Kidnapped (1971)

You know the Robert Louis Stevenson tale: Scotland, shortly after the Battle of Culloden. Young David Balfour (Lawrence Douglas), after the death of both of his parents now without a family, introduces himself to his miserly uncle Ebenezer (Donald Pleasence), only to get sold into slavery by the sad old man unwilling to share a fortune that belongs by rights completely to David. Before his way to the indentured farming life in the colonies can get on its way, David falls in with Alan Breck (Michael Caine), a Bonnie Prince Charlie loyalist (the film never really uses the term “Jacobite”) on the run. Apart from a bit of a murderous disposition and the inability to understand his cause as lost, Alan’s a stand-up guy. He also really needs to get out of Scotland and get to France, where he plans on regrouping with whoever still wants another round of getting smashed by the English. Obviously, complications lie on the way for both men. The younger one will find true love in the form of Alan’s cousin Catriona Stewart (Vivian Heilbron), while the older man will find his conscience.

There’s quite a bit to like about Delbert Mann’s combined adaptation of Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” and its sequel “David Balfour/Catriona”. For one, the landscape photography is often genuinely striking. It not just looks pretty, it actually manages to add to the emotional weight of quite a few scenes in a pleasantly subtle manner. Also rather a joy is the bunch of great actors and character actors on screen, from Donald Pleasence to Gordon Jackson to Freddie Jones to Trevor Howard; most of them make a muddle of their Scottish accents, obviously, but that’s part of the fun of traditional adventure movies like this one. Speaking of accents, Michael Caine barely bothers with one, which seems to be the right decision, since his handful of pathos-filled speeches about bonnie Scotland are already melodramatic enough, and would become absurd with too much bad accent work. Of course, Caine’s most convincing here when he is either brutal or companionable – the big speeches do tend to be a bit too much, in part because Jack Pulman’s script can’t quite hit the right tone for them, so that they sound pompous rather than dramatic and moving.

Which is a curious thing in a script whose main strength otherwise is tone. Not just in its ability to get the brightly colourful and imaginative tone of the film’s more action-heavy and adventurous first half just right but also in its willingness to be fair-minded to both sides of the political conflict here, avoiding to declare one side as the good guys and the other as the baddies, as would be rather more typical for an adventure movie. Kidnapped shows very little love for the oppression of the Scottish through the English, and demonstrates this in very 70s ways. Yet it is just as sceptical about the Jacobite side, who, after all, wasn’t simply fighting for Scottish independence but working hard to get yet another civil war on the British Isles going, with the end goal to exchange one inbred fool on a throne for another, with the population of the countries having to pay the price. Which is a rather 70s way of looking at the situation as well, come to think of it.

At the same time, the script shows a lot of respect for people like Alan who live so strongly by their principles and beliefs, even when it disagrees with them. Alas, this very interesting and complex view on questions of peace, war, independence and personal and political loyalty does suffer a bit from the film’s need to squeeze two novels into a running time of less than two hours, so that rather a lot of emotional and thematic work that would be better expressed via action has to be simply talked out. Particularly Alan’s final decision doesn’t quite work treated this way.

This talkiness results in Kidnapped being front-loaded with practically all of its – finely realized – action set pieces taking place in its first half, and most of its talky bits in the final one. It’s not a fatal flaw in this particular case because of the whole affair’s general interest, yet it is one that’s clear and obvious enough even the best will can’t ignore it.

In short: By Our Selves (2015)

Apart from a handful of exceptions, I’ve never gotten along with much experimental cinema. That’s not the films’ fault, I believe, but more one of those idiosyncratic and personal reactions to art, and I do tend to neither get these things nor develop a feeling for or from them.

So I was a bit surprised that this experimental (though not abstract) piece of filmmaking by Andrew Kotting (sometimes Kötting) did actually speak to me and held my interest throughout. But then, it is following the route John Clare – embodied by the great Toby Jones – took on his escape from an asylum in Essex to his home in Northamptonshire (for other non-Brits like me: that’s quite an expedition on foot, four days in Clare’s case) through what’s now predominantly industrialized agricultural fields and roads full of lorries, with the writer Iain Sinclair as a goat-masked guiding spirit or follower, and even one of the rare-ish appearances of Alan Moore. So it is very much operating in my cultural comfort zone of the discomforted. If it weren’t, I probably wouldn’t have the faintest idea what this thing is even about, but there’s nothing wrong with this sort of project not bringing its own handbook.

It’s an often strikingly shot film, suggesting parallels between Clare’s fractured mind and the human-caused fractures in the landscape we encounter. Though Kotting also still finds a place for the strange - even if it is now by necessity a wilful strangeness filtered through the intellect – even if it is by going through his own movie dressed as a straw bear. For some tastes, this will all be a bit too consciously eccentric in execution, something that’s certainly not helped by Kotting’s puckish sense of humour, but for me, the film works as a way of putting concepts and thoughts that aren’t always best helped by clarity, precision and earnestness into life.

Plus, I could watch Toby Jones doing anything for hours.