‘The Ordeal of Patty Hearst’ is ‘The Searchers’ of the ’70s
Among the most provocative titles of any film, we have “The Ordeal of Patty Hearst,” a made-for-TV movie that aired on ABC on March 4, 1979. The second word of that title is what matters, a stronger statement than any depiction in the film, which could’ve run hours longer.
Kidnappings thankfully are extremely rare, though definitions vary. Most people could probably only name about a handful of kidnapping cases involving ransom — including the Lindbergh baby, Frank Sinatra Jr., maybe John Paul Getty III and the investor Edward Lampert. And whether the Hearst demands actually meet the definition of “ransom” is debatable.
The “Ordeal” filmmakers know that a re-creation of the Patty Hearst drama is gripping television. That’s the goal. “Ordeal” is not being aspirational. It certainly could be. To justify a movie, you need a dramatic arc. For this story, you also need a reliable observer, because the principal figure would later claim brainwashing, and many of the witnesses to these events, by the time of this production, were either dead or in serious legal jeopardy and/or confirmed criminals. So “Ordeal” despite its title is not the story of Patty Hearst’s kidnapping but, according to its introductory text, the “experiences and recollections of former FBI Special Agent Charles Bates,” a lawman who was quoted in the news media about the kidnapping. According to this production, he was nearing retirement and happened to have a daughter of around the same age as Hearst and was motivated to stick to the fundamentals and eventually make a collar.
That sounds weak. “Ordeal” should be an independent documentary. This is an incredibly polarizing event and person. It seems a heinous crime as well as, somehow, possibly a victimless crime. Give filmmakers a chance to show their interpretation of what happened, take a side, tell us what it means.
Years later, a bona fide auteur, Paul Schrader, gave it a try. His 1988 movie called simply “Patty Hearst” is based on Hearst’s memoir and covers much of the same territory as “Ordeal.” Schrader’s film, however, starring Natasha Richardson, applies an ambiguity to Hearst not seen in “Ordeal.” Once freed of the blindfold, Richardson regularly makes goofy expressions even during intense SLA conversations and seems at times to not be taking her captors all that seriously. Multiple times, she questions where she would go if she was no longer with SLA members. After capture, her sometimes-defiant comments make us wonder, Was she just putting everyone on?
Schrader’s got a good idea. “Ordeal” had a better one.
“Ordeal” was directed by Paul Wendkos, a longtime Hollywood veteran who mostly worked in TV, though he did direct the 1959 hit “Gidget” starring Sandra Dee. Wendkos certainly had a wonderful career. Take a look at his Wikipedia page though and you probably won’t recognize many titles. There are some familiar TV series. “Ordeal” is not even mentioned.
Yet Wendkos outdid Schrader on this subject, in a big way. It’s Wendkos’ production that should’ve been the feature film.
It was written by another longtime TV veteran, Adrian Spies. Whether Wendkos and Spies envisioned the Hearst story this way or it was handed to them, they’re the ones who realized they were sitting on “The Searchers.”
They are not sitting on the much later (2015) feature film “Room.” That film is based on a novel that was inspired by a long-term domestic case in Austria. “Room” the movie depicts an Ohio woman in captivity for seven years who continually resisted and eventually broke free. She too faced a stigma post-captivity despite not taking part in any crimes. She was motivated to free her child, who had known nothing but captivity. “The Searchers” and “Room” suggest differing reactions to captivity, from gradual acceptance to permanent rejection. Patricia Hearst is at the other end of that spectrum.
But only the Hearst case is real. In Paul Schrader’s version of the story, Patty is the subject who is dealt a terrible misfortune and must overcome it both immediately (keeping herself alive) and forever (reentering the good graces of society). Schrader’s work implies that she quickly adapted to her tormentors all too well and accepted her long, difficult unwind as the price of her survival.
“Ordeal” is mostly the same events but the story of the establishment lawman who is trying to rescue the girl who, somehow, may not want to be rescued.
If Wendkos and Spies understood what they had, their star, Dennis Weaver, surely did not. As the FBI agent Charles Bates, Weaver delivers an emotionless police procedural and doesn’t care why any of this is happening. “You don’t get your victim killed” is his most important line. He’s a bureaucrat, pursuing the girl from offices and living rooms, hardly Uncle Ethan in “The Searchers.” Bates’ challenge is merely resisting the pressure on all sides and not botching the case and retiring in embarrassment. His own daughter, about Patricia’s age, is shown several times, to help give Charlie a sense of urgency that he never seems to grasp. His triumph is the fundamentalist approach. This kidnapping is a crazy scene. Even anyone with a distant connection to SLA had to be taken seriously. Randolph Hearst, the other would-be rescuer, quickly bites at the head fakes; Charlie doesn’t, he just stiff-arms the tipsters and crackpots that surfaced, a common re-creation of news events in made-for-TV movies.
