"COULD you imagine a world without oil?” A prescient line said by Mac, the central character in Bill Forsyth’s 1982 movie Local Hero, a Texas yuppie sent to buy up land in Scotland.

The director wanted to make “stories about our lives today in the here and now”. His film is one of Scotland’s best with many concluding that it says something profound about the Scottish psyche. How is this so? Jonathan Melville does a fine job telling the tale of its inception and production.

Forsyth was born in 1946; he’s from Whiteinch. He saw Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday at school in Knightswood and his cinematic debt to Jacques Tati is obvious. He spent much of his youth at what is now the Glasgow Film Theatre watching nouvelle vague movies like Godard’s Pierrot le Fou.

Forsyth soaked up the French influence; his films chime with a similar subtlety and humour; they have depth with much left unsaid.

Gallicism’s aside, in producer David Puttnam’s words, Forsyth is “as Scots as you can get … he talks about the Scots sometimes as if he’s talking about someone else”.

Flush from the critical success of Gregory’s Girl and Puttnam’s Oscar with Chariots of Fire the pair got down to work.

Melville interviews many cast members including Peter Riegert, the actor who plays Mac. Michael Douglas wanted the role but snobbishly declined meeting Forsyth in a Holiday Inn. Robin Williams also craved the part, as did – hey! – Henry Winkler, thumbs aloft, the Fonz himself. Burt Lancaster plays the oil boss Happer; he got the job ahead of Willie Nelson.

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Happer’s interest in astronomy is a neat cinematic nod to Visconti’s The Leopard where Lancaster plays another stargazing aristocrat.

Development on Local Hero was swift with Forsyth saying: “There’s actually no story there, really. It’s … just what happens in-between the story that’s important.”

Puttnam quipped: “I don’t have a job here, nothing’s going wrong.”

Location though proved surprisingly tricky with the village shooting done in Pennan on the east coast and beach scenes over in the west at Camusdarach.

The gloaming and a long fine summer were a Godsend; those northern skies have never looked brighter. The movie is more English than you’d know, made by a predominantly London based crew.

Even the iconic phone box (made from fibreglass!) came from down south. Melville, like a magician explaining tricks, revels in revealing the quirks of set and scene design. Mark Knopfler’s soundtrack is also correctly identified as a key element to the movie’s success.

So why does Local Hero still resonate, why is it a classic? Oil turns out to be the MacGuffin: the film is about deeper things. Forsyth thinks it is not a feelgood movie, after all the villagers were on the point of flogging off their birthright to a group of rapacious Yanks intent on planetary despoliation. We are lucky to live in a country with extended pink and purple simmer dims, great mountains and white beaches, so why sell it off?

On one level Local Hero is a prophetic film about ongoing environmental catastrophe. But Melville hints other matters are afoot – the relationship between Scotland and America being one. Like The Maggie, Alexander Mackendrick’s 1954 Ealing pic, Scots outsmart the Americans. But there are two sides to this double-edged claymore; one-upmanship can be cruel. As with the threat of the motorbike in Local Hero you’ve got to look both ways.

Then there’s Scotland as ideological battleground between America and the USSR. A Russian fisherman arrives (a neat theatrical shock back in those days) with the Cold War still at its height. The Falklands/Malvinas battles were in progress during production; military jets streak across the skies several times during Local Hero and the sounds of the oystercatchers are drowned out. The peace of a Scottish rural idyll is not so removed from conflict.

Beguilement is the real theme of the movie. Mac collects shells, stares into a rock pool as if prefiguring Adam Nicholson’s hymns to Scottish fauna. Forsyth makes the modern world shut its mouth but all too soon we awake to reality. As Riegert says melancholically: “the freedom (Mac) gained has buttoned up again…stop this foolishness. Snap out of it.”

We want our pre-lapsarian home back but that’s impossible. Melville hints we’re in permanent exile.