GUERRILLA: THE TAKING OF PATTY HEARST
[] (Three satrs)
An insightful time capsule. Running time: 89 minutes. Not rated (violence, sex). At the Angelika, Houston and Mercer streets.
ROBERT Stone’s first-rate documentary “Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst” uses rare news footage and exclusive interviews to illuminate one of the biggest stories of the 1970s.
Hearst, heiress to a publishing fortune and now a fixture as an actress in John Waters’ movies, made headlines at 19 when she was kidnapped in 1973 in San Francisco by a radical militant fringe group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army.
The nation was shocked when, several months later, she turned up carrying a gun in surveillance footage taken during a bank robbery.
In a recording released by the SLA, she called herself Tania and said she had joined the cause.
Stone’s film effectively uses contemporary film coverage from local TV stations that was rescued from the scrap heap when the industry converted to videotape a few years later.
We see Patty’s father, Randolph, head of the Hearst Corp., pleading for her release and agreeing to fund a multimillion-dollar food giveaway for the poor – which is shown in shocking footage to be a chaotic mess that ended with cops attacking would-be recipients.
Even more fascinating are what are billed as the first interviews with two SLA founders, Russ Little and Mike Bortin, who recall how their radicalism was fueled by the Vietnam war and movies as diverse as “State of Siege” and “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” but regret many of the group’s actions.
Unlike last year’s hazily nostalgic “The Weather Underground,” Stone’s documentary does not romanticize the SLA, nor does it take a morally neutral stance toward the group’s killing of at least two innocent people.
Perhaps the most powerful footage depicts the famous shootout with the FBI that left most of the group’s members dead – and played out for hours on TV to a spellbound nation.
Patty survived, and after serving 22 months for the bank robbery, had the rest of her sentence commuted by President Carter. She was finally pardoned by President Clinton on his last day in office.
Stone didn’t interview her, but “Guerrilla” includes a recent clip of Patty that raises uneasy questions about the woman who, 30 years later, is still the nation’s most famous kidnap victim – and terrorist.