When Scotland struck oil

There’s much about it I don’t like.

We take too long getting to Scotland. The Houston scenes are a shambles – Burt Lancaster’s tycoon snoring in a board meeting; the unfunny appearances of the angermanagement psychotherapist; the business executives gesticulating in glass offices.

I don’t much warm to Peter Riegert’s MacIntyre, whose lines are delivered with a hint of sarcasm – though he’s surely preferable to the other original casting choices: Henry Winkler, Robin Williams and Michael Douglas, who’d have overpowered – obliterated – the film’s charm.

Nor am I enamoured of Denis Lawson’s Gordon Urquhart. He is suave – almost smug and smarmy – giving his frame an odd, vain little twist each time he moves through doors and hatches, swishing into rooms as the community’s hotelier, barman, accountant and fixer. The character has a ferrety, stoaty, slinky, duplicitous manner – Sid James without the cackles.

If it comes to that, the entire conception, or plot, is actually monstrous – the destruction of a pristine coastal environment to make way for a petrochemical refinery, complete with helipads and storage tanks.

‘I don’t want to be coy with you, Gordon. We want to buy the whole place,’ says Mac, arriving in the Highland village from Texas with his clean cuffs and his briefcase.

The joke is that, instead of being appalled by the vandalism and pollution and worried about being displaced, the residents are more than happy to grab the cash.

‘You need to accept the fact you’re stinking rich,’ one old boy says to another. ‘Nobody said it was going to be easy to be a millionaire, Edward.’

All that said, Local Hero, released 40 years ago, despite demurrals, is my favourite film. For something magical occurs, and it becomes more than simply a work in the Ealing Comedy tradition.

One is sucked into the strange atmosphere, as Mac is, as he gradually abandons suit and tie and adapts to the pace of the place, collecting shells and examining the sky. In a lovely scene, he forgets his digital watch, which is washed into a rockpool and beeps and tweets, talking to the crabs and fish.

There is a sort of poetic lustre – the golden constellations; the showers and

Local heroes: Burt Lancaster and Fulton Mackay (back row) with other cast members, 1983 falls of purple and scarlet; green fire in the evening light: a protracted glow created or captured by cinematographer Chris Menges, who used a smoke gun to take away any sharpness.

Burt Lancaster’s Felix Happer, it turns out, is more interested in astronomy than in oil production – ‘Comets are important. They could be the key to the universe, maybe’ – and something about a Hollywood legend’s own majesty is metaphorically invoked.

Local Hero, ostensibly a small-scale British picture, seems to have brought back Don Fabrizio, the prince from Visconti’s The Leopard, which Lancaster made in Sicily for Visconti in 1963 – though it was of Glaswegian Bill Forsyth that the star, by now aged 68, said, ‘I’ve never worked with a director who speaks no known language.’

Nor does Local Hero unfold in any known place. The curtains of tinted blue mist; the mighty waves and walls of glistening rocks; the sea lions, lichens and surfy sand (home to Jenny Seagrove – an oceanographer with webbed toes; a vision of eroticism).

Part of the unreality is that the real-life locations were widely scattered, actual landscapes manipulated and made artificial.

It’s for you: Mac and Victor

‘Here’s the beach. Here’s the village,’ Forsyth was told by his production designer, pointing to a map. ‘Trouble is, they’re on opposite sides of Scotland.’

The village of Ferness was the Aberdeenshire settlement of Pennan, a conglomeration of small white houses and telegraph wires – with the allimportant red phone box on the jetty, placed there by the art department.

The interior of the Macaskill Arms was the Lochailort Inn, near Mallaig, 168 miles away.

The pub was the Ship Inn, in Banff. The ceilidh was filmed over three days in Ellon, on the way to Peterhead, and the music re-recorded by Mark Knopfler in the Women’s Institute Hall, Banff.

Felix Happer’s office suite was constructed in the warehouse of the Ben Nevis Distillery – his library, kitchen and observation dome. The church exterior was constructed of cardboard at the far end of Camusdarach Beach, Arisaig, on the west coast, and the interior, where the villagers hold secret meetings, was Our Lady of the Braes, Polnish. After hitting Trudy the rabbit, Peter Capaldi’s car is marooned overnight at Loch Tarff, near Fort Augustus.

The unit stayed at the Alexandra Hotel, Fort William, most of the actors at the Glenfinnan Hotel, and Lancaster had Inverlochy Castle to himself.

Once we arrive at Ferness, which could be Brigadoon or Barrie’s Neverland, conflicts fizzle out – though notice how Cold War jets stream across the firmament; the distant explosions and booms. There are no fistfights in the saloon.

Nothing dramatic occurs – only weird, shifting moods. Bill Forsyth’s hankerings were for ‘small-scale stuff ’: gentle eccentricity; blokes painting boats, pottering about; the likes of Jimmy Yuill, Sandra Voe, Alex Norton and Rikki Fulton smiling into the middle distance.

‘Whose baby?’ asks Mac, when he sees yet another chap pushing the pram. Everyone shifts about awkwardly.

John Gordon Sinclair, star of Gregory’s Girl, whizzes about on a motorbike, a danger to pedestrians: ‘You’ve got to look both ways.’

And who ever thought Capaldi, the bashful, gangling Danny from Knox Oil and Gas, Aberdeen, would later become the maniacal Tucker in The Thick of It Everyone’s favourite line is the fisherman’s, when he is painting a nameplate for his boat: ‘Are there two gs in bugger off?’

Knopfler’s electronic, twangling (very eighties) score – his beautiful tunes and arrangements – consolidates the wistfulness; the air of enchantment.

The captain of a Russian trawler appears, and is given a warm welcome. Fulton Mackay, no longer the martinet of Porridge, is Ben, a lonely beachcomber.

‘What’s the most amazing thing you ever found?’ asks Mac.

‘Impossible to say,’ replies Ben. ‘Something amazing washes up every two or three days.’

If the crowd looks as if it may be about to surround Ben and coerce him into relinquishing rights to the cliffs and foreshore, jeopardy is immediately averted by the arrival of Happer in his helicopter, arriving out of the clouds like a deity from the heavens: ‘Good sky you’ve got here, MacIntyre … I like this place.’

He decides it can be a site for a research institute, rather than an oil refinery. ‘Sea and sky. I like that. We can do good things here.’ Everything drops into place; is resolved. The villagers receive their money, and the village won’t be destroyed.

Whereupon Peter Riegert is dispatched back to Texas.

The first cut of the film ended somewhat flatly. The final shot was added later, to ensure an ending of genius, perhaps the greatest in cinema history. Mac is in his Houston apartment, examining his souvenirs. We cut to a long shot, salvaged from unused footage, of Pennan/Ferness, in the dawn silence.

The phone in the phone box starts ringing, and gets louder and louder, as we switch to Knopfler’s triumphant title music. Mac, missing the place terribly, has phoned it up.

Depending on my mood, I am weeping at this point; tears sometimes of joy, more usually of piercing nostalgia.

Local Hero ends with an attempt at connection – with the past, with lost happiness.

Further reading: Local Hero: Making a Scottish Classic by Jonathan Melville, Polaris Publishing, Edinburgh, £16.99