Why specific moments instead of whole films? We thought it would be more interesting, allowing us to offer an alternative slant on what makes films important and memorable, as well as to look beyond Scottish films, at movies that have had an effect o
n how Scotland is perceived elsewhere, or have reflected ideas about Scottish identity. Whatever you think of them, we hope you've enjoyed reading about our choices.
All that remains is for me to thank our panel of experts who assembled the list: Janice Forsyth of Radio Scotland's The Movie Café; critics Mike McCahill and Eddie Harrison; and writer Brian Pendreigh. Mark Cousins, the author of The Story of Film, also contributed.
||49
48||
A RED TELEPHONE BOX, RINGING IN THE DISTANCE; LOCAL HERO; BILL FORSYTH; 1983
IT'S the briefest shot in the entire film. It wasn't in the original script. The footage was apparently found in the outtakes and included to placate the American distributors. The film would probably have worked just fine without it, and yet, somehow, Bill Forsyth's wondrous Local Hero would be unthinkable without its final image: an empty red telephone box in a Highland fishing village; its lonely ring filling the soundtrack.
The implied caller is Mac (Peter Reigert), a Texan oil executive who has just spent the entire film falling for the indefinable charm of the (fictional) village of Ferness. Sent to Scotland to buy a stretch of coastline for an oil refinery, this brash materialist slowly experiences something alien to him: true happiness. Alas, the very moment this realisation begins to crystallise, he's whisked back to Houston.
Had the film ended there, with Mac alone in his apartment, staring at the urban sprawl in the full knowledge that the life he once coveted is as empty as the seashells he's brought back from Scotland, it would have been an honest, suitably downbeat finale to a film that consistently subverts the sentimental Scottish stereotypes it's sometimes accused of perpetuating.
Forsyth, however, immediately follows this with the ringing phone box - Mac's one connection to America throughout the film. The moment's greatness is the way it allows the film to end in Scotland on a deceptively positive note while mining a deeper layer of melancholy.
Mac's heart may be in Ferness, but in denying him a Hollywood-style return, Forsyth hints at the underlying complexities of real life and the impossibility of ever being able truly to return to the place that feels most like home. It's something generations of Scots can relate to and something no other film has captured with such poignancy.
ALISTAIR HARKNESS
||4544||
"IT'S SHITE BEING SCOTTISH!", TRAINSPOTTING, DANNY BOYLE, 1996
SHALLOW Grave's Grand Guignol didn't hint at the scabrous wit unleashed in Danny Boyle's 1996 adaptation of Irvine Welsh's book. Starting with dynamic opening shots of Renton (Ewan McGregor) pinballing through a packed Princes Street, John Hodge's script gave a kinetic energy to the lethargic lives of Scottish junkies. But the key moment comes when Renton and his gang take a trip to the countryside to get some "fresh air".
It's a trip that prompts an acidic rant about everything Renton hates about being Scottish. A scream of anguish, perhaps, but articulating our deepest fears probably had a positive effect on the nation, albeit not quite as great as the time when Archie Gemmill scored against Holland in 1978.
In short: "It's shite being Scottish! We're the lowest of the low. The scum of the f***ing Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat on civilisation. Some people hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers. We can't even find a decent culture to get colonised by. We're ruled by effete arseholes. It's a shite state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and all the fresh air in the world won't make any f***ing difference!"
EDDIE HARRISON
||41
40||"FREE-DOM!", BRAVEHEART, MEL GIBSON, 1995
SCOTLAND has a curiously ambivalent attitude towards Braveheart and the way its Australian-American star appropriated Scottish history. It is easy now to mock the film and that unbelievably tense scene in which Mel Gibson's William Wallace undergoes a series of gruesome tortures. The crowd, which had taunted him, pleads with him to cry for mercy. He responds with one final defiant cry of "FREE-DOM!" He dies, and we're straight off to Bannockburn.
Of course, there were endless spoofs and sketches, perhaps to hide the embarrassment of how deeply that scene affected us. I saw this film early on, in several different countries. No one laughed or mocked then. The only sounds during that scene were muffled sobs.
The arguments over historical accuracy were for pedants. What Gibson gave us was a "creation myth" and a pride in being Scottish. No other film had such an impact on Scottish society, politics and popular culture.
Peter Mullan told me he was sent the scripts for both Rob Roy and Braveheart, and while the former was the more intelligent script, he knew Braveheart would be the better film. He was right. This is assured, majestic film-making, a worthy Oscar winner.
BRIAN PENDREIGH
||3736||
"BOND ... JAMES BOND", DR NO, TERENCE YOUNG, 1962
NOTHING in Ian Fleming's source novel suggested James Bond couldn't be Scottish, although the hero's blandly Anglicised name and the closed-shop intelligence service Fleming portrayed implied Bond was probably discovered during a Home Counties recruitment drive, and almost certainly not a former milkman from Edinburgh.
Yet it was the relatively untested 31-year-old Sean Connery who was to don Bond's tuxedo on screen and, in introducing the character for the first time, stamp a distinctly Scottish brogue on a larynx presumed English.
So striking was the impact Connery had on the role - imbuing Bond with the qualities of the rebel and the street fighter, turning the script's single entendres into really suggestive doubles and triples - that Fleming subsequently rewrote On Her Majesty's Secret Service to give Bond Scottish parentage. Ironically, it was the Australian George Lazenby who later played this Bond on screen. The emergence of Daniel Craig - out of the sea in a skimpy bathing costume, a male equivalent to Dr No's Honey Ryder - may have shaken and stirred the demographics a little, but ask people who the best Bond is, and nine out of ten will still insist he's a Scot.
MIKE MCCAHILL
REST OF THE TOP 20
||31
30|| Sergeant Howie discovers the awful truth, The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy, 1973
||2928|| Dancing on the grass, Gregory's Girl, Bill Forsyth, 1981
||27
26|| Hiding the water of life, Whisky Galore!, Alexander Mackendrick, 1949
8 Escaping the Flying Scotsman, The 39 Steps, Alfred Hitchcock, 1935
||2322|| Getting shirty with Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland, Kevin Macdonald, 2007
||2120|| A touching family reconciliation, The Bill Douglas Trilogy, Bill Douglas, 1972, 1973, 1978
||1918|| "Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life." The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Ronald Neame, 1969
||1716|| Rhapsody in Greenock, Sweet Sixteen, Ken Loach, 2002
||1514|| A bus journey to a new house and a new life, Ratcatcher, Lynne Ramsay, 1999
14 That sex scene, Red Road, Andrea Arnold, 2006
15 The roof blows off the church, Orphans, Peter Mullan, 1997
16 "Let's get pished!" So I Married an Axe Murderer, Thomas Schlamme, 1993
17 From 20th-century New York to 16th-century Scotland - in one continuous, smooth camera movement, Highlander, Russell Mulcahy, 1986
18 "This is the night mail crossing the border", Night Mail, John Grierson, 1936
19 Lizzie reads Frankie's letters on the bus, Dear Frankie, Shona Auerbach, 2004
20 Panavision cameras swoop over Glasgow's Necropolis, Deathwatch, Bertrand Tavernier, 1980
