WELCOME to day three of our top 20 Scottish film moments of all time. Why did we choose to focus on specific film moments as opposed to whole films? We thought it would be more interesting, allowing us to offer an alternative slant on what makes films important and memorable, as well as to look beyond Scottish films (however you care to define that term), at movies that have had an effect on how Scotland is perceived elsewhere, or have reflected ideas about Scottish identity.
In compiling our list we set ourselves some ground rules - our moments didn't have to be from Scottish films, but would have to have an identifiable Scottish connection on screen. We also wanted to avoid any film featuring on the list more than once.
I'm much indebted to the panel of experts who assembled the list: Janice Forsyth of Radio Scotland's The Movie Café; critics Mike McCahill and Eddie Harrison; and writer Brian Pendreigh. Mark Cousins, the author of The Story of Film, also contributed.
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RHAPSODY IN GREENOCK, SWEET SIXTEEN, KEN LOACH, 2002
ONE of the most productive collaborations in recent British cinema has been between social realist veteran Ken Loach and lawyer-turned-screenwriter Paul Laverty, yielding four fine films set along the Clyde: Carla's Song (1996), My Name is Joe (1998), Sweet Sixteen (2002) and Ae Fond Kiss (2005). One typically good-humoured sequence in Sweet Sixteen finds disenfranchised Liam (Martin Compston) and best mate Pinball (William Ruane) joyriding in a Mercedes to an unlikely soundtrack provided by the car's original owner: The Arrival of the Night Queen from Mozart's The Magic Flute.
Central to this moment - and almost unnoticed in the escapist euphoria of the scene - is that Liam doesn't retune the radio to the kind of infernal dance racket most 16-year-olds would rather listen to, or remove it from the dashboard altogether in order to sell it on. The film made a star out of Compston, currently to be seen in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, while establishing Liam as Scottish cinema's Antoine Doinel, the delinquent hero of Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows: a poet, prankster and brawler all at the same time.
MIKE McCAHILL
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"GIVE ME A GIRL AT AN IMPRESSIONABLE AGE AND SHE IS MINE FOR LIFE", THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE, RONALD NEAME, 1969
THE film of the play of the Muriel Spark novel is virtually unique in Scottish cinema. Not only does it have a predominantly female cast, but they are all middle-class. It is set specifically within a private all-girls school, where the eponymous heroine rhapsodises about Italian classical art and promotes dangerous romantic fantasies about Mussolini and Franco. The film is full of brilliant verbal duels as it nears its climax, with headmistress Celia Johnson dismissing Miss Brodie (Oscar-winner Maggie Smith), and Brodie speculating with favourite pupil Sandy (Pamela Franklin) on who "betrayed" her, belatedly realising it was Sandy. Perhaps the best scene is the final one, in which Sandy leaves school for the last time, while Brodie's voice plays on the soundtrack. "All my girls are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life."
Sandy walks alone towards adulthood, slightly apart, her face wet with tears. It is easy to picture Miss Brodie as a respectable but bitter spinster, living out her years in Morningside, and we remain worryingly unsure of whether Sandy can escape a similar future.
BRIAN PENDREIGH
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A TOUCHING FAMILY RECONCILIATION,THE BILL DOUGLAS TRILOGY, BILL DOUGLAS, 1972, 1973, 1978
EVERY day, when his granny gets home to her miners cottage in East Lothian, Jamie retreats to the corner of the room. It is the early 1950s. The room is spartan. When she arrives we see the back of her head, the back of her chair. Without so much as a smile to Jamie, or even a glance at him, she sits by the fire and talks to her dog.
On one such day the routine of estrangement looks as if it will play out as it always does, but when Jamie's granny sits down, her back to him, she take out a bobble of beer and slugs from it. Then again, and again. Then, without turning round, she reaches her hand out and back, behind her to the space in which Jamie is, as usual, standing. At once we realise that all along she has known that he was there, but it has taken the booze to warm her heart enough, to make her care enough, to reach from her space to his.
If Bill Douglas hadn't placed his camera as consistently as Eisenstein or Dreyer, then this scene from My Ain Folk (1973) would not be one of the greatest moments of reconciliation in cinema. It is. I cry each time I see it.
Why is the Bill Douglas Trilogy not available on DVD?
MARK COUSINS
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GETTING SHIRTY WITH IDI AMIN, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, KEVIN MACDONALD, 2007
EMERGENT Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) and newly qualified doctor Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) first meet under trying circumstances - a road accident - that only get worse when Garrigan, snapping in the unrelenting African heat, snatches Amin's gun to put the cow with which the convoy has collided out of its misery. Accused by a furious Amin of being British - the implication being that only a child of empire would be so impetuous in his presence - the doctor instead pulls open his shirt to reveal a Scotland football T-shirt: an item of clothing that's at once a reminder of home, a display of national pride and, as it turns out on this occasion, a bulletproof vest.
As elsewhere in the film, the dramatic emphasis of the scene plays out over the vast expanse of Whitaker's face, as Amin's eyes widen at the sight of the saltire ("Scottish!"), and his thunderous countenance gives way to a slow-growing expression of kinship. For Amin, the Scots, like "his" Ugandans, are an oppressed minority, forever overshadowed by more powerful neighbours. As he and the doctor swap shirts at the end of this supremely tense encounter, we learn he's even named his sons Campbell and Mackenzie.
It's an early sign of Garrigan's Achilles' heel - his innate cockiness - that he's willing to play the race card with a Ugandan, and the first instance where we see the Glasgow-born, soon-to-be-stellar McAvoy start to stand his ground against Whitaker's continent-sized performance. One might question whether Scotland really needs the sympathies of despots, but here Macdonald and writer Peter Morgan present Scottishness as survival strategy: if Garrigan had revealed the three lions of England on his chest, the film would have ended, bloodily, right there at the roadside.
MIKE McCAHILL
THE TOP 20 SO FAR
||1918|| A bus journey to a new house and a new life, Ratcatcher, Lynne Ramsay, 1999
||1716|| That sex scene, Red Road, Andrea Arnold, 2006
15 The roof blows off the church, Orphans, Peter Mullan, 1997
16 "Let's get pished!" So I Married an Axe Murderer, Thomas Schlamme, 1993
17 From 20th-century New York to 16th-century Scotland - in one continuous, smooth camera movement, Highlander, Russell Mulcahy, 1986
18 "This is the night mail crossing the border", Night Mail, John Grierson, 1936
19 Lizzie reads Frankie's letters on the bus, Dear Frankie, Shona Auerbach, 2004
20 Panavision cameras swoop over Glasgow's Necropolis, Deathwatch, Bertrand Tavernier, 1979
DO YOU AGREE?
WHATEVER you think of our choices - and our omissions - we'd love to hear your views. Please get in touch with us, either by post or at www.scotsman.com/top20 where, from Friday, you'll be able to read the whole list and the reasons for each choice.
