3/18/14: The Faint Spark of Hope

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Alan Parker, Americans abroad, Angela's Ashes, auteur theory, based on a book, based on a true story, Best Adapted Screenplay winner, Best Director nominee, Best Original Score winner, Best Picture nominee, Best Supporting Actor nominee, Billy Hayes, Bo Hopkins, Brad Davis, buddy films, cinema, college student, critically-acclaimed films, dark films, drama, drug smuggling, drug trafficking, electronic score, Erich, escape from prison, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, Giorgio Moroder, Hamidou, homoerotic tension, homophobia, Irene Miracle, jail-break, Jimmy Booth, John Hurt, legal nightmare, Max, Midnight Express, Mississippi Burning, Movies, multiple Golden Globe winner, multiple Oscar winner, Norbert Weisser, Oliver Stone, Oscar nominee, Oscars, Palme d'Or nominee, Paolo Bonacelli, Paul Smith, prison films, Randy Quaid, Rifki, The Wall, Turkish prison, Vangelis

We’ve all done stupid things: that’s the one constant across humanity, regardless of age, race, gender, creed, nationality, income level or relative place in the historical timeline (cavemen did stupid things, too). Part of the human experience is learning and one of the best ways to learn something is to royally screw it up. Touch the open flame once and you know not to touch it again. Poke the tiger? Not twice, you won’t. We’ve all said and done things that were stupid: many of us may have even done things that were stupid and illegal (never a great combo). For the most part, any and everything is a good excuse for a learning opportunity: after all, many of the most powerful and respected people in the world have pasts that are littered with everything from petty crimes to outrageous public declarations. As long as your stupidity doesn’t actively hurt someone else and you’re given the opportunity to learn and grow from the situation, what’s the big deal? In fact, the whole point of youth is to be stupid, make mistakes and learn from them: it’s the “entry-level-fast-food-job/internship” phase of life, setting you up for the “responsible career” phase that’s to come.

But what if you make that one stupid mistake and, rather than a learning experience, it becomes a game-ender? Normal, average people make stupid choices and screw things up everyday: what if your “mistake” was so serious that it landed you in prison? What if you were a young, naive American college student, facing a life sentence in a harsh, barbaric Turkish prison? If you were Billy Hayes in the 1970s, these wouldn’t be questions: they would be facts. Alan Parker’s critically acclaimed Midnight Express takes viewers into Billy’s world and shows how the stupidest actions can have the most dire of consequences. In the process, it also shows us that most miraculous of human traits: the ability to hold on to hope, even when all hope seems lost.

Midnight Express begins with Billy Hayes (Brad Davis) making one of those aforementioned stupid decisions: he opts to smuggle (or attempt to smuggle, as it were) hashish out of Turkey. Even better, he does this in the dawning years of the 1970’s, during a time when Turkey and the Middle East were experiencing particularly high levels of terrorist attacks. As such, authorities are ever vigilant and Billy…well, he’s a bit of a dumb-ass. After sweating, stuttering and barely inching his way past airport security, he ends up on an Amtrak track that, unfortunately, passes through a security checkpoint. A cursory pat-down reveals the dope and our poor schmuck begins his journey down a very long, dark, grim pathway.

After a failed escape attempt, Billy winds up in a Turkish prison, where he promptly runs afoul of head guard Hamidou (Paul Smith), one of the vilest cinematic creations ever shat unto the big-screen. Hamidou beats Billy senseless for having the temerity to take a blanket and, when he comes to, he’s being cared for by a trio of prisoners: crazy-eyed Jimmy Booth (Randy Quaid), strung-out philosopher Max (John Hurt) and gentle Erich (Norbert Weisser). They quickly show Billy the ropes and cue him in on a few important facts: Steer clear of Rifki (Paolo Bonacelli), a nasty prisoner who rats out other prisoners for money; be careful of the children who run around everywhere, since they’re as untrustworthy as the guards and Rifki; all foreigners and homosexuals are considered scum but almost all prisoners practice homosexuality when no one is looking; for the right price, the Turkish legal system can be bought and sold; and, perhaps most importantly: once you’re inside, you’re probably not getting outside.

In due time, Billy’s life becomes a waking nightmare of harsh conditions (the prison is like a squalid, rat-trap hotel where the concierges occasionally beat you so bad that you herniate), a bizarre, nonsensical legal system (Billy can’t even understand the language during his trial, much less offer any useful defense) and the constant, terrifying notion that he’s doomed to spend the rest of his days in this living hell. When his original “generous” sentence of 4 years is over-turned for a more “reasonable” 30-year sentence, Billy finally decides to jump onto Jimmy’s crazy train and attempt a prison breakout. As expected, this doesn’t go quite as planned, leading to more confrontations with Hamidou and Rifki, as well as a long-in-the-making mental breakdown for Billy. After a certain point, Billy’s life seems completely hopeless. If he can just manage to keep his head above water, however, there just might be a light at the end of the tunnel after all.

