Director: Delbert Mann
Cast: Michael Caine, Lawrence Douglas, Trevor Howard

               I knew that Kidnapped was going to be a dud.
                                                                                     
                                                                                       - Michael Caine

Although I have never been involved in the Hollywood movie industry, I all the same understand why many Hollywood figures want to adapt fiction novels into movies. There are some great stories out there, a lot that are already surrounded by publicity that the Hollywood studios could exploit. But there's often a problem of dealing with the authors of these novels. There is the case of murder mystery novelist Agatha Christie. When her book Murder On The Orient Express was first published in 1934, for the next few decades various movie producers and studios approached Christie with the intent of getting the big screen rights. But Christie kept refusing, because she felt that with the Production Code in full swing, a movie version would have to have its ending changed. (When the Production Code was dropped, a movie adaptation finally was made in the 1970s.) But all that was nowhere near a headache as some authors have generated for Hollywood studios and filmmakers. After director Stanley Kubrick made a filmed adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Shining, King made a number of public blasts against the movie, complaining that Kubrick screwed things up by making the character Jack Nicholson played clearly insane from the start instead of slowly becoming insane like in the novel, blasts that irked Kubrick greatly. When Rambo: Last Blood was released to theaters, David Morrell, the author who originally conceived the character of Rambo, went on social media to blast pretty much everything about the movie. Then there is the case of P. L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins book series. As illustrated in the movie Saving Mr. Banks, during negotiations with the Disney studio regarding a filmed adaption, Travers for a long time was a major pain in the butt to Walt Disney and the other people working on the project, slowing things down with her great demands, and expressing her deep dissatisfaction with the movie once it was made and released.

No doubt about it, dealing with an author about movie adaptations can often be taxing and vexing. One solution that some Hollywood studios have tried is to get the author directly involved in the production, though that hasn't always helped, such as when Stephen King wrote and directed Maximum Overdrive, which he later proclaimed to be a bad movie. But often it seems to be a lot easier for Hollywood to adapt a novel in a way they want to when the author has long been dead. Though this didn't stop the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate from demanding that the makers of the 1981 Bo Derek movie Tarzan The Ape Man from toning down the nudity and sexual elements that the production originally intended to have. So when it comes to making a filmed adaptation of a novel without raising the ire of an author or his heirs, the best solution seems to be filming a novel that is in the public domain. At first that seems like a great idea, but even if you go down that route, you are bound to come up with a new set of problems. The most obvious problem is that if the novel is in the public domain, likely the story of the novel is set many decades (or centuries) in the past. That would mean that unless you can cleverly update the story into modern times, you would have to make a movie that is a period piece. And as you probably know, making a movie in the past means that it would be a lot harder to wrangle up or make from scratch period props, costumes, and sets. There is also the problem that in this day and age of ours, audiences are less inclined to go and see a movie that is set in the past - they prefer for the most part to see motion picture stories that are set in modern times and are more relatable.

There are additional problems, like the fact that more people today than ever are less adventurous when it comes to reading, and for a large part are ignorant of many classic public domain pieces of literature. I'm sure if you asked almost all people today about Silas Marner, they would just look at you in a confused manner. I guess one solution could be to look for literature where the public at large has at least heard of the titles of the book, such as Frankenstein or Dracula. That probably was one reason why producers decided to gamble on making Kidnapped, an adaptation of the classic children's novel written by Robert Louis Stevenson. Also, they managed to wrangle up a major actor - Michael Caine - to appear in the movie, which probably to them made it more marketable. But as it turned out, the movie did mediocre business in theaters, and afterwards was hard to see until its release on DVD and Blu-ray a few years ago. That made it an unknown movie in my eyes, and I decided to give it a look. While Caine is top-billed, the central character of the movie is played by Lawrence Douglas. Douglas' character, a youth by the name of David Balfour, is a teenager in Scotland in the mid 1700s whose parents are dead. He heads to the home where his uncle Ebenezer (Donald Pleasence, Watch Out, We're Mad) is residing, because the home and other parts of his estate were his late father's property. Ebenezer wants to keep everything for himself, so he eventually arranged for David to be kidnapped by the captain and crew of a pirate ship headed to distant lands. While prisoner on the pirate ship, David meets fellow prisoner Alan Breck (Michael Caine, Bullseye!), and the two eventually make and execute a plan to escape from the pirates. What follows are the further adventures of the two as they fight and dodge the British forces while the Jacobite Rebellion is still aflame, and deal with other assorted problems.

