Midnight Express (Blu-ray)

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"Midnight Express" is anathema in one respect, and pure Hollywood in another.

On the one hand, it presents a "hero" who's as anti as they come. "Midnight Express" is the story of a young American sentenced to four and a half years in a Turkish prison for being a dumb ass. His crime, other than stupidity, is that while traveling with his girlfriend in Istanbul he decided to strap about 20 bricks of hashish--the concentrated resin of the cannabis plant, a.k.a. marijuana--to his skinny little frame. In 1970, which is when this story begins, you could get a substantial bag of marijuana for a "nickel" (five bucks), but a "rock" of hash the size of a marble was much harder to come by and priced to match. So when Billy Hayes (Brad Davis) tries to leave Turkey with enough hash to get half of Los Angeles loaded, he's obviously not just looking for a new personal high. This guy is hoping to finance his college education plus grad school and a return trip to Istanbul. When he's caught at the airport because he sweats like a guy on a first date and we hear what he hears in his head--a little Edgar Allan Poe telltale heart action, ka-thump, ka-thump--he looks so guilty that even a meter maid would have whistled for back-up. He deserves to get busted, as far as I'm concerned, and as far as Hollywood is concerned, unsympathetic heroes can be risky business.

But Hollywood (and their audiences) do have certain fascinations--among them Nazis, hookers, dinosaurs, and prisons. So it really doesn't matter if Billy Hayes pulled a bonehead play and landed in a Turkish prison. Americans want to see what it's like inside a Turkish prison, and "Midnight Express" became a runaway commercial success. It also received six Oscar nominations--including Best Picture--and won for Best Music (Giorgio Moroder, who also won Oscars for "Top Gun" and "Flashdance") and Best Screenplay (Oliver Stone--yes, the Oliver Stone).

"Midnight Express" may not be as strong as "Papillon," "The Green Mile," "The Shawshank Redemption," or even an oldie-but-goodie prison flick like "Birdman of Alcatraz," but Stone avoids his usual self-indulgent excess and delivers a screenplay that feels so understated and fact-based that a voiceover narration would convince you it was a documentary. All that's helped by Alan Parker's fly-on-the-wall approach, and his direction is far less heavy-handed than we saw from him in "Angel Heart." The raw, you-are-there feel of "Midnight Express" comes closer to what we got from Parker in "The Commitments."

While we're inside the prison, the usual prison things happen. Some prisoners bond, others threaten or antagonize. Guards brutalize, even torture. Bribes exchange hands. Heads turn the other way. A snitch rats people out. And, of course, there's the usual quota of prison film homosexuality, which in "Midnight Express" is like cholesterol--some good, and some bad. Stone and Parker are conscious of the clichés--which nonetheless happen to be true--and we get self-aware moments to acknowledge them, as when überhippie Max (John Hurt), who's been in this particular Turkish prison the longest, reacts to an escape plan by reminding them that "this isn't Stalag 17." But like the typical prisoner-of-war film, which we'll call a subset of prison films, there's the obligatory escape attempts.

If "Midnight Express" were a baseball pitch, it would be a fastball right down the middle--nothing fancy, no corkscrew twists or big curves, just a straight-at-you pitch. That's the constraint of basing a film on a true story. One scene is bizarrely memorable and there's some invention here, as when the most hated Turkish guard (who has two porky little sons that he dresses like Little Lord Fauntleroys) gets his due in a way that's different from the version in Hayes' book, but there isn't the same degree of variation or complexity that we get in some of the better prison movies that I've already mentioned. "Midnight Express" is a solid entry in the prison film genre, but it doesn't make my top five. It might squeeze into my top ten, though.

Despite the familiar plot, there are some excellent performances, including (are you ready for this?) one by a very young and skinny Randy Quaid as fellow prisoner Jimmy Booth, who manages to be funny yet earnest and unpredictable. Davis is also quite good as Billy, while Norbert Weisser is just as believable as Erich, Bo Hopkins does a decent job as Tex, and the extras that Parker enlists to play the guards even do a fine job. Some of the exteriors were shot in Istanbul and Greece, but the bulk of the film was made on the isle of Malta over the course of a grueling 53 days. It was an ordeal for both cast and crew, with some very difficult scenes adding to everyone's frayed edges. The result, though, is a highly believable saga that is interestingly staged and shot by cinematographer Michael Seresin. But it's the Oscar-nominated editing by Gerry Hambling that keeps "Midnight Express" tonally on-track. It's not heavy-handed, either, with juxtapositions that are as artsy as they are interesting. It's an art to edit a picture like this to create interest in the visuals without drawing attention to the shots, but Seresin and Hambling get the job done.