In certain ways, Midnight Express is a strictly by-the-book prison film, one of those myriad productions where a “good” person ends up in the pokey and must adapt to survive. The Turkish setting is certainly novel, although anyone who grew up on any of the faceless, Philippine-set prison films of the late-’60s and ’70s won’t find much to be surprised by here. The setting certainly does give the filmmakers ample opportunity to play up the disparity between the Westerners and the native Turks but, more often than not, it devolves simply into “complex Westerners” vs “feral, rabid, caveman Turks.” In hindsight, there really aren’t any positive portrayals of Middle Eastern characters in the film: they’re all either vicious, sneering sadists or bumbling, incompetent Keystone Kops. Since the screenplay is written by Oliver Stone (for which he won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar), I wasn’t particularly surprised by this but it was, nonetheless, fairly tiresome. By the time we get to Rifki hanging a cute kitten and Hamidou attempting to violently rape Billy, the “villains” don’t resemble humans so much as fairy-tale ogres. Since the actual Billy Hayes has complained about the negative portrayals of Turkish characters in the film, this seems to be a problem that at least a few folks have had.

Since the film tends to be a fairly standard “men-in-prison” film, it also features plenty of familiar beats: the newbie getting instructed on the lay of the land; the intricate escape plans; the scene where a friendly character is falsely blamed for something; the homoerotic tension between cellmates; the rat; the vicious head-guard. None of these are particularly unique and the only aspect that has the potential to bear interesting fruit (the homoerotic tension between Billy and Erich) is dispensed with pretty quickly. Since this is a film adaptation of a true story, I wasn’t expecting anything particularly “tricky,” as it were, but much of Midnight Express seemed rather old-hat to me Perhaps my opinion would have been different had I seen it when it was released (you know…when I was 1) but decades of prison films since have neutered its impact a bit. Don’t get me wrong: the film is still intensely grim — the scene where a screaming Randy Quaid gets dragged out to be beaten so bad that he’ll lose a testicle is not something that anyone will forget easily — but it’s also not something inherently “fresh” or shocking.

My other major complaint with the film definitely revolves around the musical score by Giorgio Moroder, which inexplicably won an Academy Award for Best Original Score. There are times when the score seems unobtrusive (not high praise, mind you) but, for the most part, it sticks out like a sore thumb. One of the silliest moments has to be Billy’s initial escape from police custody, before he reaches the prison. His escape attempt is scored by some truly ludicrous electro music, complete with laser sound effects: not only does it do nothing to create tension, the score actually made me burst out laughing, which (presumably) wasn’t the desired effect. Later on, Billy mopes about the prison grounds as a moody electronic score plays: I’m pretty sure the intent was something similar to Vangelis’ score for Blade Runner but, again, the execution just doesn’t produce anything but groans. I’m actually a big Giorgio Moroder fan and was pretty excited when I saw his name in the credits: this, however, was like getting coal for Christmas.

On the other hand, the things that work in Midnight Express work fairly well. The performances are uniformly good, with special praise due for Quaid and Hurt’s rock-solid turns as Billy’s only friends. Quaid’s performance is a good reminder that, once upon a time, he was an actor to take seriously. Paul Smith and Paolo Bonacelli are absolutely phenomenal as Hamidou and Rifki, with Bonacelli especially noteworthy. Truly detestable villains are hard to pull off and Midnight Express’ pair of baddies are almost an embarrassment of riches. The only “main” character that seems to get short shrift is Billy’s girlfriend Susan, played by Irene Miracle. Miracle does just fine with what she’s given but she’s not given much: the emotional climax of her character is definitely the moment where she bares her breasts for Billy during a jail visitation but Brad Davis ends up doing most of the heavy lifting. Likewise, Mike Kellin, playing Billy’s dad, is pretty much a non-entity, his participation in events essentially boiling down to the moment where he tells Hamidou to “take good care of (Billy), you Turkish bastard.”

Overall, Midnight Express exists as one of those “critically over-acclaimed” films that can’t help but be a bit of a disappointment, especially when one considers previous films in director Parker’s canon, films like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Mississippi Burning and Angela’s Ashes. As your standard “men in prison must escape” film, Midnight Express is good but nothing legendary. When the film is more understated, it works quite well, although it too frequently lapses into melodrama and overwrought theatrics (the scene where Billy breaks down in court is particularly over-the-top).

As I stated earlier, however, it’s a little hard to fully get behind Billy’s plight since his own stupidity got him there in the first place. It was much easier to sympathize with Jimmy (in prison for stealing two candlesticks from a church) and Max (a heroin junkie) than it was to support Billy: the others were people caught in bad situations, whereas this dumbass college student put himself there…big difference. As a study in people making bad decisions, Midnight Express has to be one of the most on-the-noise. As a prison film, it’s pretty standard fare. As a character study, however, it just doesn’t seem like it has a lot to say.

