When I feel
that the world is too much for me
I think of the Big Sky
and nothing matters much to me.
— “Big Sky,” Ray Davies / The Kinks (1968)
I found LOCAL HERO the way Mac MacIntyre found Ferness — by accident, through a chain of events I couldn't have planned. I was listening to a Northern Exposure podcast when a producer named Cheryl Block mentioned in passing that Josh Brand had watched this film while developing the show and couldn't stop talking about it. On a whim I pulled it up. I had no prior attachment to it, no childhood memory, no critical framework telling me how to feel. I didn't even know who was in it. What I knew was that a 1983 Scottish film about an oil company trying to buy a village had somehow inspired one of my favorite television shows, and that seemed like enough of a reason. Two hours later I wasn't entirely sure what had happened to me.
I kept trying to find something to compare it to. The better Albert Brooks films came to mind — where a man whose structured, success-driven life quietly dissolves around him without anyone raising their voice. Northern Exposure is the obvious reference point, for reasons that turn out to be less accidental than they appear. You can feel the inheritance everywhere: in the eccentric community that never condescends to its own quirks, in the conversations that drift into philosophy without announcing it, in the humor that arrives sideways and leaves before you've fully registered it. The closest I came was an unlikely one — watching JURASSIC PARK for the first time. Not because the films have anything in common, but because of that specific feeling of discovering a place you don't want to leave. All of these comparisons are slightly wrong. LOCAL HERO slips out from under all of them. It is, stubbornly and completely, its own thing.
It almost wasn't this movie at all. Warner Brothers and Goldcrest, uncomfortable with the little-known Peter Riegert in the lead, pushed hard for Henry Winkler. The Fonz. There is a version of this review where I spend several paragraphs trying to unsee Arthur Fonzarelli feeding ten pence coins into a Scottish phone box, watching the aurora borealis, maybe even racing that motorcycle guy outside the hotel. Forsyth had written the role with Riegert in mind and had no interest in anyone else. What I can tell you is that Riegert's particular quality — understated, slightly opaque, a man whose face doesn't arrive with prior associations already attached — is load bearing. Forsyth held firm. When Riegert apparently told him he'd understand if the politics of Hollywood forced a different choice, Forsyth's response was simple: if you're not in it there's no movie.
The setup is deceptively simple. Mac MacIntyre, a junior executive at Knox Oil and Gas in Houston, is sent to Scotland to buy a small fishing village and its bay for a new refinery. He's chosen for the assignment because of his Scottish surname, a detail that turns out to be something of a fiction — his family changed their Hungarian surname to MacIntyre when they arrived in America because they thought it sounded more American. He is sent to negotiate with his own people and has no people. When he arrives in the fictional village of Ferness he finds a community that is warm, eccentric, and almost comically eager to sell. The expected conflict — scrappy locals defending their way of life against corporate destruction — never materializes because nobody is playing their assigned role. The villagers want the money. Mac finds himself falling in love with the place he's supposed to be buying. The oil company's eccentric billionaire owner is more interested in finding a comet than running an oil company. The film keeps setting up a confrontation and then quietly declines to have it.
Ferness is a village where everyone has at least three jobs and nobody thinks this is unusual. Gordon Urquhart runs the hotel, tends bar, drives a taxi, fixes lobster creels on the beach, and happens to hold power of attorney for the entire community in negotiations with a multinational oil company. The reverend is African — he came as a student minister decades ago and never left, which strikes nobody as remarkable. A Soviet fisherman named Victor shows up for the ceilidh and immediately starts discussing currency markets and short-term deposits with Gordon, because of course he does. Early on, Mac and Danny stand on the pristine beach they've been sent to buy and marvel at everything petroleum makes possible — nylon, polythene, dry cleaning fluid, waterproofs. The jets overhead really spoil a very nice area, Mac observes, apparently without irony. The whole village piles into the church to scheme about how to extract maximum money from the oil company, which is either the most Scottish or most human thing in the film, possibly both. And somewhere in the background, a man on a motorcycle nearly runs people down every time they walk out of the hotel, unexplained, unremarked upon, permanent.
LOCAL HERO was made in 1983, before the internet, before smartphones, before the average person spent their waking hours staring at a screen in a city that had forgotten what the night sky looked like. And yet it feels urgently contemporary in a way that has nothing to do with nostalgia. The film is quietly obsessed with scale — specifically with what happens to a person when something reminds them of their actual size in the universe. Happer, one of the most powerful men in the world, pays a therapist to abuse him and dreams of having a comet named after him. Mac arrives from Houston, where, as Forsyth noted, you can't readily look up and see the stars. Ferness has no such problem. The sky over Scotland keeps interrupting the business of buying and selling — a meteor shower stops Mac cold, the aurora borealis stops an entire community mid-thought, and when Happer finally arrives by helicopter the lights are so extraordinary that his entrance feels less like a business trip than a landing from another world. Ben Knox already understands all of this. He lives on a beach, owns no possessions worth mentioning, knows the night sky like his own backyard, and cannot be bought for any amount of money. The film's argument, delivered without a single speech, is that Ben has the scale of things exactly right — and that understanding your place in the universe doesn't make you small. It makes you free.
