More Great Films About Scotland

The Wicker Man, My Way Home, Gregory's Girl, Highlander, Morvern Callar

Apr 15, 2009

A brief celebration of some of the best films made in Scotland; The Wicker Man, My Way Home, Gregory's Girl, Highlander and Morvern Callar.

For a small country, Scotland has been lucky enough to have had some great films made there. Here are five of the best, with a brief description of why they all say more about Scotland than a certain film about William Wallace.

Morally upright Christian Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), is summoned from the mainland to help search for a missing girl on the island of Summerisle. When he gets there however, the locals claim to know nothing about little Rowan Morrison. Even her mother feigns ignorance. It becomes clear to Howie they are messing him about.

Worse still for this Calvinist cop, is their wanton behaviour; bawdy singing in the local pub, couples fornicating in public and progressive sex education in schools. Scotland's only musical horror movie is a deeply unsettling affair. Creepy, rather than horrific, poor old Howie realises too late he is out of his depth.

Douglas is one of Britain’s great lost film directors and this is his finest work. My Way Home is the final part in a trilogy based on Douglas’s own childhood. Jamie's harsh upbringing was the focus of My Childhood and My Ain Folk. Now 17, he is used to feeling worthless, being hit, or being patronised by those higher up the social ladder. While carrying out his National Service abroad, Jamie is befriended and drawn out of his shell by an upper-class Englishman. Jamie’s realization that he can fulfill his artistic intentions is one of cinema's most moving and hopeful coming-of-age stories.

Hard to pick between this and Forsyth’s Local Hero, but Gregory’s Girl just shades it. Gawky schoolboy footballer Gregory makes the mistake of telling his coach that football is only a game. Blasphemy! As punishment he’s put in goals and replaced by of all people, a girl. Football is the last thing Gregory has on his mind when he sees Dorothy in action. Unfortunately he is as awkward with girls as he is on the football pitch. Luckily Dorothy is smart enough to know how to deal with her admirer.

Handsome, French-accented antiques dealer Russell Nash has a dark secret, he is really a Scotsman called MacLeod. While Highlander’s charismatic star Christopher Lambert is generally considered to have attempted the worst Scottish accent at the movies, his detractors are missing the point. This is a movie about an immortal engaging in an ongoing battle through the centuries to win a mystical prize. There is no need for realism. Besides, Lambert is not the first Scot to speak with a French accent; Mary Queen of Scots for instance, was more Catherine Deneuve, than Cathy from Kelvingrove.

If you are snobbish about watching action movies, content yourself with viewing Highlander as mediation on being an emigrant; you can leave your homeland behind, you can change your name, you can decapitate a whole bunch of people, but you’ll still find yourself day-dreaming about the place you came from.

Few films have captured the longing to escape from a small-town existence than Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Alan Warner's novel, Morvern Callar. Supermarket check-out girl Morvern awakes to find her boyfriend has killed himself. On his computer is a finished novel which she claims as her own. Keeping his death a secret, Morvern makes some money by winning a publishing deal and travels abroad.

Warner's novel is the superior work for its humour alone, but Ramsay fashions an elliptical, near wordless gem, in which Scotland feels like the loneliest place on earth and life is elsewhere.

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