Local Hero

At the end of 2017, TCM ran a night of movies set in Scotland, including Local Hero. It got a DVD release as part of a TCM Burt Lancaster box set, although that seems to be out of print. You can do the Amazon (and other places) streaming thing, though, and since I need to free up space on my DVR, I'm going to break with my normal rule and review a movie not coming up on TV and not easily available on DVD.

Lancaster plays Happer, the CEO of Knox Industries, an oil company headquartered in Houston. As with most energy conglomerates, they do exploration all over the world, and have gotten involved enough in the North Sea/North Atlantic oil deposits that they need a new refinery in Scotland. After careful consideration, they've found the perfect location in an isolated cove.

Well, it's almost the perfect location. There's a small village where the company wants to put the refinery, and they're going to have to buy out every property in the village. You can probably guess that at least one person is going to be uncomfortable about selling, because in every situation like this you've either got one person who wants to hold out for more money, or because some people are so emotionally tied to where they currently live that they don't want to break those ties. To deal with the acquisition, Happer sends McIntyre (Peter Riegert), a middle-level executive whose biggest qualification seems to be having a Scottish surname.

McIntyre is picked up by Oldsen (Peter Capaldi), and when he meets Gordon Urquhart (Dennis Lawson) at the local hotel, McIntyre finds that a Scottish village is something radically different from Houston and the go-go world of big business that he's been used to before this. Happer, for his part, has a surprisingly laid back attitude. He inherited his position within the company, and seems perhaps more interested in amateur astronomy than actually running Knox, telling McIntyre to watch the skies and call Happer if he sees a comet.

The village is not without its charms, as the local minister, an import from Africa named MacPherson, tells McIntyre. And sure enough, as McIntyre gets held up in the village because negotiating takes longer than expected, he finds that he begins to like the place and isn't so sure if he'd want to sell if he were one of the locals. This feeling becomes stronger when it turns out that the beach is held separately, and he still has to negotiate with Ben (Fulton Mackay) to buy that last little bit of land.

Local Hero is a movie that follows a well-known formula, that of an outsider (usually a sophisticate) meeting a simpler culture, and having his or her life changed by it. Off the top of my head, as I was watching the movie I found myself thinking of Remember the Night, I Know Where I'm Going!, and even The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. It's a tried and true formula, and there are a lot of surprisingly good films following it.

Local Hero is most definitely one of those surprisingly good movies. Not to say that I thought it wasn't going to be good; it's more the sort of movie that grows on you as it goes along. Lancaster is good in his smallish role; the locals in the Scottish village are quite good, and the location shooting in the northeast of Scotland is wonderful. If you're looking for action, you're not going to find it here, but if you want an intelligent little movie, you could do far worse.