TV Film of the Week: The Kidnappers

Two little orphan boys are not allowed a dog by their stern grandfather, so instead they steal a baby to have something to love and play with.

Insufferably sugary? Not a bit of it. The Kidnappers, to be shown by Channel at 10.00 a.m. on Tuesday 9 January, is actually rather a bleak film, dealing with poverty and racial tension. It was made in Scotland in 1953, but set in Canada at the time of the Boer War. So much for the idea that British films of the period were always insular.

The best account of the film I can find is in the obituary of one of the young stars, Vincent Winter, who died in 1998. Tom Vallance writes:

The film's success was largely due to the performances of the two young lads in the leading roles, John Whiteley and, playing his younger brother, the chubby-cheeked Vincent Winter, who managed to be totally endearing without ever becoming self-consciously cute. It is the little dog-lover Davy (Winter) who suggests, when the boys are deciding on a name for the infant, "We could call it Rover."

Whiteley and Winter were both given special miniature Academy Awards for their "outstanding juvenile performances", and Winter went on to have a lifelong career in show business, though not eventually as an actor ...

Winter was born in 1947 in Aberdeen, Scotland, and was only five years old when discovered by a children's coach, Margaret Thompson. Whiteley had already played a major role in Charles Crichton's Hunted (1952), but Winter was without experience.

Philip Leacock recalled: "We brought the children in to test for the parts; we did play situations, as we did with the film itself. Vincent couldn't read so he had to be firmly taught lines - he had a memory like a computer. He would do his own lines aloud and then silently mouth everyone else's words!"

The naturalism that Winter conveyed gave no hint of the primitive methods of training. "If we had a little white ratting dog," he suggests to his grandmother, still hopeful, "it wouldn't eat but rats and it could have a wee end off of my ration on a Sunday."

Whiteley, nearly three years older, was also Scottish, and part of the two boys' charm lay in their melodious Aberdeenshire accents. "Is it our babby now?" asks Winter after they discover the child. "It's mine," replies Whiteley soberly, "but you can have a loan of it while I've other business."

Jon Whiteley is now a distinguished art historian at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.