The hard-hitting 1978 prison
drama Midnight Express shares dubious
qualities with another acclaimed film of the same year, Michael Cimino’s
Vietnam saga The Deer Hunter. Both
pictures feature unflinching depictions of inhumane treatment during
incarceration, and both pictures are bullshit. In the case of Cimino’s movie,
the famous Russian roulette scene used to depict the savagery of the Viet Cong
had no basis in reality. Similarly, the most brutal sequences in Midnight Express are fabrications, even
though Midnight Express was directly
adapted from a book by Billy Hayes, the unfortunate young man whose odyssey in
a Turkish prison is depicted in the movie.
So, while Midnight Express is unquestionably arresting (and sometimes
riveting), the movie has a distasteful undercurrent. It’s as if the film’s
producers, together with screenwriter Oliver Stone and director Alan Parker,
felt Hayes’ real-life travails weren’t sufficiently harrowing, which is
nonsense. Therefore, it’s impossible not to wonder at the filmmakers’ agenda—was
the point of goosing the content simply to make Midnight Express more exciting, or was something else involved,
since nearly every Turk portrayed in the movie is a sadistic monster?
Anyway,
the story begins when Billy (Brad Davis), a cocky young American, straps two
kilos of hash to his body before departing for the Istanbul airport. He’s caught with the drugs and thrown into a
prison straight out of the Middle Ages, where physical abuse and rape are
rampant. While ineffectual forces including Billy’s family and the U.S.
consulate try to arrange Billy’s release, Billy makes friends in jail. His pals
include hotheaded American Jimmy (Randy Quaid), who’s forever formulating
escape plans; drug-addled Englishman Max (John Hurt), who knows secrets about
the prison’s layout; and Erich (Norbert Weisser), a European with whom Billy
forms a quasi-romantic bond. Meanwhile, Billy suffers the torments of grotesque
jailers including sleazy trustee Rifki (Paolo Bonacelli) and vile head guard
Hamidou (Paul L. Smith).
Midnight Express
is torture porn made before that term was coined, because the film’s
“entertainment value” comes from watching how much abuse Billy can endure.
There’s an old-fashioned escape flick built into the picture’s DNA, of course,
since the real Billy did indeed flee Turkish incarceration, but Parker and
Stone seem more preoccupied with cataloguing horrors than in truly developing
Billy’s characterization. Make no mistake, Midnight
Express is an expertly rendered movie, with Stone’s script racing forward
at a relentless speed while Parker creates grimly beautiful tableaux and
composer Giorgio Moroder adds otherworldly textures through his Oscar-winning
electronic score. The acting is also quite good, with Davis using every bit of
his limited skillset while slicker actors including Hurt and Quaid offer
subtler work for balance.
But particularly when the movie slips into hard-to-watch
scenes that spring from the filmmakers’ imagination, like a vicious moment in
which Billy rips the tongue from another man’s mouth, it’s hard to discern
authorial intention. Is this a thriller or a horror movie? And if it’s a
cautionary tale drawn from life, why so much fakery? No matter its peculiar
contours, however, Midnight Express
is highly memorable, as seen by one of its oddest echoes in the pop-culture
universe—the scene in Airplane!
(1980) during which a creepy pilot asks a young boy, “Joey, have you ever been
in a Turkish prison?”
Midnight Express: GROOVY
