The '80s in 40: 'Local Hero' (February 17, 1983)

Bill Forsyth's gentle comedy constructs a bulwark against the harsh times surrounding it, and the harsher times to come.

The ‘80s in 40 revisits the decade of the 1980s choosing four movies a year, one from each quarter. This entry covers the first quarter of 1983.

“Mac” MacIntyre (Peter Riegert), the protagonist of Bill Forsyth’s 1983 comedy Local Hero, lives in Texas but he’s not from there. He’s moved to Houston because of his job as a junior executive at Knox Oil and Gas. When Knox settles on acquiring the seaside Scottish highlands village of Ferness — all of it, from the church to the beach to the quaint row of shops and pubs found on village’s only street — the company sends Mac there because of the Scottish heritage suggested by his name. But that’s not right either. Mac’s family changed their name to one they thought sounded more American. In Scotland, Mac becomes a stranger in a land that was never his, in service of a corporation set on erasing everything it ever was.

It’s a simple plan, really: Before Mac travels to Ferness, he makes a stop at a Knox lab where a scale model of the area has been built beside a water tank. To demonstrate what’s to come, a pair of Knox engineers simply lift out the component representing the town — telling Mac to “Hold Ferness, a minute, would you?” — and replace it with a dock for tankers and a refinery that will make it “the petrochemical capital of the free world,” a facility they boast will last a thousand years. It will be like Ferness was never there. Mac’s job is to make sure the deal goes through so the harbor can fulfill its destiny as a natural spot for “blasting in the underground tanks.”

Mac shouldn’t even have too hard a time getting the job done. Ferness appears to be home to a mere handful of residents and Mac has the corporate resources to write a generous check. What’s more, Local Hero makes a running gag of the Ferness locals wanting to sell out. A version of this film from an earlier era might have allowed Mac to be charmed by the locals and maybe even fall in love before ultimately telling off his boss and saving the town from the wrecking ball. Forsyth’s 1980s story is a little more complicated. The locals charm Mac. Mac falls in love, sort of. The town gets saved. But the way in which that plays out, Mac’s role in arranging for Ferness’ happy ending, and where this leaves him in the end don’t follow a traditional script.

Much of that can be attributed to Forsyth. The Scottish writer and director almost became a genre unto himself in the 1980s, a specialist in low-key, dry-witted comedies that might be described as “quirky” if that word didn’t quite feel right. It could certainly be applied to something like, say, Northern Exposure, a charming TV series deeply indebted to Local Hero. But the characters in Forsyth’s films never seem like a writer’s idea of a charming regional weirdo. Accompanying Mac on his journey is a young Scottish sidekick named Danny (Peter Capaldi, in his acting debut) who falls for Marina (Jenny Seagrove), a marine specialist in Knox’s employ. Romancing on the shore, he kisses her feet only to discover she has webbed toes. Forsyth’s characters’ eccentricities go as deep as their DNA.

At one point, unable to lie to the woman he loves any longer, Danny tells Marina about Knox’s plan for the area, which the company has kept from her. To his shock, Marina remains unalarmed. “I don’t see that happening here. I don’t see that at all,” she says. As it turns out, she’s right. Does she have a mystic connection with the land? Psychic powers? Has she read the script? Or does Marina just know that Ferness is a place that can’t be touched by changes sweeping through the rest of the land? Knox might have the ability to lift the village off the map but, for whatever reason, she knows the company won’t.

In the end, it’s the night sky that saves it. Back in Texas, Mac’s boss Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster) dreams of the stars. His name suggests a man with an overabundance of happiness, but his demeanor turns this into a misnomer. Drawn to visit Ferness himself by Mac’s description of the northern lights, Happer finds himself in awe of the place. He also attempts to seal the deal himself by negotiating with the lone local holdout, a hermit named Ben (Fulton Mackay) who lives in a shack on the beach made out of a shipwrecked boat. The catch: Ben owns the beach and doesn’t want to sell. Though this upsets the locals who’ve begun dreaming of how to spend their newfound fortunes, it’s all for the good. After Felix and Ben bond, Felix comes to a decision about the area’s future. Instead of being torn down, Ferness will now be a center for oceanographic study. Marina was right after all.

