Kidnapped

Young David Balfour goes to his uncle to claim the inheritance left when his father died. The uncle has him carried off onto a ship, to be sold as a slave in America. On board he meets Alan Breck Stewart, a supporter of the Stuart cause. After a killing, both of them are wrongly accused, and they have to make their way across the Scottish Highlands with the redcoats behind them. This Disney adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel was directed by Robert Stevenson, no relation. The telling uses the shape of an adventure, but behind it is a Scotland put down after the rising of 1745: a people whose language, dress and loyalties were outlawed. Peter Finch plays Alan Breck and James MacArthur plays David, with Bernard Lee, John Laurie and Finlay Currie in the cast. The mountain landscapes now and then get out ahead of the story.