This is our introduction to Alan \u201cDickie\u201d Bird, a Glasgow morning DJ and local celebrity played by Bill Paterson, who ably anchors Forsyth\u2019s follow-up to his breakout hit Local Hero<\/em> (which recently received the Criterion treatment). Not long after they\u2019ve gotten home and started decorating their tree with the four strings of lights she\u2019s stolen (unnecessarily, as it turns out, since they already had two), Alan watches as Maddy (Eleanor David) wordlessly starts packing and then casually announces she\u2019s leaving him \u2014 tonight. (\u201cI meant to tell you ages ago, but the moment didn\u2019t arise,\u201d she says.) Alan\u2019s entreaties to talk about it fall on deaf ears, though, when the movers show up and set about clearing the apartment of most of its contents. \u201cDon\u2019t let\u2019s drag it out, Alan. Don\u2019t be cruel,\u201d Maddy says, acting like the wounded party and demonstrating how lucky he is to be rid of her (once he gets over the shock, that is).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next morning, the freshly single Alan gets up at an ungodly hour to work at the radio station, a scene Forsyth underscores with a grim news report about two broken Christmas truces in the Middle and Far East. The Dickie Bird Early Worm Show<\/em> must go on, though, and Alan puts on as brave a face as possible under the circumstances. As someone whose job it is to help his fellow Glaswegians greet the day on an upbeat note, he can\u2019t let on that he\u2019s a broken man. Later on, the number of Christmas truces in jeopardy has been upped to no fewer than eight, making it seem like the whole world is going to pieces in sympathy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After calling on his best friend for some moral support and being told he\u2019s lucky to have the chance to \u201cbreak out and start all over again,\u201d Alan takes the sight of a pretty girl (Clare Grogan, late of Forsyth\u2019s 1981 film Gregory\u2019s Girl<\/em>) on a Mr. Bunny ice cream truck as a sign and impulsively follows it to its next stop so he can make a purchase and do a little awkward flirting. He also bears witness to a very un-Christmas-y display when a car pulls up and two thugs in balaclavas jump out and proceed to smash up the truck. (In a surreal touch, as they make their getaway, one of them recognizes Alan and aggressively asks him for an autograph, which he\u2019s too stunned to supply.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Things escalate the following morning when Alan finds his BMW has been broken into and dozens of ice cream cones left on the seats with a note warning him to stay silent. This is the exact wrong tack to take with him, though, as it only encourages Alan to dig deeper and learn more about the curious rivalry between the upstart Mr. Bunny operation and the more established Mr. McCool\u2019s, which is a family-run business in the same way the mafia is. Mr. McCool and his sons are even Italian, which is as incongruous as it sounds, but their capacity for destruction is straightforward enough, their hardball tactics reminiscent of the ones used by Bob Hoskins\u2019s gangland boss in 1980\u2019s The Long Good Friday<\/em>. (Suggested alternate title: The Long Ice Cream Sundae<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alan\u2019s pursuit of the story and attempt to turn it into a serious documentary for the station (a pilot for a possible series he has punningly titled Bird\u2019s Eye View<\/em>) worries its managing director, Hilary (Rikki Fulton, one of the locals from Local Hero<\/em>), who\u2019s so concerned about his on-air talent\u2019s mental state that he asks whether Alan\u2019s contract has a \u201csanity clause,\u201d a line that provokes a Chico Marxian response from his secretary. The last straw comes, though, when Alan starts slipping messages for Mr. Bunny into his on-air patter, prompting Hilary to demand he see a psychiatrist. \u201cDon\u2019t worry,\u201d Alan says to his friend, who’s equally concerned about his mental state. \u201cI\u2019m still miserable. I\u2019ll be miserable for ages.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the thing about Comfort and Joy<\/em> that makes it such atypical holiday fare. Even as Alan gets roped into more and more absurd situations \u2014 with his beloved BMW frequently getting the worst of it \u2014 Forsyth never loses sight of his lead\u2019s profound melancholy and the genuine sense of loss he feels. This is reinforced by the dreams Alan has where Maddy has come back to him, which he immediately recognizes upon waking as wishful thinking. Once he accepts that he\u2019s not getting her back (nor should he want to) and there\u2019s little he can do about the sorry state of the world, Alan\u2019s resolve to broker a truce between the rival ice cream companies that are making life unnecessarily difficult for him becomes that much stronger. Who knows? With any luck, it may even last through New Year\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Comfort and Joy<\/em> isn\u2019t as well-known as it could be, this has less to do with its quality than the fact that, apart from a long out-of-print VHS, it has never received a Region A\/1 release. (That one of the scenes at the radio station has Michael Jackson\u2019s \u201cBillie Jean\u201d playing underneath it could be the culprit here.) This is a shame because Forsyth\u2019s quirky sense of humor is one to be cherished, and this film, like Local Hero<\/em> before it, boasts a winning score by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, which is namechecked when one of Alan\u2019s coworkers commiserates with him about his romantic woes. By the time he\u2019s toasting his listeners on Christmas Day, however, he\u2019s largely put those behind him. \u201cCheers, everybody in this great big, weird and wonderful city of ours,\u201d Alan says, and having seen precisely how weird it can get, it\u2019s a sure bet he means it. It\u2019s a common enough sight in Christmas films: holiday shoppers admiring animatronic window displays and taking advantage of the sales […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":12916,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/comfortandjoy3.jpg\")
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