10 great Scottish romances

The savage beauty of Scotland’s landscapes has been inspiring romantics for centuries, from painter Alexander Nasmyth to poet Robert Burns to author Walter Scott. In the realm of cinema, this romantic evocation is best expressed in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s magical love story I Know Where I’m Going!

Returning to cinemas from 20 October in a new 4K restoration, this 1945 film serves up a beguiling mix of screwball comedy, Gaelic folklore and will they/won’t they romance, with a dash of seafaring adventure thrown in. Much of it was shot on location on the Isle of Mull, and the beautiful scenery is more than window dressing. Through cinematographer Erwin Hillier’s attentive lens, it’s a living, breathing force with a mind of its own, throwing characters together and keeping others apart.

Wendy Hiller stars as Joan Webster, a headstrong young woman who knows what she wants out of life (the finer things) and knows the quickest way to get them (getting hitched to a millionaire industrialist). She travels from Manchester to be married at her fiancé’s home on the wind-lashed island of Kiloran. The first part of the journey goes smoothly, with the sleeper train whizzing past tartan-covered hills while Joan sleeps peacefully in her cabin, dreaming about marrying her future husband’s corporation. But the changeable Hebridean weather has her waylaid on Mull, unable to cross the short distance to Kiloran.

The delay thrusts Joan into the company of fellow traveller Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey), a strapping naval officer with connections to her final destination, and the more time she spends with this salt-of-the-earth hunk, the less sure she is of her direction in life. Along with the windswept beauty of Mull and its eccentric inhabitants, he helps Joan start to wonder whether a life without money is necessarily a poor one.

To celebrate the film’s new restoration, here are 10 other on-screen Scottish love stories.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

John Buchan’s 1915 man-on-the-run novel is a cracking read, but Hitchcock improved on it by sprinkling it with sex appeal. While the book is without a significant female character, Hitchcock includes several in his peerless adaptation. 

The mile-a-minute plot is set in motion when our hero, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), is picked up by a mysterious woman, ‘Mrs Smith’ (Lucie Mannheim), who turns out to be a spy. While on the run after being framed for Smith’s murder, Richard holds up at a farm run by a Calvinist brute and takes a shine to the man’s much younger wife (Peggy Ashcroft), who gives him a life-saving coat. And most memorably, Richard stumbles into the train carriage belonging to the icy Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) and ends up handcuffed to her after she sells him out to his pursuers. Their night on the lam, chained to one another, acts like a sizzling film-within-the-film and hints at the sparky battle of the sexes dynamics that would go on to characterise much of Hitchcock’s later work.

Director: René Clair

René Clair seems to be having a whale of a time with his English language debut, bringing a bucket load of visual invention to this screwy culture-clash romance poking fun at Scottish machismo and American materialism. After a prologue in which Murdoch Glourie, an 18th-century Scottish aristocrat with an eye for the ladies, is blown to smithereens while cowering from his enemies behind a gunpowder barrel, we’re transported to the modern day, where Murdoch’s ghost wanders the now dishevelled halls of Glourie Castle and his penniless ancestor, Donald Glourie, hides from his creditors.

A solution to Donald’s destitution presents itself when Peggy (Jean Parker), the daughter of an American supermarket tycoon, takes a liking to Glourie Castle and to Donald, although only after confusing him for his more amorous spectral ancestor. Robert Donat (again) is a hoot as both Murdoch and Donald, and the gags get even more outlandish when the tycoon has the castle shipped stone-by-stone across the Pond and rebuilt among the palm trees of Florida.

Director: Michael Powell

Michael Powell’s filmmaking alchemy was hard-earned. He’d made over 20 director-for-hire quickies before this personal breakthrough, a haunting drama that takes inspiration from the evacuation of St Kilda in 1930. The film centres on a small community struggling to eke out an existence on the barren landscape of St Kilda’s largest island. Tensions between tradition and modernity come to a head when two best friends, Andrew and Robbie, decide to settle their differences about the community’s future with a climbing race up the tallest cliffs on the island without using ropes. The challenge is fraught with danger, and left caught in the middle is Ruth, Robbie’s twin sister and Andrew’s childhood sweetheart.

Powell would become a master of theatricality while working with Emeric Pressburger in the following decades, but this is a much rawer, more direct work. Closer to ethnography documentary than drama at some points, The Edge of the World’s finest quality is its palpable sense of place, time and romance.

Director: Bill Forsyth 

Few films have captured more acutely the heady mix of exhilaration and mortification that constitutes teenage first love than Bill Forsyth’s offbeat comedy. John Gordon Sinclair is a goofy delight as Gregory, the gangly teenager who falls head-over-heels for Dorothy (Dee Hepburn), the modern girl who’s usurped him as centre forward on his school’s football team.

Forsyth’s depiction of teen romance is as wise as it is funny. He seems to know the minds of adolescents all too well, painting male coming-of-age as an embarrassing blend of sexual overexcitement tampered by a chronic awkwardness. Some of his observations about the behaviour of teen boys (and adult men) don’t seem as wry today as they might have in 1980. It’s hard to chuckle at scenes of Dorothy being enthusiastically kissed by both her teammates and the opposition every time she scores a goal, for example. But Gregory’s Girl is so sweet-natured in other respects that it seems churlish to call out its occasionally dated attitudes.

Director: Michael Caton-Jones

This pleasingly old-fashioned swashbuckler, loosely based on the real-life escapades of the 18th-century Scottish folk hero Rob Roy MacGregor, manages to evoke all the romanticism of the Scottish Highlands while telling a tale that’s rich, grimy and deeply satisfying. Director Michael Caton-Jones was born and raised in Bathgate but honed his skill in Hollywood, and this classical training is evident in his expressive direction, which is ravishing but never flashy, and his diligent work with the cast, all of whom are at the top of their game.

Particularly notable are Jessica Lange as Rob’s wife Mary, whose tenacity in the face of trauma drives much of the plot, and Tim Roth, who’s deliciously vile as English dandy Archibald Cunningham. Hats off too to Alan Sharp’s razor-sharp script, which fairly abounds with earthy zingers and salty epigrams. But like Caton-Jones, Sharp is not above some Highland romanticism. In Rob and Mary, he’s idealised the married couple out of all proportion. “Do you know how fine you are to me, Mary MacGregor?” Rob says to his wife at several points throughout the film. Given that he jumps her bones every chance he gets, we think she knows.

Director: Lars von Trier

Romance set against harsh Scottish vistas doesn’t always have a happy ending, as is evident in Lars von Trier’s breakthrough masterpiece, which still feels bracingly bleak nearly three decades on. The film follows Emily Watson’s Bess, a childlike young woman from an ascetic Highland village dominated by Calvinist doctrine. She believes in love as deeply as she believes in God Almighty, whom she communicates with regularly in two-way conversations she conducts with herself. When she marries oil rig worker Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), she’s found a good match. He’s rakish and likes a drink, but he also seems to love her dearly. But when Bess prays for Jan to return to her from the rigs, he does so on a stretcher after an accident at work. Bess finds herself making a perverse pact with her infirm husband, who persuades her to sleep with men and report back on her encounters, with Bess convinced these promiscuous acts will somehow revive Jan’s health.

Von Trier’s unorthodox antics have gained him a reputation as a provocateur over the years, but there’s an earnestness to Breaking the Waves’ spiritual wrestling with religion and love that makes it easier to embrace than such harrowing fairytales centred on female suffering as Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Dogville (2003).

Director: David Mackenzie

David Mackenzie’s homegrown films (Young Adam, Hallam Foe, Asylum) tend to be concerned with the darker sides of love and sex, but the Scottish director showed his romantic side here, albeit set against a backdrop of apocalypse. Ewan McGregor and Eva Green bring charisma and heat to their roles as two people finding each other as the world falls apart. He is a happy-go-lucky Glasgow chef with commitment issues; she is a scientist studying a strange new epidemic sweeping the world and robbing people of their senses.

The film paints a bleak picture of humanity’s future, but it’s not necessarily a depressing one. As the epidemic takes hold and characters’ senses disappear one by one, humankind is quick to adapt. When taste disappears, food becomes spicier and more textural; when hearing goes, music gets more bassy. Mackenzie seems to be urging us to appreciate what we have while we have it; and when all your senses go, let’s hope you’ve found someone to hold onto in the darkness.

Directors: Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski and Tom Tykwer

Romance is one of the many threads running through David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The epic novel features six stories spanning from the mid-19th century to a post-apocalyptic society centuries in the future. The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer have divvied up directing duties, with Tykwer taking on the most heartbreaking tale: that of composer Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) and his ill-fated stint as an amanuensis to a once great composer who’s dying of syphilis (Jim Broadbent).

In the book, Frobisher’s chapters take place in Belgium in the 1930s, but Tykwer changed the setting to Edinburgh and makes expressive use of locations around the Scottish capital. One scene that reduces this writer to tears each time takes place atop the Walter Scott monument. Frobisher has climbed its steps to glimpse one last sunrise before he kills himself, but as he looks out across the Edinburgh skyline he sees his lover, Rufus Sixsmith (James D’Arcy), on the opposite side of the structure. “I didn’t think the view could be any more perfect,” muses Frobisher, “until I saw that beat-up trilby. Honestly, Sixsmith, as ridiculous as that thing makes you look, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful.” It’s the most intoxicating moment in a film made up of many intoxicating moments.

Director: Terence Davies

The late Terence Davies made romantic films, but only of the most tragic variety (The Deep Blue Sea, The House of Mirth). His long-in-the-works adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is also part of this lineage. The film’s heroine, Chris Guthrie, has a brutal upbringing – even by Terence Davies film standards. Her hardened father, played with typical psychotic intensity by Peter Mullan, is a sadist who drives her mother to an early grave and makes a game of beating her older brother so that he flies the nest. She does find true love for a time, with a local farmboy, although that falls to pieces too when he comes back from the First World War a changed man.

“There are lovely things in the world, lovely things that do not endure. And are the lovelier for that,” Chris says in the film, as if to justify why happiness is so fleeting. But Chris does have one love that endures: her love for the land. This might explain why Sunset Song feels most alive when Chris is outdoors in real locations, lying in a rustling wheat field or standing against the impossibly big sky over Aberdeenshire.

Director: Harry Wootliff

This darkly romantic Glasgow-set drama fills your heart to bursting then quietly breaks it. It follows the relationship that quickly forms between Jake (Josh O’Connor), a sweet DJ-cum-PhD student in his mid-twenties, and Elana (Laia Costa), an arts administrator about a decade older and certainly a decade wiser. They get together for an electric night of passion after sharing a taxi home on New Year’s Eve, but this one-night-stand soon morphs into something more serious, with Jake moving in almost immediately and quickly proposing they start a family. But real life soon gets in the way of the couple’s whirlwind romance.

Only You is a film that feels intensely in the moment. Even when the script can be guilty of making the characters behave in unusual ways, the fine-grain performances and character details from O’Connell and Costa ring true. The magic trick to Harry Wootiff’s intimate filmmaking is that it feels like we’re watching friends fall in and out of love, not movie stars.