Trevor Howard (The Offence), if you are wondering, plays the Lord Advocate of Scotland during all this, and Vivien Heilbron plays the key role of Catriona, who becomes the love interest of David. Howard, if you are wondering, gives the best performance in Kidnapped, managing to exude command and charisma without breaking into a sweat. At (a distant) second place is Pleasence, who doesn't appear that much in the movie, but all the same manages to raise a little interest with his trademark creepiness he gave in some other movies like Will Penny. As for third place, well... I can't really award any of the other actors in the movie that prize, because quite frankly those remaining actors simply aren't that good. That even includes Michael Caine - throughout the movie he seems to be absolutely bored and seemingly doing what he was told to do by director Delbert Mann (Marty) against his will. Caine's autobiography revealed at the time he wasn't in great physical shape or health, which may have contributed to his lacklustre performance. But I think that Caine saw that his character wasn't written to be particularly interesting. When he's introduced, we learn that his character is wanted, but it's not made totally clear why. We don't learn all that much else of his past, nor much beyond his intended goal of reaching France. Worst of all, Caine's character doesn't seem to have even a trace of a sense of humor, which if handled right could have added some desperately needed energy. Faced with the lack of enthusiasm from Caine and the screenplay, it's no wonder that actor Lawrence Douglas can't seem to do anything significant as well. With little revealed about his character's past or beliefs, Douglas for almost all of his scenes shuffles slowly forward with little emotion or anything else that might let the audience care or be interested in him. Not surprisingly, when Caine and Douglas are paired up in a scene, they can't seem to make that many sparks, even though you'd think that a youth and a man in his late 30s would find more occasions to clash than what actually unfolds in this movie.

The same thing basically happens when Douglas is paired with Pleasence, though to be fair to both actors, they hardly get any time together. In fact, the entire first third (maybe a little more) of the movie feels almost like a Cliff Notes' telling of the Stevenson story. After the character of David spends the first night in his uncle's home, seconds later a pirate suddenly appears and bashes David in the head. Then suddenly, David wakes up in the pirate's ship in mid voyage. When Alan enters the story a heartbeat later, he is barely introduced before he and David suddenly decide to fight the pirates. Then suddenly, the ship hits a rock, and then suddenly David and Alan are washed up on shore.... you get the picture. Eventually the movie does stop running at a great speed, but it soon goes too far in the other direction, so that it becomes clear that not much is happening at all. Oh, there are some motivations and ambitions here and there, but they are treated so lightly and superficially that none of them particularly stand out. There are several sequences that are clearly just there for padding out the running time, such as the scene where David gets into a sword duel with a member of the British forces. Some other sequences don't even get that far as that sequence does when it comes to resolving a particular issue in one form or another. As a result, it often appears that all the characters are meandering and not focused with great strength on their goals and rivalry. In fact, the movie is so unwilling to commit to something that the pretty abrupt ending seemed quite unfinished to me, leaving a few plot details (minor, but still there) dangling in front of us, unresolved. It's extremely unsatisfying.

Kidnapped is so dull with its weak characters, somnambulistic performances, and unfocused storytelling that it didn't take me long for me to try and find anything about the movie that might provide entertainment. One way was wondering why the movie was rated "G" at the time; with its warfare violence as well as isolated moments of brutality (including two moments where people are shot in the face), it would at least get a "PG" rating today. Though as I indicated before, the movie as a whole is pretty dull stuff, so it's not like the average modern child would be all that shaken when the movie has a brief darker moment. Some kids might be interested on occasion to see some fairly impressive shots of the Scottish countryside, but note that I said "on occasion"; most of the location shooting looks pretty generic, if you ask me. My research of the movie uncovered that it was a troubled production with money running low eventually, so that might have scaled back efforts to make the movie more visually impressive, not just with the outdoor sequences. The sets built to represent the interiors of buildings, caves, and boats only look okay at their best... which isn't that often, actually. There's usually something about these sets - their construction, their lighting, or something else that doesn't make it feel that we the viewers are in the middle of the scruffy and unpolished Scotland of the 18th century with these characters. Getting back to finding interesting things about Kidnapped to ponder, the only other thing I can think of for viewers to do to pass the tedium is to wonder why American-International Pictures - known primarily for wild drive-in movie exercises - picked this up for a stateside release. Well, there's actually one other thing about the movie to think about, than being that its title is very apt. If you subject your child to this movie, he or she will fall asleep quickly, and no doubt you will too.

(Posted October 30, 2024)