The Kidnappers
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The Kidnappers
''The Kidnappers'' (US: ''The Little Kidnappers'') is a 1953 British film, directed by Philip Leacock and written by Neil Paterson. Plot In the early 1900s, two young orphaned brothers, eight-year-old Harry (Jon Whiteley) and five-year-old Davy Mackenzie (Vincent Winter) are sent to live in a Scottish settlement in Nova Scotia, Canada, with their stern Grandfather (Duncan Macrae) and Grandmother (Jean Anderson) after their father's death in the Boer War. The boys would love to have a dog but are not allowed, Grandaddy holding that "ye canna eat a dog". Then they find an abandoned baby. Living in fear of Grandaddy (he beats Harry, the older boy, for disobeying him), they conceal it from the adults. They view the baby as a kind of substitute for the dog that they have been denied (Davy, the younger boy, asks his brother, "Shall we call the baby Rover, Harry?"). Grandaddy is having problems with the Dutch settlers who have arrived at the settlement in increasing numbers after ...
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Philip Leacock
Philip David Charles Leacock (8 October 1917 – 14 July 1990) was an English television and film director and producer. His brother was documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock. Career Born in London, England, Leacock spent his childhood in the Canary Islands. He began his career directing documentaries and later turned to fiction films. He was known for his films about children, particularly ''The Kidnappers'' (US: ''The Little Kidnappers'', 1953), which gained Honorary Juvenile Acting Oscars for two of its performers, and '' The Spanish Gardener'' (1956) starring Dirk Bogarde. He also directed ''Innocent Sinners'' (1958) with Flora Robson, ''The Rabbit Trap'' (1959) with Ernest Borgnine, and ''The War Lover'' (1962) with Steve McQueen, based on John Hersey's novel about a World War II pilot. He began to work mainly in Hollywood, where he made ''Take a Giant Step'' (1959) about a black youth's encounter with racism and ''Let No Man Write My Epitaph'' (1960) about an aspiring ...
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Francis De Wolff
Francis Marie de Wolff (7 January 191318 April 1984) was an English character actor. Large, bearded, and beetle-browed, he was often cast as villains in both film and television. Life and career Born in Essex, he made his film debut in '' Flame in the Heather'' (1935), and made many other appearances in such films as ''Fire Over England'' (1937), ''Treasure Island'' (1950), '' Scrooge'' (1951), as the Ghost of Christmas Present, ''Ivanhoe'' (1952), ''Moby Dick'' (1956), '' Saint Joan'' (1957), '' From Russia with Love'' (1963), and ''Carry On Cleo'' (1964). He is perhaps best remembered, however, as a supporting player in horror movies of the 1950s and 1960s, many of them for Hammer Films. These include ''Corridors of Blood'' (1958), ''The Hound of the Baskervilles'' (1959), ''The Man Who Could Cheat Death'' (1959), ''The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll'' (1960), '' Devil Doll'' (1964), and ''The Black Torment'' (1964). His last film appearance was in ''The Three Musketeers'' (1973). ...
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Coralee Elliott Testar
Coralee Elliott Testar UE (born February 1946 in Prince Edward Island) (died September 2023 in Vancouver British Columbia) was a Vancouver based producer and screenwriter. She was a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada. Her many credits include the award-winning '' The Little Kidnappers'' (Disney), "City Boy" (Bonneville/PBS) based on the novel ''Freckles'', and the television adaptation of '' Girl of the Limberlost'' (PBS). Testar was a past president of the British Columbia Motion Picture Industry Association and a lifetime member of the Writers Guild of Canada The Writers Guild of Canada is an organization representing more than 2,500 professional writers working in film, television, radio, and digital media production in Canada. Members of the Guild write dramatic TV series, feature films, Movies of th .... External links * 1946 births Living people 20th-century Canadian screenwriters Writers from Vancouver Canadian women screenwriters National Thea ...
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Charlton Heston
Charlton Heston (born John Charles Carter; October 4, 1923April 5, 2008) was an American actor and political activist. As a Hollywood star, he appeared in almost 100 films over the course of 60 years. He played Moses in the epic film ''The Ten Commandments'' (1956), for which he received his first nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama and the title role in '' Ben-Hur'' (1959), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He also starred in '' The Greatest Show on Earth'' (1952), ''Secret of the Incas'' (1954), ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) with Orson Welles, ''The Big Country'' (1958), ''El Cid'' (1961), ''The Greatest Story Ever Told'' (1965), ''Khartoum'' (1966), ''Planet of the Apes'' (1968), ''The Omega Man'' (1971) and ''Soylent Green'' (1973). In the 1950s and 1960s, he was one of a handful of Hollywood actors to speak openly against racism and was an active supporter of the civil rights movement. Heston left the Democratic Party in ...
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The Little Kidnappers (1990 Film)
''The Little Kidnappers'' is a 1990 Canadian/American television film made by Testar Productions, Margellos-Resnick and Jones 21st Century for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Disney Channel. It tells the story of orphans Harry and Davy MacKenzie (Leo Wheatley and Charles Miller), who are sent to live with their stern grandfather, James MacKenzie (Charlton Heston). Based on the short story "Scotch Settlement" by Neil Paterson ( previously filmed in 1953), set in Nova Scotia in 1903, the film was shot in several locations throughout Nova Scotia with dockside scenes being filmed aboard the CSS ''Acadia'' at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax. Plot Coralee Elliott Testar's version of the story revolves around letters written by James' son to his wife and children. Harry and Davy have brought them in a box James had carved for his son many years before. Through these letters, James begins to find healing from his grief over the death of his son at the hand ...
