Local Hero

Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983) was produced by David Puttnam straight after Chariots of Fire, and it won its director the BAFTA for Best Direction. It is one of the best-loved of all Scottish films, a gentle comedy with real melancholy in its bones, and it helped set the pattern 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, and Denis Lawson 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 thing is held together by Mark Knopfler's much-loved score and the wide, ever-changing light of the northern coast.

Critics adored it on release, and audiences have grown steadily fonder of it in the decades since. The premise invites easy sentiment, and Forsyth turns it down every time, finding comedy and longing instead in the collision of money, ambition and place. Funny and wistful, and wise about what people actually want from their lives, Local Hero is the kind of film viewers go back to again and again, and it gives a little more on each visit.