Local Hero

I saw a programme on TV the other day in the series Movie Connections, about the 80s film Local Hero. The series interviews ppeople involved with certain iconic films, a sort of where-are-they-now type exercise. I haven't seen any of the others as they were about films I either hadn't seen or had much interest in, but Local Hero is different.

It would make my personal top ten -it's a film I've seen many times and have always found magical and very, very special. For those who don't know it, it's about a Texan oilman who's despatched to this Scottish village somewhere on the west coast in order to persuade the villagers to sell the beach, where oil has been discovered, for vast sums of money. which will make the village unimaginably wealthy. They all quite fancy this, except for an old bloke who lives in a hut on the beach and scrapes a living as a beachcomber, and who refuses to have anything to do with it, thus throwing a gigantic spanner in the works.

Over the course of the film, the oilman becomes captivated by the area, the village and the beach, and the deal collapses. The film reveles in the magic of the area - I'm reminded, not so much of Whisky Galore, the film its most often compared with, as of I Know Where I'm Going, the semi-mystical Powell and Pressburger film of the 1940s, in which a brittle English girl becomes captivated by the local laird, and the Scottish islands. It's a classic of the highest order, and Local Hero belongs definitively in that category - a lovely, lovely film. I've been prompted to get it on DVD to as it belongs in my permanent collection.