There's more to Scottish films than Trainspotting: 10 forgotten gems

For every cinema story that gets told there is a shadow story; the story of the films that don’t get talked about. That is also the case when it comes to cinematic representations of Scotland. There is a celluloid land beyond Whisky Galore! and The Wicker Man, Trainspotting and Braveheart. What’s it like? A bit of a mess, but an interesting one at times.

Soft Top Hard Shoulder, 1992

Once upon a time it was all Bill Forsyth-style comedies around these parts. Some of them were really good. Usually, the ones made by Bill Forsyth himself.

Soft Top Hard Shoulder is very much in the Forsythian vein, though its pleasures are pretty modest by comparison. It’s a road movie which features an ill-matched couple - played by Capaldi and his wife Elaine Collins - driving a handsome but untrustworthy Triumph Herald from London to Glasgow.

What makes it interesting is its writer and star Peter Capaldi, here toggling between the tousle-haired sweetness he offered in Local Hero and the poison-tongued abrasiveness that he would let fly in The Thick of It.

The Ballad of Tam Lin, 1971

The only film the actor Roddy McDowall directed. The Ballad of Tam Lin, based (loosely) on the Scottish ballad, sees Ava Gardner wandering around Traquair House in Balmain gowns looking every inch the film star she was, whilst surrounded by a coven of pretty young things including Joanna Lumley and a young Ian McShane.

This strange, silly, yet rather compelling slice of folk horror couldn’t be more modish if it tried. A late 1960s artefact with a score by Pentangle, it is a dreamy, drifty thing that is a little high on its own supply before amping up for its trippy climax (which, to be honest, doesn’t really work). The film was shelved because of the money problems of its financiers. By the time it emerged it felt old-fashioned. Now it feels like a time capsule.

Urban Ghost Story, 1998

Variety described it as “Ken Loach meets The Exorcist” which may be overselling it, but this late 1990s ghost story set in a Glasgow tower block is a surprisingly effective chiller despite its obvious bare bones budget. Jason Connery supplies its limited star power, but director Genevieve Jolliffe and her co-writer Chris Jones coax decent performances out of new names (in particular, Heather Ann Foster) and soap stars (Nicola Stapleton), and the film plays with the idea that poverty itself is a kind of haunting.

The Devil’s Plantation, 2013

Can you be forgotten if you’ve never been seen? That’s the question that director May Miles Thomas might be entitled to ask. She has against all the odds made four films largely off her own back. That is a remarkable achievement in itself. But then comes the problem of finding an audience beyond film festival screenings.

And she deserves to. With its cool, locked-off camera shots and contemplative rhythms, May Miles Thomas’s film - a psychogeographical mapping of Glasgow - is a haunting, haunted work which may stir memories of Patrick Keiller’s arthouse classic Robinson trilogy. But May Thomas made her film on a budget of pennies and sweetie wrappers.

Hallam Foe (Image: free)

Hallam Foe, 2007

Perthshire-raised director David Mackenzie’s best film is an American one; Hell or High Water. But before that he cut his teeth in Scotland.

Has Hallam Foe been forgotten? Not exactly, but it has dropped out of the conversation. Perhaps its perversity - it’s a film about grief, voyeurism, sexual obsession and the view from Edinburgh’s rooftops - is out of kilter with the current moment, but this coming-of-age movie starring Jamie Bell and Sophia Myles has an antic appeal that overcomes the bumpiness of its dramatic construction. One worth revisiting.

The Governess, 1998

By 1998 Minnie Driver was a star. She’d made her name in Hollywood in Grosse Pointe Blank and Good Will Hunting. So it was something of a coup for Sandra Goldbacher to cast her as the lead in her directorial debut. Driver plays an educated Jewish Londoner who reinvents herself as a governess for a family on a remote Scottish island, where she finds herself caught up in the life and work of her employer played by the late, great Tom Wilkinson, whilst also attracting the attention of his son (a young Jonathan Rhys Meyer).

The result is a handsome period movie about secrecy, passion, Protestant guilt and photography. It's also about how good Driver looks in leather and lace.

Vivien Leigh (Image: free)

Storm in a Teacup, 1937

Billed as a romantic comedy starring Rex Harrison and Vivien Leigh, both at the peak of their springtime, this 1937 adaptation of a James Bridie play is actually more interested in local politics than passion. Leigh plays the daughter of the high-handed Provost William Gow (played by Cecil Parker) who is hoping to be adopted as a parliamentary candidate backing Scottish independence.

For all that it is a bit too keen on Scottish (and Irish) stereotypes, Storm in a Teacup has a handful of sharp one-liners and a couple of scenes that linger. In one, a pack of dogs are let loose in Provost Gow’s house and there is a real sense of genuine anarchy at play. In another the Provost and his daughter sit at each end of a long breakfast table and he throws her a letter which Leigh catches. It is so casually graceful you’ll wonder how many attempts it took to nail.

Comrades, 1986

When it comes to cinema, Bill Douglas is one of Scotland’s great artists. And artists are never truly forgotten. And yet Comrades - Douglas’s epic story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs - disappeared for a couple of decades after its VHS release in 1989. It has since been reissued on DVD and Blu-Ray, but it remains underappreciated. Pity, because it is an approachable, visually thrilling film, deeply moving in its humanity.

Culloden, 1964

Peter Watkins’s docudrama, originally commissioned for the BBC, is included here because it remains in the shadow of the director’s more infamous film about the aftermath of a nuclear attack, The War Game, banned by the Beeb for being “too horrifying.”

Culloden, a recreation of the last stand of the Jacobites in 1746, is itself a potent piece of cinema verite film-making about the brutality of war.

Year of the Comet, 1992

And sometimes maybe some films deserve to be forgotten. This romantic caper movie set in Scotland and the south of France was received as a poor facsimile of Romancing the Stone. And yet on paper it has all the right elements. It was written by William Goldman and directed by Peter Yates and starred Penelope Ann Miller and Timothy Daly as the film’s Kathleen and Michael options, with Louis Jordan - in his final role - as the bad guy. But no one went to see it.

Daly once suggested the fact that it was released on the same weekend as the Rodney King riots may have harmed its chances: “Every white person in the United States was locked in their safe room.”