Another great Mark Knopfler song,
from the cult favorite, “Local Hero”. Like the best of Knopfler’s work (see # 60 - On Any Street), it starts slow and quiet, and then builds to a big finish, with
a great hook.
“Local Hero” is the story of an
American yuppie from Houston, played by Peter Reigert, Boon of “Animal House”,
who is sent by the owner of the oil company he works for, Burt Lancaster, to
purchase the land around a bay on the Northern coast of Scotland, to turn it
into a refinery for the company’s North Sea oil.
He comes to fall in love with the
town and its people, but in the end, like other Bill Forsyth comedies, the end
is bittersweet, and he ends up back in Houston, calling the single phone in the
town, a pay phone outside the pub, and listening to it ring and ring and ring
and ring, as Mark Knopfler’s theme wells up.
I love the work of Bill Forsyth,
especially the largely unseen “Comfort and Joy.” Quirky, as a description of
his films, is surely an understatement. “Comfort and Joy” is the story of an
ice cream war, between the ice cream trucks of Mr. Bunny and Mr. McCool, and
the disc jockey that gets caught in the middle.
The scene that made me laugh the
most, and it’s just a throwaway, is the one where you see one of the ice cream truck
employees making the music to be played over the truck’s PA. Instead of
recording it once, and making an audio loop, they are actually making a tape
with the innocuous, tinkling music, punctuated with “Hello, Kids!” over and over
and over.
