Ugly Trip

By -- R.S.

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS Directed by Alan Parker Screenplay by Oliver Stone

The outline of Billy Hayes' true story --he is an American youth who escaped a Turkish jail after he was caught carrying hashish in Istanbul--suggests the possibility of a familiar kind of genre film. Clever and desperate prisoners concocting elaborate escape plans, fooling their dense and brutal warders, finally making it to freedom despite the odds --that sort of nonsense, escapist entertainment in the most literal sense of the term. Indeed, the promotion for this film encourages such expectations.

But what we have here in fact is one of the ugliest sadomasochistic trips, with heavy homosexual overtones, that our thoroughly nasty movie age has yet produced. Indeed, if the film has any redeeming social value at all, it is to prove that you don't have to be a hairy-chested director of the Sam Peckinpah school to get your kicks on blood and gore. It may also indicate that there are some virtues in the straightforward approach of someone like Peckinpah to violent material. In Midnight Express one imagines the director peering through the viewfinder and murmuring, "Goyaesque," or worse, "Ken Russell." Anyway, the continual aestheticizing of squalor and of brutality, not to mention the poeticizing of prison homosexuality--a necessity perhaps for prisoners but not, surely, a joyous compensation for most of them--finally makes one very irritated indeed.

From the first gorgeously modeled shot of Billy stripped before his captors to the hazy sequence of him and a friend doing yoga exercises behind bars (so reminiscent of the nude wrestling scene in Women in Love), to the final farewell kiss Billy bestows on yet another mate before his escape, we are in the possession of a perverse romanticism, or should one say romantic perversity? And what can one say about the casting of a young actor named Brad Davis in the leading role?

He has a sort of doe-eyed dumbness that will surely make him a cult object in certain circles. They will also be pleased to take this perfect imitation of James Dean's mannerisms as evidence that he can act, though he is mostly required to stand around as a prettily passive victim, prettiness being the main thing separating him from all the other victims endlessly degraded and beaten in sundry picturesque ways throughout the film.

Director Parker, who gave us the ever-so-adorable Bugsy Malone a couple of years ago, in which children played a camp gangster story, is not without gifts. Shot for shot, Midnight Express is wonderfully executed, and he can stage a chase or a fight as well as anyone. Nor can anyone question the film's implicit point that the punishments meted out to youthful amateur drug smugglers in some corners of the world are absurdly harsh (Hayes' sentence totaled 30 years, although he escaped after nearly five). But the picture offers a larger and more dubious implication, which is that the straight world is one large Turkish prison devoted to the vicious abuse of homosexuals who, undaunted, convert suffering into beauty by finding ways to redeem squalor with stylishness -- with the aid of a first-class lighting cameraman, of course. It will be interesting to see if the general public 1) gets the message and 2) accepts it. Setting aside such speculations, one must still conclude that on the evidence of this picture, you don't have to be infected with machismo to make a thoroughly repulsive movie.

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