So Local Hero finds its happy ending by sidestepping the expected plot machinations. The locals treat Mac as, at best, a curious outsider, more an amusement to be tolerated than a lost soul to be embraced. Mac falls for Stella (Jennifer Black), the wife of the town’s innkeeper/accountant/whatever-else-needs-doing Gordon (Denis Lawson), but it’s hopeless. Stella loves her husband and Mac can only wish for her from a distance. And, in the end, he can only wish for Ferness.

Local Hero was partly inspired by movements within the oil industry at the time. Told he could get funding for a film with a Scottish theme, Forsyth drew on recent news concerning oil companies seeking to develop his homeland. But while Local Hero is a product of the 1980s, the film, like Marina, has some sense of what was to come. The bits of foreshadowing it offers are less optimistic. Between the lines, you’ll find a vision of a future in which regional charm and human connection wouldn’t have a chance against the forces of commerce and history and breakthroughs in communication that would leave some feeling more isolated than ever.

It took less than forty years to arrive. In 2012, Forsyth felt compelled to write a piece for The Guardian inspired by the film You’ve Been Trumped. Directed by the Scottish-born Anthony Baxter, the documentary inspired comparisons to Local Hero both for its similarities to Forsyth’s film and the ways in which it diverged from Local Hero’s plot. You’ve Been Trumped, which incorporates scenes from Forsyth’s film, documents Donald Trump’s ultimately successful attempt to build a luxury golf course on the east coast of Scotland in spite of the protests of locals and concern about the development’s environmental impact on local sand dunes. In the piece, Forsyth praised the film as journalism while noting dramatic shortcomings outside of Baxter’s control. Its biggest shortcoming, per Forsyth, was a villain of insufficient complexity. “There are glaring deficiencies in the drawing of this character,” Forsyth wrote:

He seems to seriously lack certain human dimensions. There are whole sides to him that are missing. A writer who'd dreamed him up wouldn't be standing in line for any Oscar, no sir. This character breaks all the rules of drama. For a start, he has no arc. Stick with me, this is gold dust, I learned it in Hollywood. […] If a character doesn't have an arc, then he effectively isn't a character. He doesn't change and grow, he is unaffected by what happens to him on the journey (Hollywood term) that the story has him undertake.

Local Hero wouldn’t work with an antagonist who had no hidden depths, one who wants only to obtain and dominate. Felix might be ruthless, or mostly ruthless, but he has a soul. He loves the stars and learns he can only truly see them if he climbs down from his glass perch high above Houston. Local Hero wants to believe that even the stoniest hearts can turn soft, that no one’s really bad, at least in ways that can’t be changed. But by depicting a world in which this is true, it also invites comparison to the real world, where it isn’t. Felix didn’t wipe Ferness off the map but he could have. Others would have. Others might still.

In the end, Mac’s mostly a bystander. But it seems like he always was. Shortly after we meet him, we see Mac calling a co-worker on the phone to arrange lunch. It soon becomes apparent that he could have walked just a few feet to ask the question. But Mac is, as he puts it when asked to travel to Scotland, more of “a telex man. I could fix the deals in an afternoon over the phones.” He’s more comfortable using a device as an intermediary than talking face-to-face. He’s a man of tomorrow, an early adopter of technology that hasn’t even been dreamed up yet. Mac will struggle to remain that way in Ferness, where communicating with Texas requires him to take a stack of coins to the town’s sole phone booth, a situation that forces him to deal with the situation personally, to look others in the eyes. Ferness isn’t the sort of place for telex men. After Mac returns to his Houston high-rise and unpacks shells and photos to remind of his time in Ferness, he dials the phone booth. Its rings remain unheard and unanswered no matter how long he stays on the line. Ferness is the one place that felt like home. Now it’s like he was never there at all.

Next: Flashdance

Previously:

48 Hrs. (December 1982)
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (August 1982)
Poltergeist (June 1982)
Porky’s (March 1982)
Body Heat (August 1981)
Stripes (June 1981)
Heaven's Gate (April 1981)
Cutter’s Way (March 1981)
9 to 5 (December 1980)
Ordinary People (September 1980)
Urban Cowboy (June 1980)
Little Darlings (March 1980)