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Brad Davis and John Hurt find themselves in melodramatic hell in Midnight Express |
Director: Alan Parker
Cast: Brad Davis (Billy Hayes), Randy Quaid (Jimmy Booth),
John Hurt (Max), Paul L Smith (Hamidou), Irene Miracle (Susan), Bo Hopkins
(Tex), Paolo Bonacelli (Rifkin), Norbert Weisser (Erich), Mike Kellin (Mr Hayes),
Peter Jeffrey (Ahmet), Kevork Malikyan (Prosecutor)

Midnight Express
was an unexpected controversial sleeper hit. Many felt the film was grossly
violent, horrible, and borderline racist towards its Turkish characters.
Looking back now, the violence is (with a few exceptions) no more than you
might expect – but the attitude the film takes towards its Turkish characters
really sticks out.
There is barely a Turk in this who isn’t crooked, sadistic,
greedy, ugly or stupid (or a combination of all five). The depiction is so
unsettlingly bad, the real Billy Hayes apologised at the time (he was joined
years later by the film’s producers and writer, Oliver Stone). Many of the
Turks are lascivious anal rapists, while the whole film has a queasy unease
about homosexuality. The real Billy Hayes engaged in relationships with other
men in prison – the film’s Hayes kisses a fellow prisoner in the shower but
then shakes his head and leaves. A 1970s audience could cope with seeing a man
flogged or tortured – but in no way could they be expected to watch two men
making out.
Other than these unsettling black marks, Midnight Express is a taut, well-made, melodrama.
And I say melodrama because both Stone and Parker frequently go over the top.
After a friend is betrayed to a horrible fate by a Turkish prisoner, Hayes
freaks out, violently beats the Turk, gouges his eyes and then (in almost
laughable slow-mo) bites his tongue out and spits it across the room. Later, he
is finally allowed to receive a visit from his girlfriend – she presses her
breasts up against the glass while a near catatonic Hayes tearfully masturbates
(“I wish I could make it better for you baby” she sighs, tearfully). Yes both
those sequences are as OTT as they sound.
But when it calms down, Parker crafts a pretty affecting
story. It cuts Hayes a lot of slack – I found it hard to feel sorry for a dumb,
drug-smuggler who assumes his American passport will let him off with a slap on
the wrist. I can’t be alone in thinking that someone who breaks the law deserves
to pay some sort of price. To be fair, I think the film partly shares this
view: it fast-forwards through most of Hayes’ original term, and only really
hits into full misery once his sentence is arbitrarily extended by 27 years. I
think Parker and Stone believe this switches the moral right to Hayes, who had
served his term only to be hit with a sudden draconian change weeks before
release.
A lot of the film’s impact comes from Brad Davis’
impassioned performance as Hayes. There is something very sensitive and gentle
about Davis, a real vulnerability that the film seizes upon to great effect. He
looks like a bewildered lost soul, and Davis’ performance is scintillating
first in its confusion, then his distress and anger.
There are decent performances from the rest of the cast, with
John Hurt standing out as the gentle Max. Garlanded with awards, Hurt is
perfect as the straggled, beaten down, but still cynical and surly Max – and of
course Hurt’s natural affinity for suffering works perfectly for a character
who goes through the wringer. Quaid also does decent work as a thoughtless
loudmouth, as does Kellin as Hayes’ impotent father. It’s also nice to see a
small cameo from Peter Jeffrey as a well-spoken half-English paedophile in the
prison’s psychiatric ward.
It’s a shame that Midnight
Express too frequently goes too far, as it’s got an almost medieval
understanding of suffering. The prison is a grim world of its own, where the
prisoners largely self-police and acts of petty revenge are common. Later in
the film, Hayes is sent to the film’s psychiatric ward, a hellish basement
where prisoners walk in drugged-up dumbness pointlessly round and round a stone
pillar.
Moments like this are far more impactful because they avoid
the extremities of the rest of the film. Most of what we see isn’t true –
Hayes’ story and his escape was vastly different, and the film exaggerates both
his naïveté and his suffering – but it still works extremely well. Parker
fought to end the film simply, rather than the all-action escape sequence
filmed and this works wonderfully (it’s basically a Third Man homage, by way of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye) – although it still finds another moment for a
threat of anal rape in the final ten minutes.
Midnight Express
is a decent film, but not a pleasant one – and it leaves a slightly sour taste
in the mouth, for all the competence with which it is made. Parker and Stone
frequently go too far, and the reek of homophobic racism still comes off the
film. However it is certainly a good piece of technical film-making and has
some marvellous performances in the mix.
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