Ben Knox is the soul of the film and the hardest character in it to explain. He lives alone in a shack on a beach he has owned for four hundred years, a gift from the Lord of the Isles to an ancestor who helped out with a spot of trouble — killed his brother, something like that. He has eight unplotted objects in the night sky nobody else has bothered to catalog. Coconuts and oranges wash up by the North Atlantic Drift; he accepts them as perfectly normal. Ben cannot be bought. Not for a hundred thousand pounds, not for half a million, not for any beach in Hawaii or Australia. When Mac spreads postcards of tropical beaches in front of him, Ben looks at them politely and notes that they seem like very nice beaches, but he only needs the one. He already has this one. The company is even named after him, in a roundabout way — Knox Oil and Gas, Ben Knox, a coincidence Forsyth plants without explanation or emphasis, the way he plants everything. When Happer finally arrives and the two of them disappear into the shack together, the film stays outside with everyone else. Forsyth said he simply didn't know what they would say to each other. The audience fills it in themselves. Whatever it was, Happer comes out having decided to build an observatory instead of a refinery. Ben stays on his beach. The film considers this a happy ending. It's right.
There is a version of LOCAL HERO that is a slightly better film than the one that exists. It lives in the first act. Mac's Houston life — the migraines, the Porsche, the electrically locked briefcase, the ex-girlfriend who took his camera case, the office where everyone cheerfully discusses buying a country over lunch — needed more room to breathe. The counterweight to Scotland had to be heavy enough that when Scotland dissolves it, the audience feels the full weight of what's happening. As it stands the Houston section moves quickly in a way that slightly softens Mac's transformation. You feel him changing, but you don't fully feel what he was changing from. This is not a guess. David Puttnam identified it himself before the film even opened, calling the first act cuts the film's flaw — the price paid for getting the runtime to a manageable length. When Mac calls Houston two days into his trip and says it feels like he's been in Ferness forever, the line should hit like a small earthquake. It does hit. It just hits a little softer than it might have. Those are the eight points I'm withholding. Not for what's there. For what got cut.
Warner Brothers wanted a different ending. Mac returns to the village, gets embraced by his mates, marries a local girl. The full upbeat Hollywood resolution. Forsyth refused. His original ending was Mac back in his Houston apartment listening to the sounds of the city — no sentiment, no hope, just the noise closing back in. Puttnam negotiated a compromise. Forsyth remembered he had a shot of the village with the phone box in the mid-ground. They added the sound of it ringing. Warner Brothers found it acceptable. That became the ending. The instinct to side with the artist against the studio is almost always correct and the history of Hollywood is full of good reasons for it. This is the rare exception. The compromise produced something neither party was aiming for — genuinely open, genuinely moving, and completely consistent with a film that refused to tell you what to think from the first frame to the last. Mac is back in Houston. The phone is ringing. Whether anyone answers it is entirely up to you. Puttnam said it best — if they had done everything Warner Brothers wanted nobody would be talking about this film today. They compromised on the ending and held firm on everything else. That turns out to be exactly the right set of compromises to make. Most studios get it precisely backwards.
Everything about LOCAL HERO should tip into sentimentality. A man finds a beautiful place and doesn't want to leave. An old eccentric saves a beach from corporate destruction. A lonely billionaire finds connection with a stranger over a shared love of the stars. A community's way of life is preserved. Mark Knopfler playing gentle guitar over Scottish landscapes. Any one of those elements in a lesser film would have you reaching for a bucket. Forsyth avoids it through a combination of techniques that work so naturally you don't notice them operating. The humor cuts through at exactly the right moments. Nobody explains their feelings. The film refuses to linger on its most emotional moments — it lets them happen and moves on before you can be manipulated by them. The rabbit is funny and then it's dinner. The aurora borealis is beautiful and then Mac needs more ten pence pieces. Happer and Ben bond in a shack and the camera stays outside. What remains is something difficult to describe. Not happiness exactly. Not melancholy. Something closer to the feeling the Kinks were reaching for in Big Sky — when the world gets to be too much, think of the big sky, and nothing matters quite so much anymore. I watched this film with no preparation, no nostalgia, no prior attachment, and it still did that to me. That's the only honest thing I can tell you about it.
Final Verdict: 92 out of 100
Sidenote: Just like 3 NINJAS, LOCAL HERO is also freely available on YouTube.