Martin Scorsese once spoke of a Bill Forsyth movie, a 1980 Scottish coming-of-age tale, that he called “special”. The film stars John Gordon Sinclair
There are few names in the forever-turning world of cinema quite like the one Martin Scorsese. Eternally entwined with the medium of film itself, Scorsese has woven himself into the fabric of the movies’ long and rich history, establishing himself as one of its finest and most memorable auteurs.
Ever since the New York City filmmaker burst onto the scene in the early 1970s with Mean Streets, it has been clear that Scorsese possesses a talent that so many of his contemporaries could ever dream of. Delivering masterpiece after masterpiece with the likes of Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino and The Wolf of WallStreet, the champion of American cinema has proven that he has a special eye for film and an unrivalled talent that has ensured his legacy will remain unscathed.
Scorsese has frequently offered his opinions and reviews on all four corners of the cinematic world, from blockbuster mega-hits to the weird and wonderful pieces of film that no one’s ever heard of. The director’s knowledge of the history of cinema never fails to impress, and he once spoke glowingly of a 1980 Scottish coming-of-age film by Bill Forsyth. Continue reading →
Out on blu-ray for the first time thanks to a BFI restoration, Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl has a golden reputation; a key film in Scottish and UK cinematic history, it’s also an indie darling that’s still talked about and quoted today. But in 2023, it’s also a problematic film that’s of it’s time and needs a little unpacking. It’s a tale of a lovelorn Cumbernauld teenager named Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) who loses his place in the school football team to Dorothy (Dee Hepburn). He fancies her, of course, but life has other plans for Gregory.
Gregory’s Girlwas made back in 1980, and bridged the gap between Forsyth’s debut, the enduringly pawky That Sinking Feeling about a Glasgow sink heist, and his best film, the accomplished Local Hero. Gregory’s Girl does a good job of getting inside the head of a young West of Scotland male; perhaps too well at times. We start with a group of boys spying on a nurse’s changing room at a local hospital; using binoculars, they watch a girl undress, and we share the view. There’s nothing wrong with the human body, but enforced voyeurism isn’t such a great look, and scenes like this aren’t subtext, they’re the text.
Similarly, it’s seen as a great gag that when Dorothy scores a goal at football, not only do her own players land congratulatory kisses on her, but the opposition do as well. In the light of the on-going Spanish football scandal, with a male official resigning for doing the same to a female player, it’s a joke doesn’t play so well today. And while the badinage in the school staffroom is well caught, particularly Chic Murray’s brief but iconic turn as a CGAF headmaster, there’s also a suggestion about a potential paedophile teacher that’s also treated like just another what-are-men-like? joke.
1980 was a year awash with crude, sexist comedies, and despite the issues listed above, Gregory’s Girl is more wholesome and honest than any leering Porky’s could aspire to. There’s a cheerful, summry attitude to life, with compassion for Gregory’s predicament, and some faith put in the women who collectively act together to release him from his self-appointed dwam. For all it’s flaws to the modern mind, Gregory’s Girl is a remarkably wholesome film; the bigger picture is that it sees beyond a limited male POV and evokes a wider, humanist picture of life, and that’s why it struck a chord with audiences worldwide.
At over four decades old, Gregory’s Girl is still a classic, well worth reviving and looking better than ever before in HD; you can practically smell the fresh cut crass as Gregory strolls around Cumbernauld in the evening. If Forsyth’s examination of sexism requires a few trigger warnings today, then fine; it’s a film of a specific moment. But Gregory himself is not a thug, a Neanderthal or a sexist, but a young, growing boy afflicted by chronic self-consciousness, and his lessons learned in growing up are ones that many young Scottish males are still struggling to come to terms with.
Gregory’s Girl is out on blu-ray from Sept 11th 2023. Thanks to BFI for access.
