Movie Review: Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst

Movies Reviews

By Andy McKeague Jun 12, 2005, 8:40 GMT

Robert Stone's 'Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst' is a powerful but a frustrating watch.

Showing the hotbed of political and emotional unrest of late 60's to early 70's America at home and away, the climate is perfectly captured. The Vietnam War is raging on and the demonstrations are increasing from a bewildered public. This unrest culminates like a powder keg exploding. Riots break out everywhere; people are being hauled away by the hair and being beaten by the batons of their own police force, the very people they are sworn to protect them. The country is in chaos and Nixon is re-elected.

This is the background to which the some people started taking their own action for their own resolutions. They call themselves freedom fighters and fighters against the oppressive State, or at least that is the romanticised version. One such group of people were the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).

After the group assassinated Dr. Marcus Foster, a school superintendant, two of it’s founder members were captured by police. This lead the group to react in what was to become their most famous passage. On February 4th, 1974, a 19 year-old college student was kidnapped from her Berkeley college campus. This was Patty heart, granddaughter of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Stone’s documentary follows the aftermath of the kidnapping, from the birth of live news reporting and the country in shock to its uncrowned Princess being in the hands of urban terrorists. But it is the SLA that Stone focuses his camera on, with recent interviews from two former members, Russ Little and Michael Bortin, inter-cut with archive footage from the day. The SLA did not only kidnap Heart but in what was to follow they kidnapped a nation as well. Leaking tapes to the media and making demands indicating they are working on behalf of the people. The news coverage given was unprecedented to anything that had been before. It seems that murder and chaos, was not their motivation but they actually wanted to rob from the rich and give to the poor and needy, which Stone sarcastically cuts in footage of Errol Flynn and Disney’s ‘Robin Hood’ while the media spouts the SLA’s delusional worldviews.

On Day 59 of the kidnapping everything changes, a tape is delivered to the Hearst family with Patty announcing that she is also a member of the group, and now wishes to be called Tania. The bewildered nation looks on agape but sympathy is starting to go in the eyes of the public, especially when a machine gun totting Patty is captured on camera in the Hibernia Bank as part of an armed robbery.

It was only after several more deaths and 19 more months, the police finally caught Patty Hearst and her two companions. During this time the country had been eating up the media frenzy and speculation was rife why and what had all happened. This movie does not answer that question suitably. We are shown the cupboard were Hearst spent most of her incarceration but it is never mentioned that she is malnourished and forced to read scripted messages to the tapes her parents and the media would later play. In short we are given more of the view from the side of the kidnappers rather from the kidnapped. Strangely there are no new interviews with Hearst, but the movie does have a final punch to pull. At the end of the movie we are shown that all of the SLA are either jailed or were or dead and Patty became the media darling of the day, receiving a Presedential pardon, doing chat shows and then some movie too into the bargain. AKA: Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Visit our database to view stills and access media from the movie.

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Movie Review: Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst

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