"Hostage is a crucifying aloneness.  There's a silent, screaming slide into the bowels if ultimate despair.  Hostage is a man hanging by his fingernails over the edge of chaos and feeling his fingers slowly straightening."

"Hostage is the humilating stripping away of every sense and fiber of body and mind and spirit  that make you what you are. Hostage is a mutant creature, full of self loathing, guilt and death wishing. But he's a man, a rare unique, and beautiful creation of which these things are no part."

Brian Keenan, at his post release press conference taken from Terry Anderson's  Den of Lions

Film Facts	Reviews
Plot Summary	Favorite Moments
General Comments	Ratings
Trivia	Web links
Comments on Colin	Back to Main Roles page
Comments by Colin	Credits

Title:  Hostages
Year:  1993
Company:  Granada Films (UK) and HBO (US)
Running Time:  96 minutes
Original US airdate:  Feb 20, 8-9:45 p.m.

Colin's Character:  John McCarthy
Other Cast Members:  Ciaran Hinds (Brian Keenan), Jay O. Sanders (Terry Anderson), Harry Dean Stanton (Frank Reed), Josef Sommer (Tom Sutherland), Kathy Bates (Peggy Say), Natasha Richardson (Jill Morrell), Conrad Asquith (Terry Waite)
Producers: Colin Callendar (executive), Ray Fitzwalter (executive), Alasdair Palmer (associate) and Sita Williams
Director:  David Wheatley
Writer:  Bernard MacLaverty

 

PLOT SUMMARY

Based on the real-life occurrences, this made-for-TV film is about the kidnapping of Westerners by fundamentalist Islamic forces in Lebanon. It focuses on the experiences of six men: John McCarthy, Brian Keenan, Terry Anderson, Tom Sutherland, Frank Reed and Terry Waite. Although it is "reality-based" and mixes actual news footage with the dramatized events, a disclaimer at the beginning makes it clear that the incidents and dialogue in the film are "based on publicly available material, interviews with former hostages, their friends and relatives, diplomats and politicians from the United States, Europe and the Middle East. No endorsement has been received from anyone portrayed."

The story of John McCarthy (Colin's character) provides the frame for the story. We see other kidnappings that occurred before his in a prologue and releases after his in a summary at the end. It is very much his story and Brian Keenan's. The original idea for the film came about while the two were still in captivity as a way to keep their plight in front of the public.
 
 

News footage moves the story through a period of five years, showing various events that impacted the lives and safety of the hostages. The dramatized events focus on their day-to-day existence: the tensions of living in close quarters, the relief of seeing other hostages after spending time in isolation, the momentary laughter a game of Monopoly can bring, and so on. Contrasted with these scenes are the efforts of families and friends (Peggy Say, Jill Morrell and others) to keep the hostages’ names and faces in the public eye and to attempt to force actions from hesitant governments.

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GENERAL COMMENTS

This is a tough film to watch. It makes no attempt to soften the experiences of the hostages to please the viewer's sensibilities. And, although it occasionally walks a thin line regarding the political aspects of the situation, it never shirks from the main point - these men (and others like them) spent years locked in dirty, dark rooms, never knowing from day to day what would happen, with little news from the outside world, and no certainty of release. It is worth noting that, while all six hostages portrayed in this film were eventually released, other hostages were killed by their captors.

Hostages did not have the support of most of the men shown in the film when it was made. In his book Some Other Rainbow, written with Jill Morrell, McCarthy explains some of his objections:

The Granada film was a recurring irritation. While I appreciated that their original intention had been to make a campaigning film which would have brought our plight to wider public notice, I couldn't understand their urgency now that we were free. None of us had yet fully come to terms with our experiences and, until we had done so, were not in a position to help anyone else make sense of what we had gone through. The fact that it went ahead was an unnecessary strain at an already difficult time.

Other hostages expressed similar concerns. McCarthy, Keenan, Anderson, and Waite all signed an open letter that appeared in the press just before the film was first shown on British television. Calling claims that the film was true an “abuse of public trust,” the four noted that “the film contains scenes involving us that are pure fiction.”

