Scotch Broth

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

LOCAL HERO

Directed and Written by Bill Forsyth

In the old days of British comedy, the plot would have been predictable. If a big American oil company decided to buy an unspoiled Scottish village (and its little crescent beach) in order to destroy it and then build a refinery, the natives would launch a counterstrike of sly and eccentric schemes designed to sabotage the outlanders' plans. How times have changed! In Local Hero, the residents, excepting one beachcomber holdout, are all eager to sell. It is the outsiders, succumbing to the charm of the place, who end up defending it against everyone's greedy impulses.

As he demonstrated in last summer's Gregory 's Girl, Bill Forsyth is a master of the throwaway turnabout. Here, with a tenser situation and a somewhat richer mix of characters, he makes about the kind of advance one would expect from him, modest and self-effacing. Maclntyre (Peter Riegert), the acquisitions man from Knox Oil and Gas, may think of himself as "a telex man," all hard figures and bottom lines, but once in the field he is entirely capable of going all soppy about a wounded rabbit. His boss, Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster, expertly doing his clean-old-man routine), is anything but the Texas tycoon of fable; he scrambles his own eggs and is an amateur astronomer who orders Maclntyre to keep an eye out for unusual activity around the constellation Virgo as well as along the coveted coastline. Popping in and out of the picture are a ma rine biologist who turns out to have webbed toes, a Russian trawler officer who paddles in to play the stock market when the fish are running near a capitalist land mass, and a hotel manager who is also a shrewd accountant and a demon lover. The minister here abouts is a black African quite content to be wildly displaced.

Displacement of conventional expectations is, of course, Forsyth's specialty. If one sometimes wishes Forsyth could more often keep his eye on the comic point, it is also true that he finds his best material out there on the periphery, at the edge of the frame. What is a punk rocker doing in the rural highlands? Why does that motorbiker keep burp-burping through the action without explaining himself? Forsyth isn't telling. He's just laughing to himself, a shy, shrewd film maker worth bending near so you can hear what he has to say amidst the contemporary din.

--By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.