Enduring heroes

TWENTY five years after its first release, why does Bill Forsyth's wistful comedy still have the power to enchant us? It's a question we should ask in the week that Local Hero gets a silver-anniversary DVD release, and is also scheduled to be screened as part of Edinburgh's Film Festival Under the Stars next month. This tale of a materialistic oil executive (Peter Reigert), who comes to plunder a Scottish fishing village only to fall for its indefinable charm seems strangely

I first saw the film as a kid, on video (a Betamax, no less), and remember being quite enthralled by it at the time. I don't think I understood exactly what it was about back then; and I certainly didn't appreciate the subtlety of the humour, or have a clue who Burt Lancaster was (though I did recognise Denis Lawson, thanks to his very short appearances in Star Wars).

Nevertheless, it was the first time I'd seen Scotland represented on screen in a way that made it seem almost as magical as the worlds I'd been encountering in the Hollywood blockbusters of the day.

To a child growing up in the Borders, the film's fog-shrouded Highland locations seemed as dramatic and as mystical as the Redwood forest from ET, while the northern lights dancing across the night sky that so entrance Lancaster's cantankerous tycoon seemed as wondrous and cinematic as that dual sunset in the first Star Wars film.

Of course, plenty of others have fallen for exactly the same locations – though, admittedly, probably for different reasons. Indeed, part of the reason Local Hero remains so fondly remembered, particularly in this country, is because it captures the beauty and mystique of Scotland in the best possible way.

The reason it endures, however, why it worked as a film and continues to work as a film, is not because it serves as a good advert for Visit Scotland, but because Forsyth consistently and brilliantly undercuts the swooning romanticism of the locations with a brand of wry humour and smart scripting that both subverts the Scottish stereotypes it's sometimes accused of perpetuating, and taps into a deeper layer of melancholy that reflects the cruel habit that life has of getting in the way of true happiness.

It's this delicate balance of tones, as well as the fantastically droll and nuanced comedic turns by the likes of Lawson, Peter Capaldi and Fulton Mackay, that puts a safe distance between Local Hero and that particularly Hollywood-ised brand of embarrassing tartan tweeness perpetuated by the likes of Brigadoon and current rom-com hit Made of Honour. What's more, while it may be a gentler film, it is its complexity that allows Local Hero to easily stand alongside Trainspotting as the key Scottish film of the past 25 years.

Made in the immediate aftermath of Chariots of Fire's Academy Awards sweep, it was that film's producer, David Puttnam, who secured the Local Hero's financing. Forsyth rewarded him with the only UK-produced film of the early 1980s to survive Colin Welland's prematurely triumphant "the British are coming" Oscar-night declaration.

And while its influence on subsequent generations of British film– makers has, disappointingly, been negligible (they tend to prefer aping The Full Monty), its influence on those in the United States is plain to see thanks to Wes Anderson. After all, what are Bill Murray's mildly depressive characters in Anderson's Rushmore and The Life Aquatic if not echoes of Reigart's and Lancaster's spiritually lost Americans in Local Hero?

Subtract Local Hero from the cinematic landscape and it suddenly seems like a more depressing place. How many films can you say that about?

A Popular Inconography

LOCAL Hero's locations were as much its stars as the actors. Pennan, the one-street village clinging to Aberdeenshire's North Sea coast which became the fictional fishing port of Ferness, topped a poll in 2005 for the best-used film location in Britain.

Today, thousands of movie buffs make the pilgrimage to the village's fabled red telephone box, even though the one seen in the film was actually a prop, placed in a more picturesque harbour location by the film-makers. The old-fashioned phone box, meticulously maintained, receives calls from all over the world.

Visitors to the village also home in on its hotel – though, again, the hotel run by Gordon and Stella (Denis Lawson and Jennifer Black) in the film was simply two of Pennan's houses with a sign hung outside. The actual Pennan Inn – now happily under new ownership after a short spell during which it was tenantless – was used to accommodate the actors. The cliff-foot village became somewhat less picturesque last year, when it was deluged with thousands of tonnes of mud in landslides caused by torrential rain.

Ferness beach, which Fulton Mackay's beachcomber refused to relinquish to Burt Lancaster's oil tycoon, was in reality situated some 70 miles away from Pennan, at the silver sands of Camusdarach, south of Morar on the West Coast. Nearby, the film-makers built a reproduction church for outdoor shots, while using the real thing, Our Lady of the Braes on the Arisaig Road, for interior filming.

But the iconography of Local Hero extends further than superb scenery, to deft little touches that lodge in the memory – the anonymous figure on the motorbike who snarls down the street at inopportune moments, the way Danny runs, hands flapping out from his sides, and the arrival of Viktor (cue soundtrack flourish of balalaikas), the ebullient Russian fishing captain (Christopher Rozycki) who boats in to check on his ex-Soviet bloc investment portfolio maintained by Gordon.