Newly restored by the BFI and presented in High Definition
Limited edition including booklet and slipcase
The Strathclyde Tapes: Bill Forsyth (1992, 38 mins): the writer and director discusses his career and film craft with an audience of schoolchildren. He talks about the filmmaking process, themes and representations in his films and the prospect of Scotland attaining its own ‘film industry’
Newly recorded audio commentary with Robert Buchanan, Douglas Sannachan and Caroline Guthrie
Audio commentary with Bill Forsyth and Mark Kermode (2014)
Bill Forsyth: The Early Years – an interview with the director (2014, 20 mins)
Gregory’s Girl Memories – an interview with Clare Grogan (2014, 11 mins)
Dee Hepburn, Clare Grogan and John Gordon Sinclair in Conversation (2015, 31 mins): the stars of Gregory’s Girl are interviewed on stage by Sue Harris to mark the film’s 25th anniversary
Soundtrack gallery (2023, 13 mins): a selection of images from the BFI National Archive accompanied by composer Colin Tully’s music for Gregory’s Girl
Alternative US audio soundtrack
Original trailer
Illustrated booklet with new essays by Tim Blanchard, David Archibald and Claire Walker
Bill Forsyth’s wonderfully wistful and charming comedy is rereleased after 40 years, and its happy-sad aroma is still as pungent as ever. It has a claim to be the last movie with the authentic spirit of the Ealing comedies; although with a longer perspective we can also see how it’s also indirectly influenced by producer David Puttnam in its high-minded spirit of Anglo-American amity.
The scene is a fictional fishing village in western Scotland, making its modest living from the lobster bound for the fancy restaurants of London and Paris, but which the locals can’t afford to eat. Peter Riegert plays Mac, a junior oil executive from Texas obsessed with work and material values, who has been tasked by his eccentric billionaire boss, Felix Happer, to travel to this village and persuade the entire community to sell up so that Happer can build a refinery there and capitalise on the new gush of North Sea oil. (There is a scene in which Happer appears to get a call from Margaret Thatcher in person.) Happer is played with unique brio and gusto by Burt Lancaster, whose legendary presence in itself confers something magical on the proceedings.
Slowly but surely, hard-hearted capitalist Mac is beguiled by the beauty of the place and the gentleness of the locals, including the local hotelier-slash-accountant Gordon Urquhart, played by Denis Lawson; and poor Mac falls unrequitedly in love with his wife, Stella (Jennifer Black). There is also the refinery’s researcher Danny Oldsen, played by a boyish Peter Capaldi; there is nothing here of the brutal political spin doctor he played on TV’s The Thick of It, but in the part’s wit and whimsy, you might see the ghost of Capaldi’s other great role: Doctor Who.
Danny has himself formed a tendresse for the company’s marine biologist Marina (played with dry wit by Jenny Seagrove), who swims with mermaid grace around the shore. Perhaps all too late, Mac confronts two dilemmas: he is falling in love with a landscape and a community that he is there to destroy, and he realises that his money-grubbing life in the big city is pretty pointless. In any case, the deal might not even go through: a hermit figure called Ben, who owns the beach, might not sell. He is played with terrific presence by Fulton Mackay – a lovely performance, and very different from his fierce prison warder in TV’s Porridge.
In the early 80s, the idea of building an oil refinery didn’t have the frisson of darkness that it might have now, although this movie certainly saw that drilling for oil meant despoiling nature, and also that the oil business had a high-handed attitude to local communities who didn’t speak English. (The script skates over the question of whether Happer would pay the locals as much money for building an observatory as he would for an oil refinery.) But Local Hero snares your heart because it takes on a fantasy element: something to do with Happer’s visionary obsession with the stars. When he arrives in Scotland by helicopter, it’s as if he’s comes down from another planet: America. It’s such a pleasure to see it again.
Fantasies and obstacles in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983)
By A.C. Webster
In the late 19th-century, a short-lived literary movement sprung up in Scotland known as the Kailyard School. Often told through the eyes of a stranger, these stories usually depicted rural life in Scotland as quaint and palatial, with something innate imparted not only by the local villagers, but also the geography of the country, its highlands and shores. Scottish filmmaker Bill Forsyth explored these sentiments in 1983’s Local Hero. The film contains many elements that define an outsider’s perspective of Scotland; however, it subverts these ideas without downplaying the ineffable qualities of the land itself.
“Mac” MacIntyre (Peter Riegert) works for Knox Oil and Gas in Houston, and is the archetypal young and ambitious American executive of the 1980s. From tailored suits to his Porsche 930, Mac has surrounded himself with enough objects to exude a sense of value. But he’s romantically inept, socially uninteresting, and uses materialism to shield himself from emotional fulfillment. Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster) is the inheritor of Knox Oil and Gas—by all accounts, a rich and successful businessman. However, Happer takes little interest in the company. He seeks fulfillment through the stars, particularly his desire to discover a comet that he can name after himself. Despite their respective financial success, Mac and Happer are similarly spiritually adrift. With Knox planning to purchase land in Scotland to build a massive oil refinery, Mac is selected to close the deal in-person due to his Scottish-sounding name (there’s not a drop of Scottish blood in MacIntyre; his immigrant parents chose it to sound more American). Happer’s additional assignment for Mac—watch the skies for anything unusual—is quietly brushed aside as he plans to get in, close the deal, and get out.