Time seems to have softened Terry Anderson's views though. When the History Channel in the United States began to show Hostages last year as part of its “Movies in Time” series, Anderson appeared with the program's host to discuss his experiences and his perspective on the film. When asked about the film's most accurate moments, Anderson replied:

Photo above right from book Some Other Rainbow by John McCarthy and Jill Morrell
 

It's an emotional accuracy that runs through it. It doesn't matter that they don't get the facts quite right, although they did a pretty good job on it. The feelings are there, the humiliations, the anger, the frustration of not knowing, the ups and the downs. You saw some of that in the film. So, those are all true portrayals, those kinds of things did happen.

According to McCarthy, Tom Sutherland did assist the filmmakers. And, he attended a press conference in the United States when it was released. At that point he said, "frankly, I was kind of shocked at the reality of it. I watched it in amazement. To see somebody re-creating what we had been through, so vividly and so accurately, I was kind of blown away."

McCarthy, Keenan, Waite, Anderson and Sutherland have all written books about their experiences.

McCarthy, John, and Morrell, Jill. Some Other Rainbow. Bantam Press, 1993.

Keenan, Brian. An Evil Cradling: The Five-Year Ordeal of a Hostage. (The book is perhaps the best-written, most humanly probing analysis of the hostage experience.)

Waite, Terry. Taken on Trust: An Autobiography. Quill, 1995.

Waite, Terry. Footfalls in Memory:  Reflections from Solitude. Doubleday Books, 1997.

Anderson, Terry. Den of Lions: Memoirs of Seven Years. Ballantine Books, 1994.

Sutherland, Tom, and Sutherland, Jean. At Your Own Risk: An American Chronicle of Crisis and Captivity in the Middle East. Fulcrum Publishers, 1996.

McCarthy and Keenan have a new book due out in September, 1999 titled: Between Extremes: A Journey Beyond Imagination.

COLIN IN THE FILM

Colin plays John McCarthy. As mentioned, his role frames the movie—the personal story of the hostages starts with his kidnapping on April 17, 1986 and ends when he returns to England in August 1991 to be reunited with his family and his girlfriend, Jill Morrell, who worked hard to keep his name and plight before the public during McCarthy’s more than five years in captivity. Although the film depends on an ensemble, McCarthy and Keenan (Ciaran Hinds) are used to most vividly portray the daily human plight of the hostages, and the pair has the most screen time.

McCarthy’s character provides the humor or comic relief in the film (see below, “Favorite Quotes and Scenes”). Yet Colin is also asked to convey much of the horror and humiliation of being a hostage. One of the most painful scenes to watch shows is one where Colin shows the terror that McCarthy feels at being wrapped in tape and then unwrapped as he and Keenan are being transported in the bottom of a truck from one location to another. The humiliation is also clear in his initial scenes at being made a captive and later being asked to beg to use the toilet.

Natasha Richardson (Jill Morrell) also co-starred with Colin in A Month in the Country.

Ciaran Hinds (Brian Keenan) and Colin both had roles in Circle of Friends.

Both Colin Firth and Ciaran Hinds have portrayed Jane Austen heroes: Colin as Darcy in the BBC/A&E mini-series, Pride and Prejudice; and Ciaran Hinds as Captain Wentworth in the 1995 film version of Persuasion (also shown in the U. S. on Masterpiece Theater on PBS).

Segments of Hostages were filmed in Lebanon and Israel.

The filmmakers made a mistake in their portrayal of McCarthy as a reporter; he was, in fact, a news producer.

Colin has portrayed a well-known living person in another film: Robert Lawrence, a soldier in the Falklands War in Tumbledown (Granada, 1989).

In real life, Jill Morrell and John McCarthy eventually broke up as a couple.

Brian Keenan and John McCarthy at McCarthy's 40th birthday celebration (Source: Hello! magazine)

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Unfortunately, none of the reviews (at least the ones we could find) comment on Colin's performance in Hostages and we have not been able to locate any public comments Colin made about the film. According to an article in Newsday (cited in reviews below), he did appear with Kathy Bates at press conference in Los Angeles sponsored by HBO before the film's premiere on the U. S. cable station.  But Tom Sutherland was also there and all the questions were directed to him. Photo above right from book Some Other Rainbow by John McCarthy and Jill Morrell; The only photo of John McCarthy in captivity, taken between February and May 1988

In his commentary on the History Channel, Terry Anderson said that the film did a good job of characterizing the men, that “the man who played John McCarthy looked and sounded like him” as did the actors who portrayed many of the other hostages.

