“Can you imagine a world without oil?”
You can but this is 2024, in case you are asleep at the back. In 1983 I was living at the UN Plaza Hotel, on the 28th floor – the swimming pool was on the 29th, handy. It’s called the Millennium Hilton today and there doesn’t seem to be a pool anymore; pity because it was great to stand dripping looking out the glass wall on the lights of downtown Manhattan. My corner room had the same view plus the UN building, looking like a packet of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, and the East River.
I couldn’t imagine a world without oil. My job as an oil broker depended on it. But I digress. One weekend, feeling a bit homesick, I went to see a British film at the cinema. British directors, in this instance Bill Forsyth, often look to America for finance. Remember Ryan O’Neal in Barry Lyndon? Bill Forsyth lucked out as Burt Lancaster was perfectly cast as oil tycoon, Felix Happer, in Local Hero. The quote above is from the film.
“When Mac MacIntyre (played with deadpan perfection by Peter Riegert) is sent by his star-gazing, slightly insane Knox Oil and Gas boss (Burt Lancaster) to Scotland’s West Coast to buy the rights to a seaside town slated to be the site of an oil refinery, Mac embarks on his journey reluctantly. “Why do I have to go to all the way to Scotland?” Mac complains to a coworker. “I’m really more of a Telex man.” But on the way to closing the deal, a funny thing happens: the place takes root in Mac. The town’s eccentric inhabitants, eventful night sky, and stunning scenery soak into his psyche and combine to bring a very different Mac to the surface, a Mac who collects seashells, walks on the beach in his jeans instead of his suit, and throws his calendar watch, beeping “meeting time in Houston,” into the sea. Mac eventually vies to switch places with Gordon Urquhart–accountant, bartender, innkeeper, and community representative in the land deal. After an evening spent drinking 42-year-old scotch (“old enough to be out on its own,” Mac chirps, and then laughs smugly at his own joke) and negotiating the real estate deal, Mac tries to negotiate a deal for himself–to trade his high-rise Houston apartment, Porsche, and oil-company job for Urquhart’s less traditional, but more fulfilling, life. The plot runs along almost as if behind the scenes, and the characters are intriguing, but the real appeal here is the incisive yet gentle humor. During a visit to a Knox Oil lab, Mac is shown into a room that contains a miniature of the town he has been sent to purchase. The head of the lab says, “Welcome to our little world,” and then gives Mac the plastic replica of the town as a souvenir. “Dream large,” he intones. The irony’s easy to miss and is just one example of the intelligent presence–in the form of writer and director Bill Forsyth–working behind the scenes here. Mark Knopfler’s delicate, haunting soundtrack complements the sometimes melancholy, sometimes hilarious currents of Local Hero to perfection. –Stefanie Durbin” (Quotes.net)
I couldn’t put it better. When Bill Forsyth won a BAFTA for best Direction for Local Hero in 1983 he got a bit carried away and swapped his BAFTA with Martin Scorsese; he’d won his for King of Comedy. Unfortunately Forsyth’s taut direction did not rub off on the prolix Scorsese. Every shot in LH says something and Forsyth’s script is understated perfection. By the way Peter Capaldi makes his film debut and the trailer is so off-putting I’m not surprised it was not a success in the States. Whoever made it thought they were advertising Brigadoon.
And Burt Lancaster out-acted the lot of them.
A wonderful film which I watched with the young just a few weeks ago. Filmed up around Arisaig where my grandparents lived.
I’m sure you know that is where the beach scenes were filmed. The village is Pennan on the east coast.
I once stayed in the pub in Arisaig where the interiors had been shot. Quite eerie to be in a bathroom and realise that this basin was where in the film Mac had washed the shells he had picked up on the beach, for example. And to eat in the same dining room. In the hope of establishing my Scottish credentials I asked the landlord for a good peaty whisky at the bar. He rose to his full indignant height. ‘Up here’, he said, ‘we burrrn peat – not drink it’. The pub itself burned down a few years later.
Local Hero definitely has its fans in the States! It’s one of my favorite films of all time, and I’m always recommending it to people.
Probably my favourite film, and the music was perfect. But my absolute favourite performance is from Peter Capaldi’s wrists. Closely followed by his ankles. They were so very gawky and slightly out-of-control. My third favourite was the drummer in the band; an extremely young John Gordon Sinclair, later my upstairs neighbour for couple of years in Queens Park.
Back in the late 1970s I had interviewed Ian Clark, the quietly spoken, straight-talking and wonderfully clear-headed guy from Shetland who had taken his vision to become head of the British National Oil Corporation, BNOC, which was intended to be a state-run investment in the nation’s stake in its oil, for a big spread of an article in Accountancy Age. I took the photographs as well and had, as ever, a good time in Glasgow. He was brilliant and it made a great piece. Then in 1983 I got a call out of the blue inviting me to a private press preview of some film called Local Hero, in Soho close to where I worked, by this time as Editor of Accountancy Age, ahead of its release. I had no idea what to expect, or what it was about, or really why they had asked me. It turned out to be a showing for me alone. And I can still remember the magic of the film as it unfolded totally unexpectedly around me in my own private cinema universe. Ian Clark was very unlike the hero in the film. But it was obvious that it was his vision for Shetland and idea of oil revenues for the common good that had been the germ of the idea that triggered the film. For me it remains one of the funniest and most affectionate, kindest, fiercely Scottish, and loveliest of all films. Absolute joy.