This time we have comedy-drama British movie ‘Local Hero’ from 1983 written and directed by Bill Forsyth and starring Peter Riegert, Denis Lawson, Fulton Mackay, and Burt Lancaster.
Produced by David Puttnam, the film is about an American oil company representative who is sent to the fictional village of Ferness on the west coast of Scotland to purchase the town and surrounding property for his company. For his work on the film, Forsyth won the 1984 BAFTA Award for Best Direction.
We proposed this movie because the soundtrack of its was written and produced by Mark Knopfler. This has led to the popularity of the film with fans of the band. Since then, Knopfler performed “Going Home (Theme of the Local Hero)” at many of his concerts with and without Dire Straits.
That tune borrows some melodic riffs from traditional songs and William Ruhlmann wrote:
“Dire Straits leader Mark Knopfler’s intricate, introspective fingerpicked guitar stylings make a perfect musical complement to the wistful tone of Bill Forsyth’s comedy film, ‘Local Hero’. The low-key music picks up traces of Scottish music, but most of it just sounds like Dire Straits doing instrumentals, especially the recurring theme, one of Knopfler’s more memorable melodies.”
“Local Hero” is a small film to treasure, a loving, funny, understated portrait of a small Scottish town and its encounter with a giant oil company. The town is tucked away in a sparkling little bay and is so small that everybody is well aware of everybody else foibles.
The oil company is run by an eccentric billionaire Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster) who would really rather have a comet named after him than own all the oil in the world. And what could have been a standard plot about conglomerates and ecology…turns instead into a wicked study of human nature.
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