Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983)

Peter Riegert in Local Hero

Cast: Peter Riegert, Peter Capaldi, Denis Lawson, Burt Lancaster, Fulton Mackay, Norman Chancer, Rikki Fulton, Alex Norton, Jenny Seagrove, Jennifer Black, Christopher Rozycki, Gyearbuor Asante. Screenplay: Bill Forsyth. Cinematography: Chris Menges. Production design: Roger Murray-Leach. Film editing: Michael Bradsell. Music: Mark Knopfler.

Local Hero is one of those small charmers that pop up occasionally, get rave reviews, and then sort of fade into the background. It's worth rediscovering, principally for Bill Forsyth's affectionately whimsical take on human beings. Another writer-director would have played the subject -- an American oil company's plans to exploit a small Scottish fishing village -- for more blatant satire and social commentary. But Forsyth is more interested in the people than the issues, so he keeps sending the film off into little eddies of contingency and irrelevance. On the way to the village, for example, the representatives of the oil company, Mac (Peter Riegert) and Oldsen (a startlingly young Peter Capaldi, years away from Doctor Who), accidentally hit a rabbit with their car and decide to bring it with them and nurse it back to health. The rabbit is doomed for the dinner table, but its presence in the story speaks more about the characters than it does to any larger theme the film might be concerned with. Forsyth keeps us cheerfully off guard throughout the film, with features the larger-than-life Burt Lancaster in one of his most humanizing roles.

The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)

Fred Savage and Peter Falk in The Princess Bride

Westley: Cary Elwes
Buttercup: Robin Wright
Inigo Montoya: Mandy Patinkin
Prince Humperdinck: Chris Sarandon
Count Rugen: Christopher Guest
Vizzini: Wallace Shawn
Fezzik: André the Giant
Grandson: Fred Savage
Grandfather: Peter Falk
The Impressive Clergyman: Peter Cook
The Albino: Mel Smith
Miracle Max: Billy Crystal
Valerie: Carol Kane

Director: Rob Reiner
Screenplay: William Goldman
Based on a novel by William Goldman
Cinematography: Adrian Biddle
Production design: Norman Garwood
Film editing: Robert Leighton
Music: Mark Knopfler

Screenwriter William Goldman's death happened just a day or two after I watched The Princess Bride, and the film was mentioned in almost all of the newspaper articles about his life and career, on a par with the two movies that won him Oscars for screenwriting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) and All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976). But when it was released, The Princess Bride was something of a box office flop and got no attention from the Oscars. It has since become one of many people's most-loved movies, a beneficiary of its availability on home video. Countless parents who skipped it when it was in the theaters rented it for their kids and wound up watching it, too. Its huge success has been attributed to Rob Reiner's breezy direction, to the attractiveness of its cast, and to its immense quotability: Almost no one today utters the word "inconceivable" without expecting someone to reply, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." But most of all, The Princess Bride works because it's a celebration of storytelling, a reminder of the kind of transformation that a well-told story can bring about, the way the grandson in the film's frame story comes to regard his grandfather as more than an unwelcome cheek-pincher, and a "kissing book" can have unexpected rewards, especially since, as the boy puts it, "Murdered by pirates is good." Some unique chemistry of writing, acting, and directing has made The Princess Bride the classic of a subgenre, the spoofy movie, which has almost been played out by its imitators.