Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film, released in 1983, is "Local Hero".

It was written and directed by Scottish filmmaker Bill Forsyth, who two years earlier wrote and directed the sleeper coming of age hit, "Gregory's Girl".

Like that film, "Local Hero" is set in Scotland but its stars are two Americans, Burt Lancaster and Peter Riegert.

The supporting cast of British actors includes: Fulton Mackay, Denis Lawson, Peter Capaldi, and Jenny Seagrove.

The story begins when Felix Happer, the eccentric CEO of Knox Oil and Gas in Houston, Texas, sends one of his top young negotiators, Mac MacIntyre to Scotland.

Mac's mission is to buy the entire village of Fernness on the western coast of Scotland to serve as the site for a massive oil refinery.

Mac, who considers himself more of a telephone and telex negotiator than an in person man, is met at Aberdeen Airport by one of Knox Oil's Scottish employees, Danny Oldsen.

Together they go to a Knox Research facility where they learn the full scope of the refinery project.

They also meet Marina, an attractive but somewhat mysterious young woman who works as a marine researcher.

Once in Ferness, Mac and Danny have to get used to the slower pace of life in the village while negotiating with the village's designated agent, local innkeeper and accountant Gordon Urquhart.

But, as their visit goes on, they discover the villagers are not really the easy marks Mac expected them to be.

There's a lot going on at Ferness that's kept secret from Mac and Danny and several obstacles lie in the way of Mac's attempt to buy out the village and clear the way for the refinery to be built.

If that's still what he really wants to do.

With "Local Hero", writer director Bill Forsyth tapped into a reliable source of humor and drama with a story of big events that roil the surface of a small rural village, revealing the villagers' resourcefulness as well as their charm.

Other British films that have gone to this same well include "Whisky Galore!"

from 1949, "The Titfield Thunderbolt" from 1953, and "The Maggie" from 1954.

Forsyth has acknowledged his debt to these films and other classic postwar comedies produced by Ealing Studios.

More recent examples of this sort of story include "The Matchmaker" from 1997 and "Waking Ned Divine" in 1998, both set in small Irish villages.

The contrast and tensions in these films between the villagers and the outsiders, who find themselves in unfamiliar territory, can have both dramatic and comedic consequences.

Or sometimes, as in the British films "The City of the Dead" in 1960 or "The Wicker Man" in 1973, horrifying or deadly results.

Much of the pleasure of "Local Hero" is provided by the character of Knox CEO Felix Happer, played by Burt Lancaster.

Lancaster, who was 68 when he played Happer, already had a long distinguished career as a movie actor.

After a stint as a circus acrobat in the 1930s and serving in the army during the Second World War, Lancaster acted briefly on Broadway before coming to the attention of Hollywood.

His first breakout role was in "The Killers" with Ava Gardner in 1946.

Over the next 43 years, Lancaster starred in a number of classic films, garnering four Academy Award nominations for Best Actor and winning one for his lead performance in "Elmer Gantry" in 1960.

He was also a prolific film producer, both producing and starring in such films as "Sweet Smell of Success" in 1957, "Separate Tables" in 1958 and "The Bird Man of Alcatraz" in 1962.

In 1980, he received his fourth and final Academy Award nomination for his performance as Lou Pascal in "Atlantic City" with Susan Surandon.

But he also suffered from a number of health problems.

In 1983, the same year "Local Hero" was released, Lancaster had emergency quadruple coronary bypass surgery after two minor heart attacks.

But he continued to act in films for another six years before retiring.

His final film performance was as Doctor Archibald 'Moonlight' Graham in 1989's "Field of Dreams".

Writer director Bill Forsyth described the origins of "Local Hero" this way, "I saw it along the lines of a Scottish Beverly Hillbillies.

What would happen to a small community when it suddenly became immensely rich?

That was the germ of the idea and the story built itself from there."

It seemed to contain a similar theme to "Brigadoon" which also involves some Americans coming over to Scotland, becoming part of a small community, being changed by the experience and affecting the place in their own way.

But, for the most part, Forsyth's film refutes the 1954 film "Brigadoon" and the idea of a Scottish village as a place stuck in the past.

In "Local Hero", Ferness is a place with a history certainly and its own customs and traditions but, so Forsyth also makes it clear, Ferness is like any other place where human beings live with individual people living their individual, often complicated, lives and doing their best to get along.

"Local Hero" is filled with little hints and indications that there's many things going on behind closed doors.

Any one of which might make a movie of its own.

There's the passionate relationship between Gordon and Stella Urquhart that surpasses even Mac and Danny's randy imaginations.

There's the excitement Mrs. Wyatt, the grocer, shows when Victor, the vulgar boatman, calls on the radio.

There's the baby that seems to show up wherever there's a crowd but no one will say who his father is.

There's Reverend Macpherson, the African minister who should be as out of place as Mac, but who seems to have been accepted as a full member of the community.

There's Ben Knox, a Scottish Ben Kenobi who lives on his own and who alone possesses important knowledge that makes him the key character in the story.

But there are also a few touches of the sort of magic that suffuses "Brigadoon" in "Local Hero".

There's the breathtaking scenery caught by Chris Menge's beautiful cinematography.

There are constant references to the stars and the sea and the two principle female characters are named Stella and Marina.

And there's Marina herself, the young marine researcher seems much more at home in the water than on land.

She seems to travel between Aberdeen and Ferness by sea.

Is she swimming there to suddenly appear on the shore to confound and enrapture Danny?

when she shows him the gray seals along the shore, Danny says, "Sailors used to think they were mermaids, yeah?"

She gives him a sharp look and replies, "Aye, they did.

They were wrong."

When Danny convinces Mr Happer that an oceanographic research facility should be part of his plant, Happer Institute, Danny runs into the sea to tell Marina the good news.

There's obviously meant to be more to Marina than her passion for ocean research and her webbed toes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the films severest critics seem to be among Forsyth's fellow Scots.

Several writers for "Cencrastus", a journal dedicated to Scottish arts and literature, found fault with the film for reinforcing prevailing cinematic stereotypes about the Scots and Scottish village life.

Others criticized the way women in the film were secondary to the film's male characters and appeared primarily as idealized objects of desire.

This is a valid point.

Although it may, in part, be attributed to the culture of village life and international business in the early eighties, both in the United States and in Scotland.

Presumably, if it were made today, Forsyth would have the story unfold somewhat differently.

But, like all films, "Local Hero" must be judged as it is on its own terms.

At the time of its release, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun TImes called it, "A small film to treasure."

He wrote, "What makes this material really work is the low key approach of the writer director Bill Forsyth, who has the patience to let his characters gradually reveal themselves to the camera.

He never hurries and, as a result, "Local Hero" never drags.

Nothing is more absorbing than human personalities developed with love and humor."

Over the years, "Local Hero", like Bill Forsyth's earlier "Gregory's Girl" has come to be regarded as a cinema classic.

Gary Panton writing in "Movie Gazette" may have best expressed the opinion of many of its viewers, "Bill Forsyth's, finest work of all.

This is a perfect film."

Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm Glenn Holland.

Good night.