Local Hero

Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983), produced by David Puttnam in the immediate wake of Chariots of Fire, won its director the BAFTA for Best Direction and has become one of the most cherished of all Scottish films. A gentle comedy with real melancholy in its bones, it helped set the template for a certain kind of wry, humane and unhurried British cinema.

Peter Riegert plays the ambitious American oil-company man sent to buy up a small Highland village for a refinery; Burt Lancaster, in a beautifully judged late performance, is his stargazing boss back in Houston, with Denis Lawson as the canny local who somehow runs the hotel, the bar, the law firm and half the negotiations himself. Forsyth's script is full of sidelong jokes and odd, lingering grace notes, and the whole is bound together by Mark Knopfler's much-loved score and the wide, ever-changing light of the northern coast.

Critically adored on release and steadily more beloved in the decades since, the film carefully resists the easy sentiment its premise seems to invite, finding instead a real comedy and longing in the collision of money, ambition and place. Funny, wistful and quietly wise about what people actually want from their lives, Local Hero remains the kind of film that viewers return to again and again, like a familiar harbour glimpsed at dusk.