DIRECTOR: ALAN PARKER
“Midnight Express” (1978) is a prison drama about American student Billy Hayes (played by Brad Davis), who is caught smuggling hashish out of Turkey and endures brutal imprisonment before making a daring escape.
Hayes, a young American college student, is caught at Istanbul Airport with two kilos of hashish strapped to his body. He is sentenced to just over four years for possession. Still, after political pressure, Turkish authorities retried him for smuggling and extended his sentence to 30 years. Billy faced horrific conditions in the infamous Sağmalcılar Prison, which was rife with violence, corruption, and despair.
You would think that these horrors would be enough for screenwriter Oliver Stone and director Alan Parker to work with. Yet what they deliver is mostly fiction. Billy’s long-term gay Turkish prison affair is deemed too much for audiences, yet his chewing through a prison guard’s tongue and spitting it at the camera – something that never happened – is deemed OK! This is the worst kind of filmmaking, vulgar in the extreme. Only Giorgio Moroder’s score lifts the movie above an F.
When gay actor Brad Davis, who suffered from major substance abuse problems, was not nominated for an Oscar, you knew that something was up. He died a few years later from an AIDS-related illness.
