Taken Hostage movie review & film summary (2022)
I know lots of Americans at the time shared my rage and frustration. It was on the news virtually every day. Nightly reports on an ABC-TV show that became "Nightline" stoked the agonizing emotions, which only piled on the anger and shame many Americans felt when Vietnam fell only four years before. What provoked this new nightmare, which seemed to come out of nowhere?
Though, of course, it hadn’t. The crisis over the Iranians holding 53 Americans hostage was only the climactic act in a drama that had been unfolding for decades, and it’s one of the bitterest ironies of the modern era that even given all the resources and immediacy of modern media, Americans knew so little of this history in 1979, and perhaps still don’t.
That’s why Robert Stone’s two-part, four-hour documentary “Taken Hostage” (airing Nov. 14-15 on PBS, then on PBS streaming) is such a welcome corrective. It is the second of two docs about the hostage crisis to arrive on American TV this season; the first, the four-hour “Hostages,” went up on HBO in September. Both films are well worth your time. In some ways, “Hostages” offers a better, more detailed account of those painful 444 days, in part because it devotes almost all of its four hours to the subject. But as Brian Tallerico’s review of the show noted, its first hour offers only a very skimpy account of the crisis’ back story. That’s what makes the first two hours of Stone’s film so important and revelatory in comparison: It’s the best, most comprehensive and clarifying documentary I’ve seen about how U.S. actions toward Iran from the 1950s onward led to the tragedy that would embroil both countries in 1979.
The key figure early on is Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosadegh, a man who was revered by many Iranians. Iran had emerged from World War II relatively unscathed, though its massive oil reserves were controlled by the British. After coming to power in 1951, Mosadegh moved to nationalize the oil industry, a change with both financial and symbolic value and one almost universally supported by Iranians. Mosadegh made history by going to the United Nations to make the case for countries like his controlling their own resources, a bold proposition that resulted in his being named Time magazine’s Man of the Year.
