Vic Mathews (Tom Conti) is a remedial teacher at the Blessed Edith Semple School in Glasgow. Edith was beatified due to one authenticated miracle, but it will need two more for her to become a saint. Vic is interested in new teacher Ruth Chancellor (Helen Mirren) but she’s “not up for involvement”. Then strange things happen. Pupil Stevie Deans (Ewen Bremner), whom Vic is trying to keep from being sent to a special school, makes a marked improvement. A paralysed girl begins to walk again. Vic’s record player begins to play without being plugged in. Vic, being a rationalist, believes that there are explanations for these supposed miracles, and the church is keen to debunk them. But after Vic faints at a bus stop, a head x-ray reveals an inoperable brain tumour, though the doctors decide it’s best not to tell him about it. Five weeks later, another x-ray shows no sign of the tumour...

Set and filmed in Glasgow, Heavenly Pursuits is an example of the Scottish cinema that sprung up as a result of Bill Forsyth’s success. Needless to say, Forsyth, particularly with Gregory’s Girl (1980) and Local Hero (1983) but to a lesser extent with That Sinking Feeling (1979) and Comfort and Joy (1984), cast a long shadow. In his wake came other films aiming to capture some of the mixture of whimsy and melancholy that Forsyth had done so well. There was The Girl in the Picture (1985), written and directed by Glasgow-based American Cary Parker and starring Gregory himself, John Gordon-Sinclair. Also rather less family-friendly than Forsyth’s films due to its 15 certificate (on grounds of language and some sexual references) is the present film, Heavenly Pursuits, written and directed by Charles Gormley. It’s a pleasantly amusing film that stands up well enough after nearly forty years (and thirty-seven after I saw it in 1987), though hardly groundbreaking. It was released in the USA as The Gospel According to Vic.

The religious basis of the film is somewhat misleading, and Gormley’s script is careful to remain ambiguous as to whether actual miracles have taken place. (By contrast, see the very different film from 1994, Priest, written and directed by Jimmy McGovern and directed by Antonia Bird – one particular plot development there implies divine intervention.) However, at heart it’s a romantic comedy and as ever we know early on who are going to be together at the end and it’s more about the obstacles in the way that are to be overcome. That finale is straight out of the romantic-comedy book of tropes.

Rutherglen-born Charles Gormley was an associate of Forsyth’s, founding Tree Films with him in 1970 to make industrial documentaries. One cinema-related film he made was The Odd Man (1978), which profiled three Scottish screenwriters: Edward Boyd, Gordon Williams and Alan Sharp. He co-wrote the Children’s Film Foundation film The Big Catch, which I reviewed here as part of Children’s Film Foundation Bumper Box Vol. 4. In the early 1970s, he also wrote some sex comedies made in the Netherlands, such as Frank and Eva, the debut of future Emmanuelle Sylvia Kristel. He also had a few acting roles. Gormley made his feature directing debut with Living Apart Together (1982), an early Channel Four production which bypassed a cinema release in favour of the small screen (where I saw it). Starring singer B.A. Robertson (who had had a string of hit singles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, beginning with “Bang Bang”) as a singer-songwriter and Barbara Kellerman as his wife, plus the debut of one Peter Capaldi, it remained unseen for quite a while afterwards and was at one point apparently considered lost, before a DVD release in 2013. Heavenly Pursuits had a cinema release in 1987 and was Gormley’s only film to achieve this. B.A. Robertson was again on board, this time not in front of the camera but writing the music score. Gormley continued directing for television, from other people’s scripts, his last work in that capacity being a 1993 Screen One, Down Among the Big Boys, written by fellow Scot Peter McDougall. He died in 2005 at the age of sixty-seven.

Heavenly Pursuits looks good, due to the work of Gregory’s Girl cinematographer Michael Coulter, who as it happened was Gormley’s brother-in-law. Conti and Mirren have chemistry and the film is carried a long way on their charm. Further down the cast is fourteen-year-old Ewen Bremner in his screen debut. He would later be a part of a very different Scottish film, Trainspotting. Appearing uncredited on a television set as himself discussing the “miracle cure” case is Gordon Jackson.

Times change and the post-Forsyth strain of Scottish comedy has gone away. The man himself moved to the USA with middling results and has not directed since Gregory’s 2 Girls in 1999. Given that he is now seventy-seven, he may not make another film. That said, the films are available and Heavenly Pursuits remains an attractive film that may well receive more attention due to this Blu-ray release.

Heavenly Pursuits is released by the BFI on a disc encoded for Region B only. The film had a 15 certificate on release and retains that on disc. The Mirocle, then and now, is rated U, and the other short films are documentaries exempted from BBFC classification.

Shot in 35mm colour, Heavenly Pursuits is transferred to Blu-ray in a ratio of 1.78:1. That (or rather 16:9) isn’t actually an aspect ratio for 35mm projection, so the transfer is either slightly cropped from 1.75:1 or opened up slightly from 1.85:1, but it doesn’t look untoward either way. The transfer, from Channel Four’s HD master, is colourful with strong blacks and natural, filmlike grain.