The strongest analysis of what’s happening here is by the psychologist played by James Karen, who correctly warns that Patricia could become indoctrinated by the SLA and will confuse her tormentors with her rescuers and “try to join her captors” within a short time. This is a crucial point-of-view inclusion in the production — an objective expert suggesting that Hearst within a short time would not be in control of her own decision-making and unable to distinguish between right and wrong. He also suggests that SLA members could simply have a death wish by “flamboyant” or “grotesque” means.
As Patricia, Lisa Eilbacher in “Ordeal” is closer than Richardson to the angry Patty that the world would see. Early in her captivity, she answers the demands made of her not with questions or counteroffers but with tearful silence. “Just do whatever you’re gonna do to me,” she seems to be saying. The worst moments of her experience had to be the home invasion, when armed strangers threw her into the trunk of a car half-nude. As they began to give her lectures, probably some relief set in, “They want to include me, not kill me.” Told to start guerrilla training and hand-to-hand fighting — “skills” that the group apparently never actually used, including when the cops came to the doors — Patty accepts the challenge of assembling and deploying weapons and seems to take some measure of satisfaction in meeting the goal.
But throughout “Ordeal,” and also Schrader’s film, it is the hard-core members of the SLA, including the women, who are calling the shots. They're the ones conducting the bank robbery and grabbing the money. It’s not real socialism. Which suggests that Patricia Hearst has something in common with Linda Kasabian, the Manson family member who was drafted to take part in killings but was only assigned to be the lookout. The early members, that's the hierarchy. Kasabian, unlike Patty, joined the group voluntarily. Also unlike Patty, she chose to leave. And the legal system found an accommodation for Linda Kasabian that it (mostly) couldn’t find for Patricia Hearst.
The Hearst kidnapping and the Tate-LaBianca murders are notorious counterculture incidents in the same state only a few years apart. Do they have anything else in common? Both groups seemed to be directed by males but mostly populated by females. Each group conducted the rarest form of home invasion — not for money or sexual violence, but some kind of high-profile terrorism. These acts did nothing to achieve the groups’ nonsensical supposed end games — where everyone would rise up, defeat the establishment and turn to these groups to lead — but only elevate the interest of law enforcement.
The Hearst legal battle, which is not depicted in “Ordeal,” would dwell on one very unscientific term: brainwashing. It seems to be the best option English speakers have come up with to describe someone who, under some degree of duress or coercion, appears to parrot the philosophies of a handler that the person wouldn’t previously have been espousing. On one extreme, we have the guys in “The Manchurian Candidate”; on the other, we might know someone who simply “changed when she started hanging out with so-and-so.” Brainwashing would be little more than a silly concept in 1960s drive-in movies except it is suspected in numerous calamities — communist dictatorships; the Manson family, Jim Jones. And the Patty Hearst case.
Neither “Ordeal” nor Schrader’s film try to tell us much about Patricia Hearst prior to Feb. 4, 1974. This is disappointing. But “Ordeal” hints at something significant: Patty’s parents, during the kidnapping at least, apparently did not care for her fiance, Steven Weed. That doesn’t make her a rebel. But it’s interesting. The couple, about seven years apart, met when Patty was 15 when Weed was teaching math at her school. In “Ordeal,” she reminds him that they began dating when she was 16. At Princeton, Weed had liberal friends, which interested law enforcement after Patty’s kidnapping. A couple months after the kidnapping, Weed told the New York Times that he had a cordial relationship with Randolph and Catherine Hearst but that they became “very upset by public references to the fact he and their daughter occasionally used drugs.” In “Ordeal,” before the kidnapping, Weed’s character tells Patty that he and her parents have arrived at “an understanding.”
By numerous accounts, the kidnapping was the last time Patricia ever spoke to Weed. After prison, a whole two months after release, she married Bernard Shaw, a police official on her security detail who happened to be about 10 years older.
Was Patty born with a rebel streak, drawn not to establishment blue bloods but older men in positions of authority? That is not a crime. It could perhaps explain why just two months after abduction she was releasing audiotapes declaring herself “Tania” and a successful SLA recruit. This was a 19-year-old college student who wasn’t in any kind of trouble who would, within a year or less, find herself America's Most Hated. Not only were many people skeptical of her trauma, they were actually afraid she might rob them.
