Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst

If this is the same movie directed by Robert Stone and which I saw at the Seattle Int'l Film Festival today then I would have to say it was quite dull in places and in need of some editing. While it got across the interesting spectacle Patty Hearst made at the time - rich girl turned radical rebel ostensibly for the people - I would have liked to have seen more in-depth profiles of all involved prior to hearing them talk - of Patty, her parents, their relationship, the backgrounds of the other members of the party, etc. Too much of this film's information was just a dry re-telling of the news, and a dry outline of how the event affected the evolution of reporting and FBI investigative reporting. It's a fascinating and timely topic - in that today again we are faced with a conservative government and a growing rebellion against it complete with terrorist activity, only on a global instead of just domestic scale, but this documentary falls sadly short of portraying the events that unfolded in any particularly interesting or involving way. There's got to be a better documentary out there on this subject. Can anyone recommend any?

I saw this at the Florida Film Festival and was quite blown away. Taken with the Oscar-nominated doc The Weather Underground, both movies present a jaw-dropping look at just how tumultuous those times were, especially for someone who didn't live through them, like myself. It's amazing to see how far young, well-educated, mostly white kids were willing to go to prove their points about race, money and war. Archival footage, especially that of the harrowing shootout in Los Angeles that was broadcast live on the air, shows you an America that is almost unrecognizable to us. The ending, which juxtaposes images of media-darling Patty with the rest of the SLA either in jail or long-since dead, is truly stunning.

I guess enough time has passed that the strange and fascinating case of Patricia Hearst can be looked at from a safe distance; although the recent post 9/11 interest in terrorism puts the Symbionese Liberation Army and their actions into a whole different context.

This documentary mixes news footage, photographs, tapes recordings and interviews with figures associated with the SLA and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst - yet it has to be said that most of these are marginal figures. Given that most SLA members are now dead, this is unavoidable. The real coup would have been scoring interviews with surviving members Bill and Emily Harris or Hearst herself - although her lack of participation is quite understandable given that her version of the case is already well documented.

The film comes ready-made with the gripping narrative of a thriller - and proves the cliché correct that truth is much stranger than fiction. It must have been quite an odd case to watch unravel in the media and could only have happened in the 70's. I can't quite see Paris Hilton robbing banks for the poor, somehow....

The only criticism I would have with the documentary is that plays on the ambiguity of Hearst - the good girl/bad girl, did she or didn't she mythology while conveniently neglecting facts that may have painted her is a more sympathetic light. It's one thing to play tapes of her calling her parents 'pigs' but quite another to fail to mention that all of her communique's were written for her, that she was kept blindfolded for over a month and expected to have sex with SLA members (all within her closet that she was rarely allowed out of). When arrested her IQ had dropped to a near comatose level, she was seriously malnourished and had ceased menstruating. Hardly a cutting revolutionary figure.

Altogether, it is a gripping and often darkly funny insight into one of the strangest cases in pop culture as well as the annuls of crime. It is thorough and impeccably researched. Highly recommended.

to watch this documentary and not have clear answers. The documentary leaves you with a confusion answer, I guess if I'm understanding right that's what was left for people in the 60's and 70's and still today? And I'd say the confusion is what happened to Patty Hearst and what was the mindset of the SLA. Both things we don't see.. It's also hard to understand from the interview's what the Interviewers roles are in the TOTAL picture, this I think this can effectively be blamed on the documentary makers.

One thing this story does recant is human stupidity, which is a age old tale that is endless and never ceases and ironically re-occurs a lot.

'Guerrilla' is a documentary about a bizarre episode in recent American history, the story of a strange left wing terrorist organisation that first kidnapped the daughter of a millionaire, and then made a fellow-terrorist of her. Subsequently, she was captured, recanted, spent time in gaol and then returned to her privileged life. It's a very weird story, and the press didn't quite know how to cover it; as the kidnappers where inaccessible, they focused instead on the millionaire, who found himself at the centre of a media circus with surprisingly little sympathy for him. What's good about this documentary is the extensive use of footage from the time, we see how the story came to be cast by the American media, but we also see a portrait of a climate in which there was a surprising amount of sympathy for the self-styled "Symbianese Liberation Army", perhaps because they more romantic than Marxist, though nonetheless murderous. What the film does not convey (despite access to two SLA members) is the real psychology of those in the movement (the interviewees distance themselves from it's wilder antics), or indeed, that of the Hearst family. Patty has given interviews in the past, but not in this program, and a host of questions about her and her behaviour are raised but not answered. The result is that 'Guerrilla' works as a piece of reconstructed history; but as to whether it is history of significance, or merely a freak show, the jury is still out.