The soundtrack is the original mono, rendered as LPCM 2.0. By 1986, when this film was made, and 1987, when it was released, Dolby Stereo and its low-budget alternative Ultra Stereo had become all but ubiquitous. Films released in mono were becoming rare, but this was one of them. (Another was Hidden City, also a Film Four production shot the same year as Heavenly Pursuits.) There’s not much to say here: it’s clear and dialogue, sound effects and music are well balanced.. English subtitles for the hard-of-hearing are available for the feature only, though I don’t think most people will find the Scottish accents too trying.

A Magic Touch (20:12)
A new interview with Tom Conti, in which he talks to camera (and interviewer Vic Pratt, who prompts him with some memory lapses) about the making of Heavenly Pursuits, or Just Another Miracle which he tells us was the working title. There’s something of a spoiler in the clip used at the start. He talks warmly about “Charlie” Gormley but does say that he felt anyone could have played the role – as a Scot of Italian ancestry, he has played several Jews in his time, most recently Albert Einstein in Oppenheimer, and he says you wouldn’t have needed to know much about Catholicism for Heavenly Pursuits, though he had been to a Catholic school. He talks about taking Helen Mirren to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Glasgow where he used to play guitar and sing and tells an anecdote at his own expense about men and women’s differing powers of observation. Conti feels that Charles Gormley, unlike Bill Forsyth, wasn’t able to leave Scotland – and you would have had to for a long-term career in the film industry, then and now largely based in London. He also talks about how expectations of films have changed over the years – as witness his showing his grandson Butch and Sundance: The Early Years (1979) and his grandson finding it too slow. He doesn’t know what he’ll think of Heavenly Pursuits when he sees it again, though given a complimentary copy of this Blu-ray he might well have done by the time you read this.

The Mirocle (13:04)
This title needs a [sic]. A short and rather obscure animation made in 1976 for the BFI Production Board and St Martin’s School of Art, shot and released in 16mm and influenced by the work of Paul Klee. The O in the title takes the form of a mirror, which leads a man to look within himself.

The Science of Miracles (17:39)
A feature of BFI disc releases are films from the archive tangential to one or other of the main feature’s themes. This time, they are more tangential than usual, as they deal not with a spiritual miracle but one of the scientific kind, namely the X-ray. You wonder if there are many films dealing with miracles of the spiritual kind in the archive. The four silent films were all shot at sixteen frames per second and are rendered at Blu-ray speed by repeating every third frame. There is a Play All option.

The X Rays (0:44)
1897 was two years after Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of x-rays and already the scientific breakthrough was being played for laughs. This skit, made by Hove-based G.A. Smith comprises three shots, all from the same angle, separated by cuts. Two young lovers sit on a bench and – shazam! – X-rays reduce them to clothed skeletons. Fortunately this is reversed.

X-Ray Images (0:30)
On to 1910, and an opening caption tells us we are about to see photographs taken in a 300th of a second, so we can see the beating of the heart, the digestive system in action and the movement of the joints.

The Miracle of X-Rays! (1:21)
A Topical Budget item from 1928, in which” the latest 100,000-volt wonder shows how man is constructed”. So, after a couple of shots of x-ray tubes, a man’s hand is placed in front of a camera and we see the skeletal result. The same with a woman’s bare elbow, a man’s trouser-clad knee and shoe-clad foot.

Scientific Tit-Bits (5:06)
Back to 1917 and a somewhat decayed miscellany of short items. So we see sugar boiling, soundwave patterns being made in sand and yet more x-rays. Also Percy Smith, himself the subject of a previous BFI disc (Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith, released 2017), examines a tear drop under a microscope. Other than the intertitles, this film is tinted yellow or pale blue.

Mass Radiography (9:56)
The only sound film in this collection, this item from 1943 (also known simply as X-Ray) was sponsored by the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis. TB had caused 20,000 deaths in the year this film was made, and it’s intended to encourage people to be screened. So it’s off with shirts and (discreetly) blouses and in front of the miracle rays, with one young woman signing her topless x-ray photograph for her boyfriend.

Trailer (1:41)
A fair attempt at selling this not-especially family-friendly film in reasonably family-friendly terms. So we do get some of the subplot about a boy masturbating in class but the trailer censors one word from Helen Mirren (begins with W, rhymes with banker).

Booklet
The BFI’s booklet, available with the first pressing of this release, runs to twenty-four pages. First up, with a spoiler warning, is Philip Kemp with “The Age of Miracles Not Yet Past?”. This begins with Charles Gormley’s early life and career, including the documentaries and the Dutch softcore. Living Apart Together came in under budget at £350,000 while Heavenly Pursuits, with two bigger-name stars, cost £1.2 million. It wasn’t a success in Britain, but did better in the USA with a new title and some of the Scottish accents redubbed. Kemp’s article goes on to discuss Gormley’s later career as a lecturer and his directing work on television.

After two pages of cast and crew credits for Heavenly Pursuits, Ellen Cheshire provides biographies of Helen Mirren and Tom Conti and there are notes on and credits for the special features.

Heavenly Pursuits won’t change your life, miraculously or otherwise, but nearly forty years later it remains an engaging film which this BFI Blu-ray should help rescue from obscurity. As usual, it’s well presented with some interesting special features.