Most studies of people in captivity almost certainly must deal with larger populations. Prison inmates, people in occupied countries or territories, dictatorships. Slavery. Those situations have a reverse numerical situation to Hearst. Fidel Castro does not have the manpower to send a dozen loyalists to every home in Havana for weekslong classes. For those people, as long as you don’t grab their attention, they’ll mostly leave you alone. In the Bay Area, meanwhile, it’s 15 to 1 against Hearst, watching every move.
Another FBI official in an early meeting with Charlie in “Ordeal” says Patricia has “led a couple of hunger strikes” at her school and is “sort of a half-baked rebel.” That official notes “rich kids like that have been known to stage their own kidnappings.” Charlie insists “this one smells real” and says “the only way” to handle the case is to establish some contact with the kidnappers and not to push panic buttons. “You don’t get your victim killed.”
That seems like an obvious strategy. But is it naive. Charlie is indicating that being patient in these situations saves lives. Physical lives, maybe. But “Ordeal” hints at the permanent or long-lasting trauma of being a kidnapping victim — a change to the person that can happen not over years, but mere weeks. The feds took so long to find her that by the time they did so, there wasn’t — on some level — any victim to save.
Few things motivate males as much as rescuing a woman or girl, even if there is no romantic interest. That’s the plot driver of not only “The Searchers” but “Star Wars,” “Casablanca,” “Chinatown.” Hunting fugitives is high up there too — but not quite as high. Imagine Princess Leia telling Luke & Han & Obi-Wan, “Take your ship back to Tatooine; I’m with the Empire.” Talk about mixed emotions for the rescuers. The Hearst story dialed itself down the moment the world heard “Tania.”
Schrader’s film indicates that Patty’s behavior can’t really be quantified even though society’s judgment must be. The FBI and state authorities concluded that Hearst’s post-kidnapping actions were voluntary. The fact she was defiant upon her arrest for weeks did not help her cause. Neither did waving a gun at the Hibernia bank robbery or firing bullets at a sporting goods store manager. It was determined she had at least several, perhaps countless, chances to escape. The law agreed, though presidents — two of them, a record for granting clemency — would not.
Much is or was speculated about SLA motives. What did they really intend to do with Patty? Over time, kidnap victims tend to become baggage at best, expendable at worst. There was never a ransom amount. Many figured she was taken with the idea of trading her for two jailed SLA members charged with the murder of Oakland schools superintendent Marcus Foster, itself a strange crime. The group’s initial letter said she was being held in “protective custody as a prisoner of war.” A second letter demanded Randolph Hearst distribute $70 worth of food to each of 2 million poor people in California, after which negotiations could take place over Patty’s return. But Randolph Hearst’s attempt at a scaled down $2 million food distribution led to chaos and a near-riot. The SLA then demanded a bigger giveaway and indicated if not met, Hearst would be held for the Foster suspects. Upon Patty’s “conversion,” it seems the SLA lost interest in the Foster suspects.
Was there any strategy in targeting a woman of Patty’s age rather than, say, a male like her father? A male might be more capable of overpowering the captors if given a chance; also, kidnapping a male wouldn’t provide the same media shock value. Those are probably reasons why a young woman was chosen. But harming an innocent young woman, however wealthy, would be stepping into Manson territory. One or more of the SLA’s associates might turn them in. Had Patty not been indoctrinated, they might’ve killed her as threatened, or they might’ve cast her aside somewhere. The fact they started in on her right away possibly suggests the latter.
Schrader’s “Patty Hearst” shows that the SLA really had nothing to do. Members talked politics and “trained” for something or other but were reduced to ordinary crime to put food on the table. The days after kidnapping seem almost like when a family brings home a new pet; “Ordeal” shows the whole group gathered around the door, pounding and chanting at the person inside. Roger Ebert reviewed Schrader’s film and concluded, “This whole story seemed so much more exciting from the outside.” In fact, another advantage to “Ordeal” is that it supplies, in some measure, the world’s reaction to what is happening, the boomerang of outrage toward this person.
Wealth is the curious and enormous undercurrent of the Patty Hearst kidnapping. It’s why she was taken. It also may be why she recovered. Some movies about elites (such as, on a much more genteel level, “The Way We Were” or “10”) indicate that when you have access to big money or that kind of lifestyle, things such as breakups, betrayal, failure and legal problems that can cause serious grief for most people are just blips. In his review of “Patty Hearst,” Roger Ebert writes of meeting the 30-something Hearst at Cannes that year, unable to reconcile that pleasant, “joking” woman with the kidnapping victim depicted in the movie.