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1954 Cannes Film Festival
The 7th Cannes Film Festival was held from 25 March to 9 April 1954. With Jean Cocteau as President of the Jury, the Grand Prix went to the '' Gate of Hell'' by Teinosuke Kinugasa. The festival opened with '' Le Grand Jeu'' by Robert Siodmak. This was the last festival with a predominantly French jury. As the festival was becoming more and more a pole of showbiz attraction, scandals and romances of stars were appearing in the press. In 1954, the Simone Silva affair during the Cannes Festival ended up in the destruction of her career as an actor and her premature death, three years later. Jury The following people were appointed as the Jury of the 1954 competition: Feature films *Jean Cocteau (France) Jury President *Jean Aurenche (France) *André Bazin (France) *Luis Buñuel (Spain) *Henri Calef (France) * Guy Desson (France) (MP official) * Philippe Erlanger (France) * Michel Fourre-Cormeray (France) * Jacques-Pierre Frogerais (France) (CNC official) *Jacques Ibert (France) * Ge ...
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BAFTA Film Awards
The British Academy Film Awards, more commonly known as the BAFTA Film Awards is an annual award show hosted by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) to honour the best British and international contributions to film. The ceremonies were initially held at the flagship Odeon cinema in Leicester Square in London, before being held at the Royal Opera House from 2007 to 2016. Since 2017, the ceremony has been held at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The statue awarded to recipients depicts a theatrical mask. The first BAFTA Awards ceremony was held in 1949, and the ceremony was first broadcast on the BBC in 1956 with Vivien Leigh as the host. The ceremony was initially held in April or May; since 2001, it typically takes place in February. History The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) was founded in 1947 as The British Film Academy, by David Lean, Alexander Korda, Carol Reed, Charles Laughton, Roger Manvell, Laurence Olivier, Emeric Pressburge ...
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Margaret Thomson
Margaret Thomson (10 June 1910 – 30 December 2005) was an Australian-born documentary filmmaker who divided her forty-year career between New Zealand and England. She was the first female film director active in New Zealand. Family and education Margaret Thomson was born in Australia to Gertrude Thomson and James Allan Thomson, a geologist. He was appointed head of the Dominion Museum in Wellington, so Margaret spent most of her childhood in New Zealand. She attended Canterbury University, graduating with a degree in zoology. Film career She moved to England in 1934. Her first film-related job in England was with Gaumont-British Instructional Films, for whom she worked initially as their film librarian and subsequently as editor for a series of films on the ecology of Great Britain. She left in 1938 and worked as a film editor elsewhere, eventually joining Realist Film Unit (RFU) in 1941. Partly due to the onset of World War II, which opened opportunities for women while men ...
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Academy Juvenile Award
The Academy Juvenile Award, also known informally as the Juvenile Oscar, was a Special Honorary Academy Award bestowed at the discretion of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to specifically recognize juvenile performers under the age of eighteen for their "outstanding contribution to screen entertainment". The honor was first awarded by the Academy at the 7th Academy Awards to 6-year-old Shirley Temple for her work in motion pictures of 1934. The Award continued to be presented intermittently over the next 26 years to a total of 12 child actors and actresses, with the last Juvenile Oscar presented at the 33rd Academy Awards to 14-year-old Hayley Mills who received the child-size statuette for her performance in the 1960 film ''Pollyanna''. The trophy itself was a miniature Academy Award statuette standing an estimated seven inches tall (depending upon variations to its base over time), approximately half the height of the sta ...
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The Advertiser (Adelaide)
''The Advertiser'' is a daily tabloid format newspaper based in the city of Adelaide, South Australia. First published as a broadsheet named ''The South Australian Advertiser'' on 12 July 1858,''The South Australian Advertiser'', published 1858–1889
National Library of Australia, digital newspaper library.
it is currently a tabloid printed from Monday to Saturday. ''The Advertiser'' came under the ownership of in the 1950s, and the full ownership of in 1987. It is a publication of Advertiser Newspapers Pty Ltd (ADV), ...
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Christopher Beeny
Christopher Winton Beeny (7 July 1941 – 3 January 2020) was an English actor and dancer. He had a career as a child actor, but was best known for his work as the footman Edward Barnes on the 1970s television series '' Upstairs, Downstairs'', as Billy Henshaw in the sitcom '' In Loving Memory'' (Yorkshire Television), and as the incompetent debt collector and golfer Morton Beamish in ''Last of the Summer Wine''. Early life Beeny was born in London. He moved to Bristol with his family as a young child, spent several years at the Arts Educational School, and later attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. As a child, Beeny began his career at the age of six when he danced for the Ballet Rambert. Beeny's first screen role was in the film ''The Long Memory'' (1953). It starred John Mills and featured Thora Hird, Beeny's future co-star in '' In Loving Memory'' and ''Last of the Summer Wine''. Television Beeny played Lenny Grove in the first British television soap, the BBC TV ...
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Eric Woodburn
Eric Woodburn (''né'' Eric Melville Reis; 9 March 189425 October 1981) was a Scottish stage, film and television actor. Prior to this he had a long career on the stage and was also a noted baritone singer. His most important role was as Doctor Alexander Snoddie in ''Doctor Finlay's Casebook''. He also played the father of Lance Corporal Jones in the Museum Piece episode of ''Dad's Army ''Dad's Army'' is a British television British sitcom, sitcom about the United Kingdom's Home Guard (United Kingdom), Home Guard during the World War II, Second World War. It was written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft (TV producer), David Crof ...''. Filmography References External links * 1894 births 1981 deaths Scottish male stage actors Scottish male film actors Scottish male television actors Male actors from Glasgow 20th-century Scottish male actors {{Scotland-actor-stub ...
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