Home › Kidnapped › Book vs. movie

Kidnapped: the book vs. the movie

Kidnapped (1960) — Disney's version, with Peter Finch as Alan Breck and Peter O'Toole in his first released film · Kidnapped (1971) — Michael Caine as Alan Breck, folded together with the sequel Catriona · Kidnapped (2005) — The BBC's three-part version with Iain Glen — no current US release to link to

Read first, or watch first?

This is one of the few books on this shelf where watching first is a real option rather than a compromise, and the reason is the Scots. Alan Breck's speech is the wall most young readers hit, and ninety-five minutes of hearing it spoken makes the page enormously easier — that is a mechanism, not a consolation. The cost is specific: the 1960 Disney gives away both the round-house fight and the trick that gets David his inheritance, which are the book's two best surprises. So: a confident reader in grade 6 or above should read first and watch after. A reader who opens chapter two, meets 'ye'll find water behind the door,' and closes it again should watch the 1960 version first, take the spoilers, and go back — because what the film cannot spoil is the islet, the quarrel, and David's own voice telling on himself, and those are three-quarters of the book. Pick the Disney one for a family; the 1971 and 2005 versions both graft on a romance Stevenson did not write.

What the movie changed

Two of them import a girl from the sequel

Stevenson wrote a second novel, Catriona, in 1893, and both the 1971 film and the 2005 BBC version reach forward into it and pull Catriona Stewart back to be David's love interest. The 1971 one was even working under the title David and Catriona. In Kidnapped itself there is no romance at any point, and barely a woman with a line.

Disney was asked to add a woman and said no

Robert Stevenson — no relation, and later the director of Mary Poppins — read the novel eight to ten times before shooting and worked the screenplay with Walt Disney directly. Both of them turned down pressure to write a female lead into it on the grounds that it was not in the book. It is the most faithful of the three by a distance.

Peter O'Toole's first released film is in it

He plays Robin MacGregor — Rob Roy's son — in the piping contest at Balquhidder, where two men settle a quarrel by taking turns on the bagpipes instead of with swords. Peter Finch suggested him for the part. Tell your kid to watch for the piper; it is a good scene and it is also the first time anybody saw him.

The 1971 film has Alan give himself up

Michael Caine's Alan decides the rebellion is finished and surrenders to save James Stewart from the gallows. Stevenson's Alan does no such thing: he takes ship for France with David's help, and James of the Glens hangs anyway. The film wants the story to end in a decision; the book ends in an escape and a judicial murder that nobody stops.

What only the book has

David tells it himself, years later

Every version turns David into a boy you watch. On the page he is a grown man looking back at his own seventeen-year-old self, dry about him, sometimes hard on him. The moment the round-house fight is won he staggers to a seat, the two men he shot sitting on him 'like a nightmare,' and begins 'to sob and cry like any child.' That voice — older, embarrassed, exact — is the whole reason the book still works.

The islet, and the joke on the hero

David is shipwrecked onto Earraid and spends days starving on raw shellfish, soaked and despairing. Then Stevenson tells you it is a tidal islet that can be left twice a day 'either dry-shod, or at the most by wading,' and that David, who had watched the tide go out for his own shellfish, would have worked it out if he had once sat down to think. None of the three screen versions keeps it, and it is easy to see why: no film wants its hero that foolish for that long.

The quarrel on the moor

Alan gambles away their money; David, just up from a bed of sickness, goes silent and needles him for a whole day's march. Stevenson gives you both heads at once — 'I, angry and proud… Alan angry and ashamed' — and David's private, shaming discovery that he wants to abandon the man who loves him. It is the best writing in the book, and the screen versions have no room for it, because it makes both of them small for a whole chapter.

Stevenson's Scots, with his own glosses

Slockens, gliff, kittle, rowpit, bouman. The dialogue is written in the language the people actually spoke, and Stevenson footnoted the hard words himself. An actor gives you the sound and loses the words; the page gives you both, and this edition sets each gloss into the sentence where the word is.

Making it a movie night?Find the 1960 film on Amazon →

Ready for the real thing?Get the free ebook →

Film links are Amazon affiliate links. Works both directions, by the way: how to use a movie to spark the book →