Audience with movie royalty

A REGAL night at Bo’ness Silent Film Festival and a chance to see Ernst Lubitsch’s 1927 classic The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg. It’s a lush romance about a lonely German prince looking for companionship and beer at university, who ends up with both, thanks to a Bavarian barmaid.

Presenter, pianist and film fan Neil Brand provided splendid musical accompaniment to a movie that should be essential viewing for any royals contemplating marriage to a commoner in the next couple of months.

Unfortunately, Prince Harry couldn’t make it, but it was nice to see Scotland’s movie prince Bill Forsyth in the audience.

I’m very much looking forward to his stage version of Local Hero at the Edinburgh Lyceum next year because, like Lubitsch, Forsyth makes dark charmers, with heroes who rarely end up with the romances you might expect.

Hollywood never really understood Bill – and vice versa.

One of his last films, Being Human, particularly perplexed them; a movie that took Robin Williams at the peak of his outrageous comic powers, and put him in a wry, quiet comedy.

Unnerved, the studio insisted on running a test screening.

Unfortunately, next door Steven Spielberg was testing his new film Jurassic Park, so the sound of thunderous dinosaurs pursuing screaming human beings bled through the cinema walls.

At the end, when the Being Human audience was asked what they would have liked from the film, they wrote ‘what Screen Two had’.