When Mac arrives in the town of Ferness, it’s cloaked in an evening fog so thick he’s forced to stop his car for the night. This mystical quality introduces the fantastical perception of rural Scotland often held by outsiders; for Mac, it’s a misty inconvenience. His first few days in town are spent at the inn attempting to negotiate the sale. As time passes and Mac becomes used to the town and its residents, he becomes emotionally enveloped by Ferness. The process unfolds beautifully throughout Local Hero, first through acclimation to the town’s minutiae—from Scottish pronunciations to local customs and spending time with the towns’ quirky residents. Ultimately, it’s the town and its surrounding areas that seals Mac’s infatuation. Forsyth and cinematographer Chris Menges often let the landscape speak for itself, starting with the sandy white beaches in the daytime. Figures become silhouettes against the pastel dusk. When Mac gazes into the midnight sky for the first time, he is struck by its beauty, a sheet of blue midnight filled with twinkling stars.
The land is still majestic, but modern life is so different from those Kailyardic days, and Forsyth’s juxtaposition heightens the film’s comedy and drama. The town’s residents are more than willing to sell off their land for a hefty payoff. Financial success informs the decisions made by Mac, Happer, and the residents of the town throughout Local Hero, yet it never leads to emotional fulfillment; we see that wealth is what hardened Mac and left Happer disinterested in anything beyond celestial recognition. Even when the sale of the town’s about to occur, one local expresses his regret: “I thought all this money would make me feel… different. All it’s done is make me feel depressed. I don’t feel any different!”
If the film had a more self-righteous approach, it might take the form of an antagonistic villager pleading against the sale of the town. The closest to this is Ben (Fulton Mackay), an eccentric hermit who owns the beach due to an archaic grant from the Lord of the Isles. Living in a shack made of beachcombing refuse, his unwillingness to sell isn’t from resentment, but rather a matter-of-fact sense of the true value of the land and the stars above. Mac tries to buy the beach for an enormous amount but Ben refuses, much to the town’s chagrin. As the conflict is about to come to a head, Happer suddenly arrives in Ferness and speaks with Ben alone. This conversation leads Happer to have a sudden change of heart, pivoting to building out Ferness as a research hub in order to preserve the local environment and further research the sky above.
With Happer satisfied, he sends Mac back to America to finalize the deal. Mac’s entire purpose in Ferness isn’t only upended, but at odds with his affection for the town. Back in Houston, all that remains of his trip are the seashell keepsakes and Polaroids—small tokens of memory instead of the peaceful life he once briefly imagined. As the Mark Knopfler score builds with overlapping synthesizer lines and guitar playing, Mac gazes out at the Houston skyline, a humming electric blue that surely feels like a cosmic taunt. Half a world away, the phone rings in the only phone box in Ferness—a long-distance plea for connection.
Fantasies, everyday desires, and personal obstacles permeate Bill Forsyth’s entire filmography. As he put it: “Thinking back on it, I think basically I’ve just made the same movie over and over again… in the sense that there’s a main character who sets out with a kind of story in mind and really nothing happens to the story. But a lot, maybe other things, happen to the characters.” Forsyth finds humanity in the mundanity and irony of everyday life.
It is revered as one of the greatest Scottish films of all-time, which brought Hollywood legend Burt Lancaster to the Highlands, turned a fishing village and a little-known beach into tourist attractions, and gave Peter Capaldi his breakthrough acting role.
By Brian Ferguson
Forty years after writer-director Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero put Scotland on the global movie map, the full story of how it was made is set to be told.
A new book due to be published next month explains why the production was shot on the east and west coast of Scotland, recalls the impact made on and off screen by Lancaster, and reveals the scenes which did not make the final cut.
The book recalls how Lancaster struggled to perform his lines, the director’s insistence that the depiction of a mermaid in the film be toned down and how he was forced to change the ending of the film to keep its American funders happy.
Jonathan Melville’s book is drawn from new and archive interviews with key players in the Local Hero story, and a Q&A event he conducted with Forsyth in Mallaig when the film was shown to mark the 15th anniversary of Scotland’s mobile cinema The Screen Machine.