Hearst actually has acted in Hollywood films and raised victorious dogs in the Westminster show. Ebert said the kidnapping would not go into “American history textbooks” because in the end, it was “all just a very odd footnote to history.” It’s only a “footnote” for a reason that the “Ordeal” movie in early 1979 would not yet have realized. Hearst is one of the greatest survivors the world has ever seen. Thrown an incredible setback, she accomplished what so many traumatized people are unable to do: picking up right where she left off.
Both “Ordeal” and “The Searchers” arrive near the end at the same powerful reaction to this saga: disappointment. This was a tragic figure whom the public hoped to save, only to be defied by her own insistence that she’s not even a victim. Yet there’s a note of optimism at the end of each film that she’ll eventually come around and appreciate the effort.
“Ordeal” — that’s indeed the correct word — concludes with narration indicating Charlie’s view of justice in this case. It is a softer view than that of prosecutors. The “Ordeal” filmmakers stuck to form and honored their protagonist with a victory. Charlie will exult “We did it!” to cheers in the office as if he’s just apprehended John Dillinger, not realizing that as a rescuer who didn’t get there nearly fast enough, he was a failure.
Schrader, by the way, co-wrote 1977’s “Rolling Thunder,” a movie about someone tortured into an unlivable life who overcomes his tormentors on the strength of his beliefs. “Ordeal” reveals how vulnerable we actually are.
4 stars
(January 2024)
“The Ordeal of Patty Hearst” (1979)
Starring
Dennis Weaver
as Charles Bates ♦
Lisa Eilbacher
as Patty Hearst ♦
David Haskell
as Steven Weed ♦
Stephen Elliott
as Randolph Hearst ♦
Dolores Sutton
as Catherine Hearst ♦
Felton Perry
as Cinque ♦
Tisa Farrow
as Gabi ♦
Jonathan Banks
as Pato ♦
Anne De Salvo
as Gelina ♦
Catherine Butterfield
as Carmella ♦
Karen Landry
as Fahizah ♦
Nancy Wolfe
as Lucy Brawley ♦
Brendan Burns
as Cujo ♦
Roy Poole
as Tyler ♦
Redmond Gleeson
as Sheriff’s Deputy ♦
Rosanna Arquette
as Becky ♦
Mary McCusker
as Zoya ♦
Alan Fudge
as Bradshaw ♦
Charles Shull
as Shandell ♦
James Karen
as Psychologist ♦
Ed Ness
as Warrant Officer ♦
Richard Crystal
as Seaman ♦
Richard O’Brien
as Holman ♦
Jordan Wendkos
as Student ♦
Bruce Reed
as Jess Brawley ♦
Suzanne Kent
as Fat Girl ♦
Peter Zapp
as Bushy Haired Guy ♦
David Blue
as Schiller ♦
Allen Case
as Froelich ♦
Joseph DiReda
as Sam Bennett ♦
Paul Henry Itkin
as Grass ♦
Bob Delegall
as Jackson ♦
Alva Celauro
as Sandy ♦
Judith-Marie Bergan
as Young Stenographer ♦
Robert Behling
as Berkeley Agent ♦
Stephen Bradley
as Berkeley Agent ♦
John Alderman
as Executive ♦
Heshimu Cumbuka
as Drummer ♦
Rockne Tarkington
as Death Row ♦
Barbara Iley
as Mrs. DeFreeze ♦
Joe Medalis
as Professor ♦
Gary Graham
as Young Editor ♦
Crane Jackson
as Police Captain ♦
Judson Pratt
as Inspector ♦
Eleanor Zee
as Landlady ♦
Ben Marley
as Young Man ♦
Paul Lukather
as Lynwood Detective ♦
Bill Deiz
as TV News Reporter ♦
James Beach
as SWAT Captain ♦
John Zaremba
as Father ♦
Laurence Haddon
as Lucas ♦
Michael Greene
as Joe ♦
Helen Funai
as Wendy Yoshimura ♦
Robert Englund
as Informer ♦
Ric Mancini
as Desk Sergeant ♦
Allan Hunt
as Agent Hunt ♦
James Curley
as Agent Curley ♦
Stu Klitsner
as Agent Klitsner ♦
Scott DeVenney
as Agent Devenney ♦
Russ Marin
as Brawley Uncle ♦
Conrad Bachmann ♦
Dennis Falt
as FBI agent ♦
Jack Lindine
as Detective ♦
Rusty Meyers
as George ♦
Judith Weston
as Ellen Brawley
Directed by: Paul Wendkos
Written by: Adrian Spies
Producer: Bill Finnegan
Associate producer: Patricia Finnegan
Executive producer: Marvin Minoff
Music: John Rubinstein
Cinematography: Héctor R. Figueroa
Editing: Ken Zemke
Casting: Michael McLean
Production design: Joe Aubel
Stunts: Marneen Fields
