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Amongst all the crackpot politics of early 70s USA, the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst by anti-capitalist revolutionaries was the freakiest act in town. Robert Stone's fascinating Guerrilla combines a stunning wealth of contemporary footage with interviews from many - but sadly not all - of the major surviving players to brilliantly document the ideological fury of the captors, the harebrained reaction of the establishment, and the whirling media lunacy that fuelled both sides.

In 1973, a dismayed group of Berkley radicals and an escaped convict formed the Symbionese Liberation Army dedicated to destroying the "fascist insect" the USA had become. Attempting to bring about a prisoner swap, the SLA snatched Hearst, great-granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst and heiress to the publishing empire the SLA regarded as "chief propagandists of the military dictatorship".

"EVERY WILD TWIST WAS PUMPED OUT ON TV"

The film's most comic and shocking moments come from the fact that every wild twist in the drama was pumped out on wall-to-wall television, especially when Patty herself turned up two months later as a bank-robbing, gun-toting member of the SLA - or when a month after that, six SLA members ended up dead in a two-hour shootout with the LA police.

Claiming brainwashing and using her family's considerable influence, Hearst obtained an early release from her ensuing prison sentence and an eventual Presidential pardon. The film suffers slightly, then, from a gaping Patty-shaped hole in the finale. Just as we are ready for some answers, Stone sidesteps the question of her truthfulness, claiming that the interesting part of the tale is the way America reacted. True as that may be, we, the bloodthirsty consumers of personality-led media, cannot help but be disappointed by her absence.