St. Louis Post Dispatch, February 19, 1993
 

Snatch a baby for ransom, and you’re guilty of kidnapping. Seize an airplane and force it to land in Cuba, and you’re a hijacker. But grab a newsman or a professor off the streets of Beirut, beat him, humiliate him and steal years of his life from him, and you’re making a political statement . . . But this is not The Captors. It’s Hostages and it uses McCarthy’s confinement as the unifying element in a story about the inhumane treatment of hostages and the effects of that treatment on the minds and bodies of the men who experienced it.

Hostages, a properly sobering HBO docudrama...seems longer than its 95 minutes, perhaps because so much of it details life in bitter captivity....Scenes of the hostages being tormented, either by their captors or by the intense sense of loneliness and isolation, are grueling but not gratuitously violent. Writer Bernard MacLaverty and director David Wheatley do give you an extremely discomforting idea of what it must be like to be locked away with no concrete hope that you will ever be released ...Hostages continues the HBO tradition of tackling hot topics in intelligent and relatively non-hokey docudramas..
..This is television with class, and also television with guts.

If we must have TV movies based on harrowing real-life events, let them all be as good as Hostages, an account of the kidnapping, torture and subsequent release of six civilians held in Lebanon in the late 1980s and early ’90s...Cut off from the world, regularly punched and kicked by their kidnappers for no apparent reason and left to live in a filthy room, the hostages comfort one another but also get on one another’s nerves. The worst thing this TV movie could have done would be to turn the hostages into bland martyrs or ennobled victims. Instead, the script grants these men their individual, prickly personalities.... Hostages is, in this sense, as misleading as any other true-life TV movie [refers to shifting chronology, changing names of minor characters, creating dialogue]. But, on a deeper level, the uniformly quiet, passionate acting and the power of its drama give it a thoroughly redeeming force.

Pictured: Brian Keenan campaigning for John McCarthy's release from the book Some Other Rainbow

The British are coming to American TV again, and they're putting us to shame yet another time. As if PBS' current run of Prime Suspect 2 on the “Mystery” series wasn't enough dramatic one-upmanship, HBO has the latest from its fruitful partnerships with the investigative filmmakers at Granada and the BBC...

Hostages delivers even more than its title promises:  not just a portrait of the westerners held captive by Moslem extremists during the ’80s in Beirut, but a wide-scope view of the entire hostage situation – of those who take them, and those who also sit and await their return.

Much of the dialogue spoken by Colin in this film focuses on McCarthy's sense of humor, something his family and friends spoke about often and that more than one of his fellow hostages credited with helping them survive their ordeal. Some examples:

When McCarthy and Keenan are given a video to watch, McCarthy asks his captor:  Please, sir, can we take our blindfolds off to watch it?

At one point, Keenan and McCarthy are moved and join, for the first time, Anderson, Sutherland and Reed. McCarthy looks at them and says:  Doesn't anyone ever kidnap any women around here?

As the guard leaves the room he asks if they want anything. McCarthy quips:  A taxi?

McCarthy and Keenan are watching a video and turn the television to broadcast channels. They happen on coverage of a benefit for McCarthy and an interview with Jill Morrell. Watch Colin's face as he expresses the range of emotions McCarthy feels as he sees the woman he loves: astonishment, joy, frustration.  It's a great example of Colin's phenomenal ability to convey the character's inner self without words and almost without moving a muscle.

Watch him when McCarthy is told he's being released. He's blindfolded and almost totally silent throughout the scene, but again, all of the feelings that McCarthy is having are vividly portrayed.
 

And, of course, the reunion scene between McCarthy and Morrell at the end.  It can't be reduced to words – it must be watched.

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Chris's personal ratings:
 

Colin's looks:  *** (but, he's not supposed to look good in this one)
Colin's acting ability:  *****
The film in general: *****
Ranking in the films of Colin Firth:  ****
Watchability and rewind factor:  ***  (it's a hard film to watch)

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WEB LINKS

Back to Main Roles page

Visit the Firth Archives Hostages pics

Visit the original Friends of Firth website, which now incorporates the Circle of Friends web ring

Visit Murph's website- includes listings for other Firth websites

Visit Lisa's overview of Colin's career & web page

Link to Jane's articles page

 

CREDITS

This page was written by Chris, edited by Janet, designed and assembled by Meluchie

Photocopied photo from Entertainment Weekly magazine (provided by UKAAS); Snappies by Vicki Harris and Meluchie
Also various photos from Some Other Rainbow by John McCarthy and Jill Morell (as noted)