Chelsea Spear
You couldn’t spin a broadcast dial in 1985 without hearing the music of Dire Straits. After releasing a string of solid long-players that melded gimlet-eyed singer/songwriter fare with guitar heroics, the British quintet entered their imperial era with the state-of-the-art production of Brothers in Arms. “Money for Nothing” rocketed to the top of the charts, partly on the strength of its computer-animated music video, which put its anti-MTV lyrical text front and center. Brothers in Arms would eventually sell 30 million copies worldwide. Not bad for a band fronted by a middle-aged songwriter with a trollish sense of humor and a fondness for terry cloth headbands.
Art house filmgoers were also developing a taste for Mark Knopfler’s nimble fingerpicking and wistful sense of melody. After the success of Dire Straits’ Making Movies, the guitarist had grown creatively restless and sought out opportunities to write music outside of his band. His scores for Local Hero and The Princess Bride balanced the whimsical tones of both films with the grit and expansiveness of Dire Straits’ finest work.
Knopfler made his debut as a film composer with Local Hero, director Bill Forsyth’s American commercial breakthrough. It follows Mac (Peter Riegert), a mid-level executive at Knox Oil who is sent to Ferness, a Scottish village, to purchase the land. The company’s eccentric president (Burt Lancaster) sends Mac on the basis of his Scottish last name and directs him to watch the skies for anything unusual. Working with Danny Oldsen (Peter Capaldi), a gormless Scottish representative for Knox Oil, Mac falls in love with the slower pace and traditional culture of Ferness and feels conflicted about its eventual purchase of the land.
With its climactic scene at the aurora borealis and a supporting character who may or may not be a mermaid, Local Hero could have been a too-twee-by-half fairy tale for adults. The wistful humor of Forsyth’s screenplay, combined with his cast’s naturalistic performances and Chris Menges’ unfussy camera work and desaturated earth-toned color palette, undercut any cutesy missteps he may have made. Mark Knopfler’s score enhances the film’s unfussy-yet-dreamy tone. In his career up to that point, Knopfler was as influenced by traditional Scottish music as he was by American blues, and his knowledge of Scottish music comes through in an original ceilidh he wrote for a pivotal scene at a village party. He also showed great skill at composing and recording in response to the diegetic sounds in the film, as in a beach scene where he plays a call-and-response with a seagull’s call.
The seeds for the high-1980s production of Brothers in Arms may have been planted with the recording of the Local Hero score. In the music cues for scenes at Knox Oil’s Dallas offices, Knopfler plays a Fairlight synthesizer as a music bed and gradually fades in a fingerpicked guitar line over the hum, symbolizing the modern life that Mac left behind with his affection for Ferness. Knopfler’s use of the Fairlight reaches its apex in the aurora borealis scene, in which the synthesizer plays a counterpoint over a bagpipe melody that steadily grows in volume to underscore a bright light coming over the horizon. As the Fairlight reaches a crescendo, a helicopter with the Knox Oil logo lands on the beach, and the bagpipe melody pipes in as the villagers approach the helicopter.
Local Hero was a modest hit on its 1983 release, making double its budget on an art house theatre engagement in America and the UK, but it would find a wider audience from its broadcasts on cable throughout the decade. The success of its score was a similar slow burn; while the soundtrack album was nominated for a BAFTA, it really found its audience when the Newcastle FC soccer team adopted “Going Home” as the theme they’d play before the game. Knopfler re-recorded the theme with 60 guitar heroes and also Eric Clapton as a fundraiser for pediatric cancer charities in America and England.
After the release of Local Hero, Knopfler would collaborate with Local Hero producer Bill Puttnam on the score for Cal and with Puttnam and Forsyth on Comfort and Joy, with Forsyth citing Dire Straits’ Love Over Gold as an influence on the screenplay for the latter film. Filmgoers would next hear from Knopfler in The Princess Bride, another cult hit fairy tale.
Watching Local Hero and The Princess Bride in quick succession, one could say that the latter film took the more understated aspects of the former and turned them up to 11. Where Forsyth’s Local Hero script gestured towards magical realism, William Goldman wrote an unambiguous folk tale, complete with an idyllic kingdom, a magical healer, and Rodents of Unusual Size. The subtle humor of Local Hero is replaced with broad slapstick and comparatively quippy one-liners, and cinematographer Adrian Biddle’s picturesque framing and saturated earth tones replace Menges’ more homespun depiction of the Scottish highlands.
Where the score for Local Hero functioned as a way of contrasting the traditions of Ferness and the yuppie lifestyle of 1980s Texas, the score for The Princess Bride serves as more standard Hollywood fare. Knopfler emphasizes the comedy and suspense through a graceful synth fanfare that complements Robert Leighton’s editing, particularly in the first-act sword fight between Westley and Inigo Montoya. While the synth strings and horns sound tinny to contemporary listeners, Knopfler’s use of the Fairlight as a bed to contrast with his finger-picked guitar lines works well with the foggy ethereality of the mid-movie set pieces.
The success of The Princess Bride echoed that of Local Hero. It made back double its budget at the box office and earned positive reviews, with Knopfler receiving the film’s sole Oscar nomination for his original song, “Storybook Love.” The film found a wider, more receptive audience through home video rentals and cable broadcasts, and Knopfler’s score has remained one of the most enduring parts of its legacy.
A few years after the release of The Princess Bride, Knopfler reactivated Dire Straits for a final album and tour. He remained active as a film composer through the 2010s, working on both Hollywood features and intimate British character studies. If he’s done with film composition, eight years from his most recent soundtrack, his scores for Local Hero and The Princess Bride take their place among the best work of his career.
