10 great films about kidnapping

The movies have lately been big on kidnapping. Sean Penn’s steroidal white supremacist abducted a teenage activist he suspected of being his daughter in One Battle After Another; a conspiracy-fried Jesse Plemons kidnapped the hard-hearted CEO of a pharmaceutical company whom he believed was really a malevolent extraterrestrial in Bugonia; and a group of dissidents tortured by the Iranian regime debated whether a man they’d taken prisoner was one of their former tormentors in It Was Just an Accident.

This week sees the UK release of another film revolving around a kidnap: Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, the based-on-truth story of a disgruntled Indiana businessman (Bill Skarsgård) who kidnaps and holds hostage the mortgage broker (Dacre Montgomery) he believes swindled him out of profit on a land deal.

The powerless facing off against the powerful; individuals taking the law into their own hands inside a system they don’t trust; characters experiencing uncertainty in their own reality. Certainly these films show that a kidnapping plot can offer a runway on to commentary about contemporary social and political concerns.

This recent crop of films about kidnapping, though, also offers a reminder of the timeless dramatic potency of a kidnap plot, with its characters tested to their extremes in what’s often a compressed timeframe – an inherently thrilling scenario, and one that filmmakers have exploited since the silent days of dastardly villains absconding with damsels and tying them to railway tracks.

Director: John Ford

It’s a kidnapping that sets the heroes on their journey in John Ford’s masterpiece, a five-year tramp across terrain that both romanticises to its ideal the Fordian vision of the West – the natural visual majesty of the director’s beloved Monument Valley exploited to its fullest – and complicates it. One of The Searchers’ gunslinging white hats, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), is of part Cherokee heritage, while the other, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), is a bitter, racist former Confederate soldier whose relentless hunt for the Comanche who took his niece, Debbie, is fuelled as much by his hatred for indigenous Americans as it is by any compassion for the girl.

Meanwhile, during her half-decade being raised among the Comanche, Debbie comes to live as them and consider the people her own. This is Ford and Wayne challenging a myth of the Old West that they together and apart helped to create, of gallant white settlers and ‘savage’ Indians. The Searchers doesn’t take such a binary view, and it’s no Native but instead Wayne’s white ‘saviour’ who might ultimately pose the gravest threat to Debbie.

Director: Akira Kurosawa

This is Akira Kurosawa in Hitchcock mode. In the first half, it’s an anxious morality play set almost entirely inside the lounge of a plush hilltop house, where corporate alpha dog Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) must decide between paying the ransom to free his chauffeur’s kidnapped son or using the money to finalise a takeover of his embattled company. Then, in the second half, it’s a procedural set out on the streets of Yokohama, in which a police investigation led by Tatsuya Nakadai’s investigator gradually closes in on the kidnapper.

In the guise of a suspense thriller, High and Low is a Trojan horse for commentary on contemporary Japan, where cutthroat capitalism wrestles with traditional notions of honour. A glorious house like Gondo’s might overlook a city in which others struggle in poverty, the desperation down below eventually driving one disturbed individual to seek retribution.

Director: Bryan Forbes

Kidnapping in the cinema rarely gets more ill-thought-out than clairvoyant Myra Savage’s (Kim Stanley) ‘borrowing’ of a schoolgirl in Seance on a Wet Afternoon. With timid husband Billy (Richard Attenborough) assisting with the grunt work, Myra holds Amanda (Judith Donner), the daughter of a prominent London businessman, expecting that fame and riches will follow from her staging a séance to ‘find’ the girl – a plan that’s as vague as it is surely doomed.

Writer-director Byan Forbes shows great compassion, with Myra and Billy not evil but rather, together, dangerously dysfunctional – her disturbed both by her disordered upbringing and a recent trauma, and him eager to please Myra following a shared loss. Attenborough has captivatingly nervy presence as a man whose devotion to his wife has twisted into something unhinged, though the picture is really a showcase for Kim Stanley, the ‘female Brando’, in one of her rare big-screen appearances. She paints a delicate portrait of egotism, frailty, desperation and mental illness all uncomfortably alive in one person.

Director: Costa-Gavras

State of Siege begins with the discovery of the body of Yves Montand’s American USAID official, found shot execution-style in a car in a Uruguay that’s on its way to becoming a dictatorship. It’s misdirection for Costa-Gavras fans used to seeing Montand play upstanding figures typically brutalised by authoritarian regimes, for the director. State of Siege flashes back to the kidnapping of Montand’s Philip Michael Santore by leftist guerrillas, who uncover that Santore is not a bureaucrat but an instrument of state terror. He’s in Uruguay to teach police torture techniques, as he did previously to repressive regimes in Brazil and the Dominican Republic.

Unlike Costa-Gavras’s best known political thrillers Z (1969) and Missing (1982), State of Siege provides no clear moral compass or righteous characters to root for; the film’s blandly murderous Uruguayan authorities freely torture and kill, but the guerrillas who abduct Santore aren’t above carrying out summary executions either. Set during the South American winter, State of Siege depicts a cold moral universe, a Latin America where shady characters like Santore are petrifying the soul of the region to fight the Cold War.

Director: Mario Bava

In the aftermath of a robbery that leaves several bystanders and one of their accomplices dead, three criminals take a woman hostage and commandeer a car being driven by a man on his way to the hospital with his young son. As they drive out of the city and into the Italian countryside towards a hideout, the sadistic, sociopathic thieves can’t resist indulging in a spot of torment of their captive fellow passengers.

