Local Hero is full of them, but there are a few that are particular favorites. Like a lot of the best throwaway lines, they require a lot of context, and don’t seem particularly funny when described:
There’s a scene where many of the men of the small Scottish fishing town are standing around talking with Mac, the American oilman who’s come to buy the whole town, about how everyone in town has more than one job, and they all sort of pitch in together to do whatever needs doing. Throughout, one of the men is pushing a pram back and forth with a baby in it; the same baby and pram have been seen several times earlier in the movie, always with someone else pushing it. Finally, at the end of the scene, Mac says “Whose baby?”, which is met with an embarassed silence as the men glance briefly at each other, then a cut to the next scene.
Another character that’s seen several times is a teenaged girl in a short skirt, tights, a black leather jacket, spiked hair, with her face painted in white with a star or lightning bolt or something on it – London punk, 1977, except in rural Scotland nearly a decade later; to all appearances, there are only one or two other teenagers in the whole town. This girl is seen several times in the movie awkwardly pursuing and failing to catch Danny, the eager young Scottish employee of the oil company who’s been sent along with Mac – a thoroughly unremarkable young man, except for his height and awkwardness. After the ceilidh scenes, there’s a quick scene of the girl and the drummer from the band that played at the ceilidh, where he says something like “I saw you chasing him; what do you see in him anyway?” Her reply is “He’s different”.
It transpires that there’s a snag in the plan to buy the whole town, in the that the beach where the oil company plans to put a refinery is actually owned by the old beachcomber who lives on it, and he doesn’t want to move. Mac tries unsuccessfully to negotiate with Old Ben, who at one point offers to sell the beach to Mac for “a pound note for every grain” in the handful of sand he’s holding. Mac refuses, and Ben tells him he could have had quite a bargain, since he can’t hold much over a few thousand grains of sand in his hand at a time. Later, when Mac’s boss, the head of the oil company (Burt Lancaster), flies in by helicopter to meet and negotiate with Ben himself, Mac tries to brief him: “If he offers you anything to do with sand, sir, take it” “What?” “Yes, sir. Anything up to a hatful”.