Air Force Ones Local Hero A Classic Scottish film

Local Hero was produced by David Puttnam and is a Goldcrest Films production.
The Comedy of Local Hero
Bill Forsyth packed this charming comedy with his typical pithy local characters and hilarious one-liners. Mac plays a reluctant hero who falls in love with Gordon Urquhart's wife Stella [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], famously trying to arrange a drunken lifestyle swap with Urquhart: 'I could be a good Gordon, Gordon'. On running over a rabbit on a Highlands road, Danny asks Mac if they should 'put it out of its misery, hit it with something hard', to which Mac replies: 'we already did that, with a two-tonne automobile'. On the local pier Mac approaches a bunch of fisherman and a girl with a child in a pram. To break the ice he asks whose the child is [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], to resounding silence and sideways glances.
Local Hero is the most popular Scottish film comedy ever produced, directed by by Bill Forsyth and only rivalled by his other classic Scottish film Gregory's Girl. It was an instant hit in 1983 on general release and over the years has become the most quoted Scottish movie due to its sardonic wit and classic one-liners. The haunting theme music was composed by the Dire Straits musician Mark Knopfler. It is perhaps a stroke of genius or just plain luck that Forsyth secured the acting services of Burt Lancaster, who provides a storming comedic role as the unhappy oil baron and amateur astronomer Felix Happer.
Read on
Burt Lancaster - a Biography
Edinburgh Film Festival Programme 2009
More Great Films About Scotland
The Director
Synopsis
Bill Forsyth is a Scottish director and film writer. Local Hero was his biggest international hit and won him the Best Director award at the 1984 BAFTA's as well as an NSFC award for Best Screenplay in the same year. Bill Forsyth's classic comedies are renowned for their locations, gritty humour and sheer Scottishness. They include: That Sinking Feeling (1980) [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Gregory's Girl (1981) Local Hero (1983), Comfort and Joy (1984) and Being Human (1993). A sequel to Local Hero has always been talked about, but Bill Forsyth has always refused, recognising in the movie its one-off charm and unrepeatable genius.
Local Hero is a moralistic comedy set in Scotland in the oil boom era and relates the adventures of 'Mac' (Peter Riegert), a reluctant oil negotiator sent to Scotland to secure a location deal for a refinery. Chaperoned by the gangly Danny (Peter Capaldi), Mac arrives in the sleepy village of Furness to find a population of characters already well aware of the money coming their way. After a drunken night of negotiations at the local Ceilidh dance with hotel owner and entrepreneur Gordon Urquhart (Denis Lawson), Mac secures the consent of all the locals bar one: the stubborn loner Ben (Fulton Mackay) who lives on and owns the beautiful local beach. Ben refuses to sell and so Mac is forced to call in the oil company owner Happer (Burt Lancaster), who arrives by helicopter and transforms the ending of the movie by arranging quite a different fate for the village.

The post has been approved 0 times