It recalls how Forsyth joined forces with producer David Puttnam to try to make Local Hero, despite the latter’s “very stupid decision” to turn down the director’s hit comedy Gregory’s Girl.
As the finishing touches were being made to both Puttnam’s new film, Chariots of Fire, and Gregory’s Girl, the producer invited Forsyth to a private screening of the classic Ealing comedy Whisky Galore!
Puttnam suggested to Forsyth that there could be a contemporary tale inspired by the Shetland oil boom in the early 1970s and the financial benefits that were negotiated for islanders.
Actors Denis Lawson and Peter Riegert with director Bill Forsyth during the filming of Local Hero. Picture: Enigma/Goldcrest/Kobal/Shutterstock
The director produced a two-page “treatment” of a story following a Texan oil executive sent to Scotland to seal a deal to acquire a small village and its beach for a new refinery.
Crucial finance from Goldcrest Films, who had also backed Chariots of Fire, was pledged at the BAFTAs, where the film won three awards, with Warner Brothers later coming on board.
Lancaster who was also at the BAFTAs ceremony, to collect an award for his role in Atlantic City, was handed Local Hero’s script. Forsyth had long had the actor in mind for the role of oil company boss Felix Happer.
Forsyth said: “When I was writing it, I imagined him saying the words, and I suppose once you get that locked in your head you start to write for that voice. I was kind of writing for him, but that was just for me.”
He recalled: “It was me and one of those tiny tape recorders. I’d start at 10am, when it was getting light and finish at 3pm when it wasn’t, find a pub and go and transcribe the notes I’d made, spend the rest of the evening in the bar, and start again the next day. It took about two weeks.”
Local Hero’s location manager David Brown, who would go on to produce Outlander more than 30 years later, said: “For many of us it was absurd, the notion that you can film on the east coast and West Coast and connect the two things. For a lot of the Scots, it was like ‘How can this even work?, but it works in the movie.”
Recalling filming in Pennan, Brown said: “I don’t remember any huge opposition to it. People were more accepting of it and also more prepared to get on with their lives without feeling a desperate need to photograph everything in a kind of an Instagram-type world.”
The production team had to create key locations for the film, including the church overlooking the beach and a shack which was home to beachcomber Ben, who resists Mac’s overtures to sell up.
Tasked with finding detritus washed ashore for Ben’s hut, property master Arthur Wicks had to recruit a local yachtsman for a week to find enough.
Actors Peter Riegert (Mac) and Chris Rozycki (Viktor) star in Bill Forsyth’s classic comedy Local Hero, which was partly shot in Pennan, in Aberdeenshire. Picture: Moviestore/Shutterstock
The rest of Local Hero’s cast were a mix of established Scottish actors such as Fulton Mackay and Rikki Fulton, familiar faces from previous Forsyth films, including Gregory’s Girl star John Gordon Sinclair, newcomers like Peter Capaldi, Jenny Seagrove and Tam Dean Burn, and Peter Riegert, who was cast to play ambitious oil executive Mac despite pressure on Forsyth to consider better-known actors including Henry Winkler and Michael Douglas.
Riegert said: “At breakfast, lunch, and dinner, if I wasn’t working I was seeing them, and they had such interesting faces and distinctive voices. Not only were the beach and the sunsets interesting, but all the people were exotic.”
The book recalls the huge logistical challenges involved in making a film deploying key locations on either side of the country to depict the fictional fishing village and beach of Ferness.
Production designer Roger Murray-Leach travelled all over Scotland on a hunt that would eventually bring the cast and crew to the village of Pennan, in Aberdeenshire, and Camusdarach Beach, near Mallaig, in Lochaber.
He said: “We spent about a week scouring the west coast of Scotland and we didn’t find a matchstick on a beach. They were spotless all the way to Mallaig.”
Forsyth intended Local Hero to end with Mac returning to his flat in Houston and examining the beach shells he has kept in his pocket, but was forced to add an additional scene, which shows the red phone box in Ferness ringing, after the executives bankrolling the film insisted on a happier ending.
Riegert recalled: “‘Bill and I were in Los Angeles and we were meeting with one of the Warner Brothers executives. The executive said: ‘We love the movie, but the ending is so sad.’”And Bill said, “Oh, that’s great. Thanks so much, I really appreciate that. I had no idea you were gonna see it that way.’”
The village of Pennan, put on the map by Bill Forsyth’s 1983 film Local Hero, starring Burt Lancaster, Peter Riegert, Fulton Mackay and Denis Lawson, some of which was filmed here.
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