10 Most Sympathetic Movie Kidnappers And Hostage Takers

7. Symbionese Liberation Army - Patty Hearst (1988)

If there was ever a more pronounced case of Stockholm syndrome than Patricia Campbell Hearst, it€™s probably never been documented. An apolitical student at Berkeley University, CA, Patty had no interest in the radicalism of the late '60s/early '70s €“ perhaps unsurprisingly, given that she was the granddaughter of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, founder of the Hearst Corporation (and Orson Welles€™ inspiration for Citizen Kane). When the SLA took her captive at Berkeley, they seized her partly out of opportunism and partly to aspire to the uncompromising ruthlessness of other urban guerrilla groups. She was to be used as a pawn for the release of SLA activists in jail - but over time, as psychological pressure and the sensory deprivation of imprisonment in darkness took their toll, she adopted the dogmatic stance of the group who held her prisoner. The term €˜symbionese€™ was derived from symbiosis - that is, all parts working in mutual dependence, emblematic of the naive-yet-ruthless neo-communism of the day. In his film of Ms. Heast€™s memoir (Patty Hearst: Every Secret Thing), Paul Schrader cut through the dogma to depict the SLA as a bunch of middle-class American kids in search of a violent identity. Much in the way that present-day Islamists reinvent themselves as bloodstained fundamentalists when their background is moderate or westernised, these comical but gun-toting zealots set out to go beyond Chairman Mao. The obvious leader of this supposedly egalitarian group is a charismatic black man calling himself Cinque (Ving Rhames - the terrifying Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction), who inducts Ms. Hearst as a comrade of the Revolution by raping her. Schrader wasn€™t directing a Four Lions-style parody of identity politics, but some of the scenes have undoubted comic appeal: a married couple who idolise Cinque black themselves up like minstrels to spout Black Power slogans. But we€™re brought up sharp to be told that the SLA, in their pious wisdom, have killed a black school administrator (offscreen) because they considered him a traitor to his race and class. Finally, the film belong to Natasha Richardson as Patty. A subdued, objectified figure in the earlier part, her later re-emergence as a comrade renamed Tanya, her former personality eclipsed by a zealot announcing, "Death to the fascist insect!" is as striking as the authentic news footage of an apparently brainwashed Patty Hearst. After serving two years of a prison sentence for her involvement in an SLA bank robbery, Ms Hearst gained an odd celebrity status €“ appearing on talk shows and even as an actress in cult trash movies directed by John Waters. She was later pardoned for her offences under the Clinton presidency. The Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence has now been mooted to play Patty in a film based on a new book by CCN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. Although she€™s likely to pick up more publicity for the role, it seems unlikely to this writer that her performance will diminish that of the late, underrated Ms. Richardson.