Eric's Time Capsule: Midnight Express (Oct. 6, 1978)

By the time it was released theatrically 30 years ago this week, on Oct. 6, 1978, Midnight Express had already caused controversy. Would you be surprised to know that Oliver Stone was involved?

The film, an adaptation of a memoir written by Billy Hayes, an American who spent the first half of the 1970s in a Turkish prison, had premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. The book had been widely read, so people were already aware that the movie version, with a screenplay by Stone, departed from the facts in several significant ways. Furthermore, the film paints Turkey as a brutal, backwards country where the law is capriciously administered. For many people even today the mention of Turkey calls to mind either Midnight Express or the reference to it in Airplane! ("Joey, have you ever been to a Turkish prison?")

In fact, the film adaptation of Midnight Express was so over the top in its portrayal of the Turks that Billy Hayes, Oliver Stone, director Alan Parker and producer David Puttnam each eventually apologized for it, separately and at different times. And when Oliver Stone is admitting he played fast and loose with the facts, you know he must have really played fast and loose.

Billy Hayes is played in the film by Brad Davis, who looks a bit like Josh Brolin (and, for that matter, like the real Hayes, who's seen in a behind-the-scenes feature on the DVD). The year is 1970 and Billy, who has been vacationing in Istanbul, is arrested at the airport with two kilos of hashish taped to his body, which he had bought locally and planned to sell to his buddies back home. In a flash he is swept into the Turkish legal system, which seems to consist only of dank, cement-floored back rooms where all the employees are corrupt, sadistic, and/or sexually predatory. This last is conveyed in a scene where Billy has to stand naked before a group of prison officials for no apparent reason.

Billy notes in a letter home that "homosexuality ... is a big crime here, but most of them do it every chance they get." ("Hey! You guys better not be doing homosexuality in there!") Still, though the real Billy indulged of some of that with a fellow inmate, the movie Billy remains chaste, even gently rebuffing the advances of another prisoner. Later, his American girlfriend visits him in prison and he persuades her to show him her breasts, probably to let the movie audience know that he's still straight.

Considering how famous Midnight Express is for its harrowing depiction of prison abuse, it's surprising how little of it there actually is in the film. We see the guards beat Billy's friend Jimmy (Randy Quaid) to a pulp, landing him in the hospital, and Billy himself has the bottoms of his feet whipped. (The Turks must have liked that; other prisoners get the foot treatment in another scene.) Rape is only barely implied, and never with Billy as its victim. By today's standards, what happens in Midnight Express is rather tame.

The basic concept is still horrific, though: Billy Hayes is sentenced to life in prison (reduced to 30 years by a sympathetic judge) for what basically amounts to a stupid youthful misdemeanor. Jimmy is in for a long stretch because he stole two candlesticks from a mosque. The film suggests, with all the subtlety we would come to expect from an Oliver Stone screenplay, that justice in Turkey is harsh, merciless, and unrelenting. And the Turks themselves? Swarthy philistines.

Billy manages to hold it together until he finds out, just 53 days before he was supposed to be released, that his sentence has been extended to the aforementioned 30 years. He has a courtroom monologue that starts out talking about the qualities of justice and mercy before coming to a crescendo with this:

"For a nation of pigs, it sure is funny you don't eat them. Jesus Christ forgave the bastards, but I can't. I hate you, I hate your nation, and I hate your people. And I f*** your sons and daughters because they're pigs. [To the prosecutor] You're a pig! [To all] You're all pigs!"

At this point, with the way he's been treated, it's hard not to agree with him -- which is probably why the Turks were none too pleased with the film and sought to ban it when it was released.

But the Turks weren't the only people getting shafted in American films at this time. The post-Vietnam movies had started to come around, and 1978's eventual Oscar-winner, The Deer Hunter (released two months after Midnight Express), went the usual route of portraying the Vietnamese as cruel and insane. Had America's tragedies abroad made filmmakers wary of foreigners in general?

Midnight Express won six Golden Globes (including best drama) and was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture. It won Oscars for its screenplay and musical score. Among its nominees (for Best Supporting Actor) was John Hurt, playing a hashish-addled prisoner who's oddly similar to the doddering old man Hurt played in this year's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Brad Davis wasn't nominated for an Oscar, though he did get two Golden Globe nods: one for best actor in a drama (which he lost) and one for "best motion picture acting debut -- male" (which he won).

Davis' story is tragic. A victim of sexual abuse as a child (by his mother, no less), he struggled with drugs and alcohol for much of his life, got sober in 1981, was diagnosed with AIDS in 1985, and ended his life via assisted suicide in 1991. Rumors of his homosexuality abounded, probably because of his illness, but his wife insists that not only was he straight, he was an unfaithful womanizer to boot. Whatever the case, his performance in Midnight Express is solid and convincing, and the film holds up now, 30 years later, without feeling dated. The filmmakers may have regretted going overboard in their depiction of the Turks, but the nightmare scenario they created for their protagonist is certainly effective. Unfortunately, the star's life wasn't much better.

FROM THE TIME CAPSULE: When Midnight Express was released 30 years ago this week, on Oct. 6, 1978 ...

• Audiences were still enjoying the summertime hits Grease, Jaws 2, and Animal House. Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke had been released a few weeks earlier. On the very same day that Midnight Express hit theaters, two films with oddly similar titles were also released: Jack Nicholson's Goin' South and Donny and Marie Osmond's Goin' Coconuts.
• Halloween and The Wiz were just a few weeks away, and Superman was preparing for its December launch.
• The No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart was Exile's "Kiss You All Over," a song I have never even heard of, let alone heard. It was No. 1 for four weeks, but I'm not sure being the most popular song in 1978, in the middle of the Disco Era, really counts for much.
• The top five TV shows were all ABC sitcoms: Three's Company, Laverne and Shirley, Mork & Mindy, Happy Days, and Angie.
• Pope John Paul I had died a week earlier (after only 33 days in office), to be succeeded on Oct. 16 by Pope John Paul II. President Jimmy Carter was four days away from signing a bill that would put the Susan B. Anthony dollar into production. The Yankees had just won the American League East pennant (defeating the Red Sox, as usual), and they went on to beat the Dodgers in the World Series on Oct. 17.
• Sid Vicious' girlfriend Nancy Spungen had six days to live. Norman Rockwell, Golda Meir, and Ed Wood all had less than two months left. Actress Shannyn Sossamon and Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears were both three days old. R&B singer Usher had another eight days of gestation left. Wes Bentley and Ruben Studdard were both less than a month old.

Eric's Time Capsule appears every Monday at Film.com. You can visit Eric at his website, where the renaming of Constantinople as Istanbul is nobody's business but the Turks'.

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