[ed. One of my favorites (along with the soundtrack)]
"Local Hero", in which a Texan oil company's attempt to buy up a whole Scottish village is thwarted by a lone white-haired beachcomber, is 25 years old. Half the film was shot up the road in the tiny port of Pennan (above)--nowadays billed, on undiscoveredscotland.co.uk, as the home of "Scotland's most famous phone box". The anniversary is worth celebrating not just because of the happy recurrence of its plot. Bill Forsyth's film is a modest masterpiece.
That's how I've always thought of it, anyway. I first saw "Local Hero" as a school leaver in 1983, and it has stayed in my head ever since, along with Mark Knopfler's bittersweet acoustic theme tune. At first, it seemed merely a comic gem. The joke was that the hicks are far cannier than they appear to MacIntyre, the cocksure emissary sent from Houston to negotiate. But the older you get, the more it looks like the darkest Nordic tragedy: having fallen for this bucolic paradise, the incomer is brutally exiled back to an inferno of skyscrapers and tailbacks.
It's a measure of how subversive a film it was that Forsyth got into trouble at the test screening in Seattle. "There was irritation", he recalls, "that this little upstart from Europe was having the gall to hint these things about the American way of life. MacIntyre was an everyman losing his personality in the glass tower of work. One guy got me against the wall and said, 'You don't have the right to play around with the American hero.'" (...)
"Local Hero" came about when the producer David Puttnam, who was about to win an Oscar for "Chariots of Fire", advised Forsyth that there would be studio money for a Scottish script with parts for a couple of American actors. One was the role of the star-gazing petro-mogul Felix Happer. "I wrote it with Burt Lancaster in my head from the very beginning," Forsyth says. "I'd read in an interview that he'd like to do some real comedy." He also drew on a recent deal struck with an oil consortium in Orkney. "The chief executive of the council realised he had a strong position and got the community a cut of the revenue and incredible things like care of libraries and community centres."
Thus was conceived the alluring figure of Gordon Urquhart, the savvy hotelier and accountant ("we tend to double up on jobs around here," as he explains). He was played, or beautifully underplayed, by Lawson. "Around that time it was quite hard to find a contemporary Scottish character who wasn't in wellies and a kilt or a Gorbals heavy," says Lawson. "I had hardly ever used my own voice. It's the most enjoyable experience I've ever had." The same endorsement comes from Riegert, who had to fight off Michael Douglas and half of Hollywood to land the part of MacIntyre. "If you could storyboard the best possible experience for an actor, this would be it," he says. "It was effortless. I recognised the material right off the page. My only question was how well could the director direct this movie?
by Jasper Rees, More Intelligent Life | Read more:
Picture "Local Hero" 
