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Kidnapped (Walt Disney; Buena Vista). Robert Louis Stevenson's casual classic was written, he confessed, with "no more desperate purpose than to steal some young gentleman's attention from his Ovid." Walt Disney's movie version may persuade the young gentlemen that Latin homework is a comparative pleasure.

Shot in Scotland by Director Robert Stevenson, who says he is Author Stevenson's tenth cousin, Kidnapped follows the story of the novel accurately enough. David Balfour (James MacArthur, 22-year-old son of Actress Helen Hayes), "a steady lad and a canny goer," is diddled out of an inheritance by his wicked Uncle Ebenezer, who has the boy sandbagged aboard a brig bound west for the Carolinas, where the infamous Captain Hoseason intends to sell him as a bondslave. But the ship is wrecked off the Isle of Mull, and David, washed ashore, soon finds himself involved in a political murder case. Pursued by Hanoverian redcoats, he flees through the Scottish Highlands. Home at last, David lays his uncle by the heels and gets his ancestral portion.

Like all the Disney adaptations of famous boys' books (Treasure Island, Rob Roy), Kidnapped shuns the grandeurs that encumber most of Hollywood's hysterical historicals. The picture is made to the scale of the book, which is modest. Unfortunately, in trying to keep it small, Director Stevenson has also made it insignificant; and in trying to temper its excitement, he has let it become dull.

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