I’m working on a scene that involves a character who has wandered off from his traveling companions is coming back to announce that he’s found what they all came looking for. He’s almost there, when suddenly he’s SURPRISED BY KIDNAPPERS, and he doesn’t see his friends again for months.
This has me thinking back through my favorite kidnapping scenes at the movies.
The first scenes that spring to mind are from Coen Brothers films: H.I. stealing young Nathan Arizona in Raising Arizona, and the two psychos who kidnap the screaming, shower-curtain-wearing woman in Fargo.
If you were going to point to a great kidnapping sequence, what would spring to mind?
Billy Bob Thornton trying to kidnap a distraught Cate Blanchett as she speeds down the road in Bandits
Peter Lorre’s pursuit of the little girl in M. And after he moves in, all we see is her balloon caught in a tree…
Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s abduction from inside the Vatican was a good one, and the high point of Mission: Impossible III.
Plus: Galaxy Quest!
The short-lived 1996 series “Kidnapped” opened with, of course, a very suspenseful kidnapping/shoot-out right in the middle of NYC. You can get it off of DVD.
Whoops! I meant that you can get the DVD off of Netflix.
Touch of Evil- Orsen Welles
the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Man on Fire – Tony Scott
Kidnapping is a major plot point in the classic The City of Lost Children.
Wel of course–Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped–the 1960 Disney movie with Peter Finch as Alan Breck Stewart and James MacArthur as David Balfour!