Charlie Martin Smith starred in westerns as a teenager with James Coburn and Lee Marvin. A little bald guy, with glasses and a nervous smile, he cornered the market in weedy sidekicks and pen-pushers in classics such as Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, American Graffiti and, years later, The Untouchables.

But this iconic Hollywood actor has ended up directing a film about Scottish nationalists and a curious incident from the byways of British political history — the removal of the Stone of Destiny, on which generations of Scottish kings had been crowned, from Westminster Abbey in 1950.

His achievement in getting the film Stone of Destiny before the cameras, with a cast that includes Robert Carlyle and Billy Boyd, is all the more remarkable because if follows several abortive attempts by indigenous film-makers — I had it at No 6 in an article I wrote on the Top 10 Scottish Films Never Made in 2001, behind Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Sean Connery’s Macbeth.

“I know,” says the 54-year-old actor-turned-writer/director, with the bubbling enthusiasm of a 14-year-old. “What the hell was I thinking? There’s not a drop of Scottish blood in me.”

Had Sir Sean raised the subject during the making of The Untouchables? Connery, Smith and Kevin Costner were law enforcement agents on the trail of Al Capone (Robert De Niro) in the successful movie, which won Connery an Oscar in 1988.

Connery certainly worked Scottish politics into the conversation. “We had a few discussions about it,” says Smith. But the daring Westminster raid wasn’t part of them.

It was at a Los Angeles party that Smith heard the story of how four students broke into Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, armed only with a crowbar and a lot of audacity — they even chatted to a policeman in the street outside.

They did, however, break the stone, and one of the students lost two toes after it was dropped on her foot. The heist prompted headlines around the world and the police launched an international search and closed the Scottish border.

The Coronation Stone was, according to myth, a pillow used by Jacob while dreaming about a ladder to heaven, which somehow found its way to the village of Scone in Perthshire. A plain sandstone slab, weighing about 450lbs, it had great symbolic power.

It was taken to London by King Edward I in the 13th century. After the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, the English agreed to return it but never did. It has been suggested that Edward was fobbed off with the cesspit cover from Scone Abbey — meaning a succession of British monarchs sat on a lavatory lid while being crowned. But six centuries later, most Scots believed there had been a theft. So in 1950 Ian Hamilton, Kay Matheson, Gavin Vernon and Alan Stuart went to get it back.

Smith says: “I heard the story from a producer friend who had read the book [written by Hamilton]. We were standing around at a party with a glass of wine and he told me the story and I just said, ‘What a great idea for a film’.”

The result is a gently old-fashioned movie with no guns, violence or sex, closer in spirit to Whisky Galore! and Passport to Pimlico than Braveheart.

This has not stopped Alex Salmond hoping it will have the same effect as the Mel Gibson epic in stirring support for independence. The first minister attended its premiere at The Edinburgh International Film Festival in June with Ian Hamilton, who went on to become a QC, and who was persuaded to view the stone in Edinburgh Castle. Hamilton, still a maverick at 81, had refused to attend a welcome ceremony when the stone was returned to Scotland by the then Scottish secretary Michael Forsyth in 1996.

It was not the Scottish aspect that appealed to Smith, however. “It was the universal themes of the story,” he says. “My connection had more to do with having grown up in the 1960s and coming from a family of radicals. My father was an artist and was interested in social causes and I remember as a kid marching for civil rights and protesting at the Vietnam war.

“I just felt at that age that we, the university students, could change the world. You have that feeling when you’re young, and that’s what I really connected with in the story.”

Smith started acting professionally in his teens and appeared in several westerns in quick succession. He had a supporting role in Sam Peckinpah’s classic Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. “Sam was a force of nature,” he recalls, “and a much more studied and serious director than people realise.”

Behind the camera, Smith worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and directed Disney’s Air Bud. He had been developing the Stone of Destiny project for nearly a decade — he wrote the film using Hamilton’s book as his source — and was fascinated to see the SNP’s advance in that time, though as an outsider he wishes to “steer clear” of the question of independence.

The film — a Canadian-UK production shot in Glasgow — will close the Toronto Film Festival this month before opening in Scotland, then England. Smith hopes it will also play well in America. “I tried to make it a universal story of the underdog fighting back against the big guy,” he says. “I think things like that will resonate in the US as well.”

Stone of Destiny opens in Scotland on October 10.

When Scotland was less divided by ideology

THE “repatriation” of the stone by Ian Hamilton and his fellow students may have enthralled the nation nearly sixty years ago, but it happened before the TV age decided which events to preserve for posterity.

For many people, Scottish nationalism began in 1967 when Winnie Ewing won the Hamilton by-election, because it was seen on TV — and now is on YouTube.

This film should change the way we view 20th- century Scottish politics, showing that the success of Ewing in 1967 — and of Alex Salmond today — has its origins in the activities of people long forgotten in official political history.

Birlinn, the Scottish publisher, has reissued two books by the men most closely involved. Stone of Destiny, by Ian Hamilton, which inspired the film, is a hilarious romp that reads like the script of an Ealing comedy. The Flag in the Wind by Hamilton’s mentor, John MacCormick, tells how the nationalist movement grew out of a student society he founded in the 1920s and later became the SNP.

The most striking thing about both accounts is how deferential early nationalism was to king and country. The young Hamilton, fresh from national service, frets about how his raid might affect the health of George VI, who saw Britain through the war.

MacCormick laments the terrible disservice done to nationalism by the wild poet Hugh MacDiarmid. The Kirk seems to play a big role in everyone’s life. Yet there is a sense of nationalism as a unifying force, bringing together everyone from shipyard workers to the Earl of Mansfield, who plays a bizarre bit part in the stone’s repatriation, along with a band of travelling English gypsies and hapless police.

Both books show that Scottish national identity was a powerful force early in the last century and that even after the second world war, when official history suggests the Blitz and Clement Attlee’s welfare state meant the British state was strongest, there was resentment about Scottish industry being nationalised.

Despite the unifying experience of the war, the nationalists won a by-election in 1945 and MacCormick persuaded 2m Scottish adults to sign a petition for self-government — The National Covenant.

MacCormick left the SNP to bring all political parties behind his movement. Later, intense rivalry between Labour and the SNP cast the national issue as “divisive”. Each claimed to be the true voice of Scotland.

Modern nationalism might be less about kirk and king, but there is a new sense of connection with the world described in these books — a Scotland less divided by class and ideology than, say, the 1980s and 1990s.

Stone of Destiny and The Flag in the Wind are published by Birlinn, at £9.99

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• Oscars

• Cannes

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette