National Velvet - 1944 125 minutes. Directed by Clarence Brown and starring Mickey Rooney, Donald Crisp and Elizabeth Taylor, the story is set in England. A kid who is crazy about horses and an embittered former jockey buy an unmanageable brute of a horse and enter him in the Grand National Sweepstakes. The race scene is accompanied by the constant roar of a very loud, but unseen, pipe band playing Piobaireachd of Donald Dubh at a break neck speed.
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The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey - 1988 92 minutes -This is a time-travel adventure which was the first major joint production of Australia and New Zealand. It's tells a story of people fleeing the black death in 14th-century Cumbria, England. In their pilgrimage, they travel through the earth and somehow emerge in modern-day Wellington, New Zealand, where they encounter references to the modern plague of AIDS.
One of the characters is an oafish fellow named Ulf who carries a set of pipes with him, but is never seen playing them. The pipes, seem fairly characteristic of 14th-century English pipes with their bell-like endings on chanter (the large pipe) and drones (the two smaller pipes to the left in the image--- the other pipe is apparently the blow stock). Yet, none of the historical illustrations I have seen from the era reveal any pipes with more than a single drone. The background music makes extensive use of piping (Paul Koerbin on a Spanish gaita and a Macedonian gaïda and Bill O'Toole on a gaïda) as well as other mediaeval instruments such as the shawm, crumhorn, psaltery and oud. The pipes produced a fairly gentle sound (as distinct from the strident sound of the great highland bagpipes), which probably does a good job of capturing the conjectured sound of the 14th-century English pipes.
Negotiator - 1998 or 1999 - Starring Samuel L. Jackson, the movie features the Pipes & Drums of the Emerald Society - Chicago Police Department performing at a funeral. Inconguously, the sound that emerges from this band is the Uilleann pipes not the great highland bagpipes. Maybe the whole band was playing some of the electronic bagpipes which have the option of the sound of small pipes; maybe the producer was incompetent --- you get to chose the more likely scenario.
1969 - 1999 - Winona Ryder & Kiefer Sutherland star.The pipes are heard, but not sean during the funeral of a brother who was killed in Vietnam.
Northern Exposure- (TV Season 3, Episode 19) - The final scene has Maurice Minnifield playing the bagpipes to the setting Sun from the roof of his house. The pipes belong to his Uncle, a member of the Blackwatch regiment, so one assumes that the skills he exhibits on this single foray into piping were acquired genetically. Clearly the pipes are maintained magically also: Maurice notes, "I found these pipes in the attic," where they had rested for years, and then proceeds to supposedly play them without blowing into the bag or moving his fingers. As if this combination of events were not ludicrous enough, the sound which emerges is that of an ensemble (The Chieftains: A Chiefain's Celebration) playing The Coulin Medley. Sigh, I can just hear the producer saying, "so what, the audience is stupid."
Northern Lights - 1978 Sean Folsom played bagpipes in this film which won "Best New Film" at Cannes Film Festival. He played both the Northumbrian Small Pipes and Uilleann Pipes. His wife, Sharon Folsom, played an Irish harp, Clarsach, of the O'Fogerty style made by Jay Witcher.
Northern Pursuit - 1943 Across the frozen waste of Canada, a Mountie relentlessly hunts down a Nazi pilot. Directed by Raoul Walsh, featuring Errol Flynn, Julie Bishop, Helmut Dantine, John Ridgely, Gene Lockhart and Tom Tully. Errol Flynn is a Royal Canadian Mountie during WW II who poses as a collaborator who cooperates with Nazi troops who landed in the northland. Several times during the movie the cranky old Scotsman John Ridgely (a barber) seems to plays the pipes. However, he doesn't really play; he just cradles the pipes in his arms and doesn't even bother to move his fingers.
NYPD Blue (TV) - an early episode (4-7?) features a piper in the police band. The sound track has the ground of a piobaireachd. The piper on the screen manages to keep the bag inflated while chatting away for 2-3 minutes with a detective. As he swings around to begin to play the piobaireachd, the viewer can plainly see why - all three drones have corks sticking out of them!!! Presumably, the chanter has also been blocked. The sound track was good though.
The piper in the story line apparently works in the Internal Affairs section, the only place in the police organization where he can work now, having lost the respect and trust of his fellow officers when he ratted on a colleague at some point in the past. The scene shows him piping in a cemetery, where he apparently likes to go to play on his own, since the police bagpipe band won't let him join. He suggested to the detective with whom he is conversing in the scene that they meet in the cemetery during one of his practices, as it is a fairly out-of-the-way location where it is unlikely that they will be observed in conversation by other officers, as the detective may not want others to think that he's trying to rat on someone.
The Piobaireachd played at the end just before the closing credits is the first three measures of The Little Spree. Although it was played a little slower than usual, the effect of a little extra reverb and speed of the playing make for a real tear jerker, if only for ten seconds of so.