Local Hero (1983)

"The sky, Macintyre, the sky..."

“Sky, sir? It's amazing. I wish you could see it! I wish I could describe it to you like I'm seeing it!”

Gordon Urquhart: How is the Casserole de Lapin?

Mac: Excellent. Terrific.

Danny: (grimacing) Lapin. That’s rabbit.

Mac: Is this my rabbit?

Gordon Urquhart: Yes.

‘Thrusting young oil executives…’

Are you urban or rural? Or, enviably, both? This idea— this contrast between the city and the countryside is, of course, a theme popular in both film and fiction, and in the case of 1970s cinema, sometimes used to horrific effect. John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) immediately comes to mind, as does Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973). Earnest townies arrive in the darkest countryside— albeit with good intentions— to find somethin’ nasty in the woodshed. In Local Hero (1983), Bill Forsyth’s delightful Scottish comedy, it’s the other way around. The townies are the baddies, and the country-dwellers are the goodies. Set at the time of the North Sea oil boom, the dastardly corporate baddies (Americans) want to build a massive oil refinery on the Northern Scottish coast, demolishing an ancient fishing village in the process and bringing considerable pollution and destruction to both the countryside and marine life.

‘Mac’ Macintyre (Peter Riegert) is a twenty-something, thrusting young oil executive, an Eighties yuppie with a squeaky-clean bachelor flat in downtown Houston, Texas, and a flashy white Porsche with flanged wheel arches and a spoiler— sent by Knox Oil to buy up the village of Furness (near Aberdeen) and its surrounding land. Riegert’s like a young Dustin Hoffman (the star, funnily enough, of the superb Straw Dogs), and he’s marvellously brash, or at least, at the beginning, striding down the beach in his boxy Eighties’ double-breasted suit, clutching his ridiculous executive briefcase. Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster) is his boss— a (slightly) deranged, world-weary oil tycoon, a Mr. Big with a Bondian power office (shades of Dr. Evil), with sliding doors and a huge globe à la Berchtesgaden, who (rather endearingly) is actually far more interested in amateur astronomy than professional business, and, at the same time, has paid an experimental therapist to abuse him at random intervals, actually not dissimilar to Inspector Clouseau’s arrangement with Burt Kwouk’s Cato.

As in the charming Gregory’s Girl (1981), Forsyth’s humour is dead-pan and very, very amusing: as dry as a bone— which is kinda fitting, as on the way to the village, Mac runs over a rabbit in his hired Ford Cortina, and takes the poor creature with him to the hotel “We have an injured rabbit, also…” only to discover landlady Stella’s (Jennifer Black) considerable Cordon Bleu cookery skills a few days later. But, of course, that’s the difference between the practical villagers and the squeamish and sentimental townies.

‘There’s a madman on the roof…’