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Next week will mark the 68th birthday of one of the most influential -- albeit underrated -- filmmakers of our time, Alan Parker.
The English director created a number of prominent movies, including “Fame”; “Pink Floyd's The Wall”; “Angel Heart”; “Mississippi Burning”; “The Commitments”; and “Angela's Ashes.”
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However, Parker's best known film was one that sealed his reputation and concurrently created a controversy that persists to the day.
In October 1978, Parker's epic “Midnight Express” was released and caused an immediate sensation in Britain, Europe and North America.
Based on an apparent “true” story, the film told the tale of Billy Hayes, a young American man who was arrested at the airport in Istanbul, Turkey for trying to smuggle hashish. Then the film grimly follows his subsequent conviction and incarceration in a brutal Turkish prison.
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When I first watched this movie, as an impressionable young lad (probably too young, considering the adult subject matter), it made an overwhelming impact on me.
The film introduced me to a country and an environment I knew nothing about – but one that I found disturbing, compelling, fascinating and frightening.
Life in a gloomy prison in Turkey was portrayed in (apparent) graphic realism -- a world ruled by fear, deception and extreme violence.
With the pulsating, hypnotic disco-influenced soundtrack by Giorgio Moroder, Midnight Express engrosses the viewer inside the claustrophobic, filthy realm of a gothic prison filled with murderers, perverts and rapists.
In the next-to-last scene, where Hayes kills his psychotically-brutal prison guard (“Police-baba”) and escapes the jail, one feels an incredible sense of euphoria and relief.
The sights and sounds from this spectacularly well-made film stayed with me for years, unlike any other piece of cinema I had watched up to that point.
However, as I got older, learned more about the world and travelled a bit, my attitude towards Midnight Express changed... quite dramatically.
I eventually realized that Parker's masterpiece was a brilliant example of Hollywood propaganda designed to vilify and demonize Turkey and the Turkish people.
Of course, my evolution of thought was slow and gradual. When I first met real-live, actual Turks and mentioned the film, they expressed their anger about it. At first I didn't understand their distress – after all, I countered, “it's only a movie.”
But I realized that Midnight Express had insidiously penetrated into my subconscious and even made me fear the Turks.