Other memorable cameos include the auld yins at the ceilidh, discussing over a conspiratorial dram the undreamt of wealth coming their way – "Aye, strange times. Strange times" – or the village's token punkette, pursuing Danny with amorous intent, or the baby in the pram nobody seems to own…

Then there's the soundtrack. Written by Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler (no stranger to Scottish music), the score, with its yearning Going Home theme, became a hit in its own right. Dire Straits frequently play it as an encore at gigs, while Newcastle United still run on to the field to its strains. Maybe they too see something written in the stars…

THE CAST: WHAT THEY DID NEXT

BURT LANCASTER

HEADING Local Hero's inspired casting, Lancaster brought undoubted Hollywood cachet as Felix Happer, the millionaire oil magnate who doesn't suffer fools gladly yet who conflates astronomy with astrology and is tormented by his loopy therapist (Norman Chancer). He prefigures Donald Trump with his unsympathetic designs on the idyllic Highland village, yet is ultimately persuaded by the place's natural beauty – and, of course, by what the astrology tells him – to change his plans from petrochemical complex to marine research station.

With a glittering Hollywood career behind him, Lancaster was 70 when he made Local Hero, and made several more films afterwards, including Field of Dreams and the comedy Tough Guys, as well as various TV miniseries. He died in 1994.

PETER RIEGERT

"MAC", the second-generation Hungarian chosen by Happer for his mission because he happens to have a Scottish-sounding name, was played by Riegert, a Bronx-born actor, screenwriter and director, who featured in such Hollywood productions as The Mask and Traffic (which won him a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance), as well as making TV appearances in The Sopranos and Seinfeld.

FULTON MACKAY

BEN KNOX, the wily old beachcomber who not only combs the beach but owns it, was played by Fulton Mackay, who died of cancer just four years after the film came out. He had already established his credentials as a comic actor, co-starring with Ronnie Barker in Porridge, and also had an unlikely role as the lighthouse keeper in the British version of the Muppets spin-off, Fraggle Rock.

DENIS LAWSON

LAWSON, who played the all-knowing hotel-keeper Gordon Urquhart, had already appeared in the first three Star Wars movies (a tradition later taken up by his nephew, Ewan McGregor) by the time he returned to home ground to make Local Hero. Since then, he has had several notable TV roles, including Hornblower, Jekyll, and an Emmy nominated performance as John Jarndyce in the BBC's epic Bleak House adaptation.

JENNIFER BLACK

STELLA, the wife with whom Gordon enjoys a wonderfully understated passionate relationship, was played by Jennifer Black, who went on to appear in another Scottish movie, Charlie Gormley's Heavenly Pursuits. She has also kept busy on stage and TV, including performances as Blanche Dubois in Streetcar Named Desire, Jocasta in Liz Lochhead's Thebans and opposite Ken Stott in STV's later Rebus adaptations.

PETER CAPALDI

HIS role as Mac's gormless assistant, Danny Oldsen, was a breakthrough, and he went on to appear in films as diverse as Ken Russell's loopy Lair of the White Worm and Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons, also winning a BAFTA Award for Best Short Film for writing and directing Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life. He has also become a familiar face on TV, and was award-nominated in 2006 for his performance as the malign political spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It.

JENNY SEAGROVE

THE film was also the first major screen role for Jenny Seagrove, who played a marine biologist so at home in the water she has webbed toes. While her cinema credits have been few, she has pursued a distinguished West End career, and played Jo Mills in the long-running BBC drama series Judge John Deed.

JG

'I'm ten times happier not making films'

IT COULD have been an embarrassment, another Brigadoon, and in fact its director, Bill Forsyth, later admitted that the notorious Hollywood feast of tartan kitsch had indeed been in his mind: "It seemed to contain a similar theme to Brigadoon, which also involved some Americans coming over to Scotland, becoming part of a small community, being changed by the experience and affecting the place in their own way." But he also felt close to the renowned film-makers Powell and Pressburger, who also

Forsyth felt he was "treading the same water", but in fact in Local Hero he created an affectionately made film of immense charm which consolidated the reputation he had established with the similarly engaging Gregory's Girl two years previously. The director seems to have had mixed feelings about the film, however, grumbling soon after its release that: "Too many people like Local Hero, that's what I find."

Now aged 61, Forsyth has said that several high-profile environmentalists told him the film was an early influence on their thinking. He followed it with Comfort and Joy, which starred Bill Paterson, embroiled in a Glasgow ice-cream war, although it didn't attract quite such unanimous acclaim.

Joining Local Hero producer David Puttnam in Hollywood, in 1987 Forsyth made Housekeeping, based on a novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson, which critics hailed as whimsical and haunting. The production of Breaking In (1989), however, was beset by arguments and described by Forsyth as "a bastard child … a film that none of us wanted", but his next venture, Being Human (1994), an eccentric history of Everyman, proved a real disaster, despite his good working relationship with its star, Robin Williams. It was eventually given only limited release.

These days, Forsyth seems more interested in scriptwriting than in directing films, but in 1999 returned to the director's chair in Britain for Gregory's Two Girls, as John Gordon Sinclair returned to his role as the (now grown-up) eponymous central character of the 1981 film. The eagerly awaited film met with mixed reviews.

Apparently disillusioned with film-making, he now lives in the west of Scotland, writing, and is reportedly working on a comedy with an American sitcom producer. The director, who has said in the past that "the only ambitions I have for the films I make is that they're appreciated as poetical works", recently told a interviewer: "I have to put my hand on my heart and say I'm ten times happier not making films than making films."