To board an aircraft is scary in its own right. To do so with copious amounts of illegal narcotics strapped to your torso with duct tape is suicidal. While the United States has a plethora of flaws when it comes to drugs and drug crimes, many foreign nations take the illegal drug trade to another level.
Australian model Schapelle Corby spent a decade in an Indonesian dungeon when she was caught with nine pounds of cannabis in Bali in 2005. Movies like “Return to Paradise” and “Brokedown Palace” depict fictitious tales of Americans and their would-be efforts to transport drugs across the border of foreign nations. The 1978 Alan Parker film “Midnight Express” is similar save for one facet – the events are based on a real life case.
Istanbul, Turkey: 1970. American college student Billy Hayes (Brad Davis) is sweating like a roofer in the Carolina heat, his heart pounding audibly accompanies heavy breathing as he finishes taping bags of hashish to his stomach and gets dressed. With his shades on he looks like a typical lowlife. With the shades off, he is the striking image of a frightened kid.
En route to the airport, Billy meets up with his girlfriend Susan (Irene Miracle) and his nerves calm when it appears he has made it past the security check. But moments before boarding the plane that will return him home, a swarm of militants pull him from the line and quickly discover the drugs after a pat-own. Susan cries as she helplessly watches from the plane as Billy is taken away by a no less than a small battalion of heavily armed soldiers.
Thinking honesty will play as a reward, Billy confesses to an ominous official through a translator and is hauled off to a lawless prison. “It doesn’t matter if its two kilos, or two hundred.” One agent tells him. “The Turks like to make examples out of foreigners.”
Now an inmate at the harsh Sagmalicar Prison, Billy must learn to survive.
He befriends a wise English prisoner Max (John Hurt) and a rebellious fellow American Jimmy (Randy Quaid). Initially naive to the situation, Billy thinks the Turkish law will act in the same manner as it would in America. He soon discovers this is not the case when he hears Max’s words of advice. “The only way out, is to catch the Midnight Express.”
“Midnight Express” deals with a concept of struggling to survive and eventually attempt an escape from a prison similar to Andy Dufresne in “The Shawshank Redemption.” The major difference (aside from the reality of the story) is that Billy is actually guilty of the crime. Billy can be tough to root for as a protagonist since he did commit the illicit act, but once he is handed down an inhumane sentence, all bets are off.
Brad Davis is perfectly believable as Billy Hayes, alone in an awful situation that he threw away a perfectly good life to get into. You feel his nerves from the very beginning as he makes his way to the airport with bags of ganja tethered to his frame, or as he deals with the plight and helplessness inside the walls of the Turkish prison.
Hurt and Quaid offer plausibility in early roles for both men and the antagonists in the film range from the power hungry warden and shifty members of the Turkish courts, to a conniving and smarmy one-eyed fellow inmate called Rifki (Paolo Bonacelli) who explains to Billy with a wicked sneer the rules of prison life. “You f* other men before they f* you. And you must f* last.”
“Midnight Express” is good for its historical values, and fans of shows like “Locked up Abroad” will doubtless enjoy the real life case as it unfolds. The movie is a bit slow and not something one would want to watch multiple times. Some of the prison scenes are a bit graphic, but nothing in comparison to today’s world. As a historical piece, “Midnight Express” is informative. For entertainment sake, its an above average movie.
by – Matt Christopher