From its first moments through to its deliciously cruel ending, Mario Bava’s Rabid Dogs has the pungent air of the grindhouse, as though the very print had been marinated in the blood and sweat of its noxious characters. Bava never allows his audience any respite; largely he keeps Rabid Dogs to the interior of the getaway car, with the boiling sun bearing down on a combustible set of villains who reveal ever greater depths to their depravity as the film rolls on. A mean midnight movie, brutal and lean.

Director: Martin Scorsese

In The King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese frames a celebrity-obsessed aspiring comedian’s kidnapping of his favourite late-night host as cringe comedy. Rupert Pupkin, played by a mustachioed Robert De Niro as a hilariously dorky cousin of Travis Bickle, both loves and hates Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), the Johnny Carson-like TV personality who Pupkin seeks to use as his shortcut to the top.

When Jerry rejects Rupert’s deluded attempts to befriend him, Rupert and fellow Jerry superfan Masha (Sandra Bernhard) abduct Jerry and hold him hostage, until producers of The Jerry Langford Show agree to put Rupert on the air to perform a comedy set. What follows is the greatest depiction of stand-up by an actor put to film, an overly rehearsed routine of uncanny (and occasionally disturbing) material attacked with hysterical energy. It’s a set that could only have got on to TV as the result of a kidnapping.

Director: Paul Schrader

In one of his boldest experiments as a filmmaker, Paul Schrader seeks to explain one of the 20th century’s strangest stories – that of heiress Patty Hearst’s kidnapping and then apparent induction into leftist militant group the Symbionese Liberation Army – by retelling it through the subject’s own point of view. That means the director concealing much of the first third of the film in expressionistic shadow, as Patty is kept blindfolded and locked inside dark rooms, and having the stray observations and commentary of the voice inside Patty’s head provide the film’s narration.

Schrader succeeds in making a sensationalised story banal, his Patty first psychologically broken by the monotony and horror of captivity, and then passively swept along with ridiculous, deluded ‘revolutionaries’ until law enforcement arrive. As a figure with almost no agency, an observer in her own biopic, Natasha Richardson is extraordinary. Her Patty turns listless and muted during her time in captivity, and is left with a deadpan expression that occasionally still flashes with slyness and fury.

Director: Joel Coen

The Coens have been dealing in (often bungled attempts at) kidnapping since their first feature together, though none of the brothers’ films so pleasurably uses a kidnap plot to lounge around in one of their worlds as The Big Lebowski does. A shaggy-dog noir set in LA at the time of the Gulf War, The Big Lebowski finds counterculture burnout and bowling enthusiast Jeff Lebowski, aka The Dude (Jeff Bridges), swept up in a ransom plot when he’s mistaken for philanthropist ‘Big’ Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston), whose wife Bunny has gone missing.

As it so often goes with the Coens, one of the film’s big jokes is that the tangled plot is revealed to be no more than a work of bumbling idiocy, only made to seem complicated and important by the schemers’ botching of the plan. The real point and joy of the film is in its digressions – the rambling narrativising by Sam Elliott’s mysterious Stranger, the tripped-out dream sequences, the encounters with nihilist porn stars – and a cast of richly individual characters, chief among them Bridges’ freewheeling Dude.

Director: Ridley Scott

“Creasy’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece.” For its first hour, Man on Fire patiently allows chemistry to develop between Dakota Fanning’s Mexico City schoolgirl and her taciturn new bodyguard played by Denzel Washington. But after Fanning’s Pita is taken by gangsters looking for ransom from her wealthy father, the film shifts gear into a gnarly revenge thriller, Pita’s kidnappers not having counted on Washington’s washed-up John Creasy being a former Marine and CIA paramilitary man with a penchant for creative violence.

It’s ludicrous, reactionary entertainment. In one scene, Creasy is firing an RPG into Mexico City traffic in broad daylight; in the next casually clipping fingers off a man’s hand in a bid to extract information from him. Executed in Tony Scott’s kaleidoscopic latterday style, Man on Fire is MTV Peckinpah: opulent images and sounds crashing together in a restless edit, as an ageing man of action finds purpose and honour in some operatic bloodshed south of the border.

Director: Jafar Panahi

Could Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) have made a mistake? He thinks that the man he has blindfolded and tied up in his van is Eghbal, the jailer who tortured Vahid during his time in jail, though he isn’t sure; neither are other survivors of Eghbal’s violence and humiliations, whom Vahid visits in a bid to get a positive ID.

Given the filmmaker’s own years of persecution and periods of imprisonment by the Iranian regime, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident is a heroically compassionate work; ever the humanist, Panahi has sympathy for perpetrator as well as victim, the director making room to explore the possible reasons and responsibilities behind the monstrous deeds of state instruments like Eghbal. More surprising is that Panahi still finds humour beneath the outrage, whether it’s the sight of another victim of Eghbal’s, Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), pushing Vahid’s broken-down van down the street while wearing a wedding dress, or the fact that everywhere Vahid goes people seem to be looking for bribes – petrol station attendants and maternity ward doctors included.

Dead Man’s Wire is in cinemas from 20 March and screening at BFI Southbank from 30 March.