Comfort and Joy

Dir. Bill Forsyth. 1984, 106 mins. 35mm. With Bill Paterson, Eleanor David, Clare Grogan. Forsyth returned to his Glasgow roots after the success of Local Hero to make this delightfully glum Christmas-time film about a local disc jockey who tries to cheer up the town while his own personal life is falling apart. After his kleptomaniac girlfriend dumps him, he somehow gets involved in a local turf war between competing ice cream vendors. Pauline Kael praised Chris Menges’ “stark raving beautiful cinematography,” with its alternately warm and cool color scheme, and capturing Forsyth’s spirit, wrote that “everyday life is an idyll in this movie.”