Local hero’s journey
May 7, 2008David Bordwell, blogging about the recent Ebertfest in Chicago – where else? — talks about festival attendee Bill Forsyth, the Scots filmmaker whose 1981 teen romance flick Gregory’s Girl remains a cult favorite in the U.K., and whose comedy Local Hero has been on my personal Top Ten ever since I saw it on its initial 1983 run.
On first acquaintance, Local Hero brings to mind the best of the old Ealing Studio comedies like The Man in the White Suit or The Lavender Hill Mob, with its gentle humor and quietly observant way with the eccentric locals of a Scottish seacoast village. However, this wee unassuming film has a roll of quarters hidden in its fist, and while it doesn’t sucker-punch you, it does get pushy and even downright tough in its quiet way.
The first surprise is the way it stands cliches on their heads: the protagonist, a Texas oil exec sent to buy up the village for a planned oil refinery, falls in love with the splendor of the place, but the locals can’t wait to sell out and get rich — “You can’t eat scenery,” one of them says. The second, which comes at the very end, is harsh bordering on brutal and sharply rights a film that was threatening to tip into twee whimsy.
According to Bordwell’s report, the return to Texas — and the piercingly lonely image it sets up — was to be the final shot of the film:
The original cut ended with Mac returning to his Houston apartment and staring out at the dark urban landscape—beautiful in its own way, but very different from the majesty of the Scottish shore. There the original film ended, but the Warners executives, although liking the film, wanted a more upbeat ending. Couldn’t the hero go back to Scotland and find happiness, you know, like in Brigadoon? They even offered money for a reshoot to provide a happy wrapup. Forsyth didn’t want that, of course, but he had less than a day to find an ending.
The movie makes a running gag of the red phone booth through which Mac communicates with Houston. Forsyth remembered that he had a tail-end of a long shot of the town, with the booth standing out sharply. He had just enough footage for a fairly lengthy shot. So he decided to end the film with that image, and he simply added the sound of the phone ringing.
With this ending, the audience gets to be smart and hopeful. We realize that our displaced local hero is phoning the town he loves, and perhaps he will announce his return. This final grace note provides a lilt that the grim ending would not. Sometimes, you want to thank the suits—not for their bloody-mindedness, but for the occasions when their formulaic demands give the filmmaker a chance to rediscover fresh and felicitous possibilities in the material.
Bordwell also has a very thorough and insightful analysis of Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Hamlet, which aside from fleeting annoyances — mainly, the stunt-casting of Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal — remains one hell of an impressive work.
