Among the happiest surprises of my years as a movie critic was the world premiere of That Sinking Feeling, the unknown 33-year-old Glaswegian Bill Forsyth's first movie at the Edinburgh film festival, knowing only that the whole £5,000 budget (which made into the Guinness Book of Records) had been raised in Scotland.

Writing in the Observer (2 September 1979), I noted that it "brings back happy memories of Ealing in its heyday and Ealing's resident Scot, Alexander Mackendrick. A delightful comedy, it does for present-day Glasgow what Hue and Cry did for postwar London – it gives a gang of lively, unemployed working-class teenagers the freedom of the city. This time, however, they're the crooks, and the objective of their elaborate heist is a warehouse full of stainless steel sinks." I noted Forsyth's pawky humour and the skilful way he played off the heavy Victorian legacy of Glasgow (the civil buildings and statuary) against its decaying tenements and the new housing projects. My opinion was confirmed when nearly two years later the film reached London in company with Forsyth's equally charming second movie, Gregory's Girl, played by much the same cast but enacted in the more salubrious setting of a comprehensive school in Cumbernauld new town.

With these two films a Scottish cinema was being created and a major new talent had arrived that was to fulfil itself in Local Hero and the undervalued film version of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Sadly, Forsyth ran into production problems in 1993 with Being Human, and since then has only directed the disappointing Gregory's Two Girls (1999).

But we should be grateful for what this Capra of the Clyde has given us with this admirable dual format version of That Sinking Feeling, an addition to the BFI Flipside label celebrating offbeat British films. It restores the original Glaswegian dialogue track, contains four shorts with which Forsyth was associated, and has an informative, eloquent and highly amusing commentary by Forsyth and my Observer successor Mark Kermode. The gifted Glasgow-born cinematographer Michael Coulter, who made his debut on That Sinking Feeling, was to work on most of Forsyth's subsequent films as well as shooting Four Weddings and a Funeral, Sense and Sensibility and The Long Day Closes.