3/15/14: Just a Couple Good Old Boys

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actor-director, Altamont, America, American Dream, Best Original Screenplay nominee, Best Supporting Actor nominee, bikers, Billy, Bob Dylan, Born to Be Wild, buddy films, Captain America, Charles Manson, cinema, classic movies, counter-culture films, counterculture, Dennis Hopper, directorial debut, Easy Rider, end of an era, film reviews, films, friendship, hippies, Hoyt Axton, Jack Nicholson, Luke Askew, Mardi Gras, motorcycles, Movies, Oscar nominee, Palme d'Or nominee, Peter Fonda, Phil Spector, rednecks, road movie, road trips, Sharon Tate, Steppenwolf, the American Dream, the Manson Family, The Pusher, Wyatt

When, exactly, did the Summer of Love go up in flames? Conventional wisdom usually points to Altamont, in December 1969, as the point where the promise of free love and hippy Utopianism soured. For my money, though, I always pinpointed Sharon Tate’s murder, on August 9th of the same year, as the real tipping point. Even though the Woodstock festival (usually seen as the pinnacle of “hippyism”) would follow Tate’s murder by less than a week, I always viewed that as sneaking one last one in before Manson and his followers nailed down the coffin lid. By the time the Mason family had cemented their terrible legacy, it was pretty apparent that the shiny red apple of peace, love and harmony contained more than its fair share of rot. While Altamont may have slammed the door shut, it had begun to close long before then. In fact, some folks could see the end way before then: when Dennis Hopper’s now-iconic Easy Rider was first released, in May 1969, who could know that the man would seem like Nostradamus a mere seven months later?

Easy Rider is many things: a buddy film…a road movie…a counter-culture landmark…a return to the sensibilities of On the Road at a time when that attitude seemed not only passe but quaint…a drug movie…a critique of the fractured America of the ’60s…More than anything, however, Easy Rider serves as a death knell, a dire warning from one of the original “freak-flag-flyers” that times were changing and that the peace-and-love hippies were about to be swept from the Earth in the same way that the dinosaurs once were. You could stay the same, he posited, but you would die: that was a given. You could, of course, leave behind your ideals and survive by evolving into something else entirely, something colder, more calculating, less romantic. But isn’t this, in the end, the same sort of death as offered in the first option? Above all else, however, Hopper was making concrete the words of Bob Dylan, albeit casting them in a much darker light than Dylan originally intended: the times, indeed, were a changin’.

As a film, Easy Rider has a pretty simple structure: it’s essentially a series of vignettes featuring Billy (Dennis Hopper) and Wyatt (Peter Fonda), usually addressed as “Captain America.” As the two men travel around the back-roads of America, they meet with an odd assortment of characters, including a hitchhiker (Luke Askew) and his hippy commune, a drunken lawyer (Jack Nicholson), lots of rednecks and some good, old-fashioned, middle-American squares. They sell cocaine to Phil Spector (not the “person” of Phil Spector but the actual man: he’s billed as “The Connection” and wears one seriously yellow suit, complete with matching gloves and glasses), visit a whorehouse in New Orleans and leave a diner one step ahead of an angry mob of rednecks and small-town cops.

For the most parts, events in the film fall into a pretty basic formula: the duo rides to a new place, Billy acts like a square, the Captain tells him to chill out, there’s a musical interlude and the whole thing repeats. Each interlude, however, serves as a way for Hopper (who also wrote the screenplay, with Fonda) to dig a little deeper into the whole notion of the “American Dream.” The opening pre-credits drug-dealing sequence begins with Steppenwolf’s version of “The Pusher,” before their iconic “Born to Be Wild” slams us right into the credits. It’s a subtle way to establish Billy and the Captain’s manifesto (they do whatever they want, man), while also commenting on changes in the pop culture zeitgeist: “The Pusher” was written by Hoyt Axton, a popular folk singer in the early ’60s but it was Steppenwolf’s cover, not the original, that Hopper used. As one of the “heavier” new bands to emerge in the late ’60s, Steppenwolf was a good representation of the direction music was taking, at the time, away from the folk and early rock of the ’60s and into the hard rock and metal of the ’70s. Steppenwolf was pushing Axton out, just as the darker mid-late ’60s was crowding out the peace and optimism of the earlier part of the decade.

They end up on the hitchhiker’s commune but don’t get to stay long: the hippies end up picking on and ostracizing Billy, leading us to the notion that maybe these “peaceniks” aren’t quite as nice as they first seem. Although he couldn’t have known it at the time, Hopper was prophesying what would happen with the Manson family: the hippy exterior concealed a dangerous, deranged interior. Lest it be thought that Hopper is unduly picking on the counterculture (which is rather absurd, since he’s been a genuine, card-carrying member of the counterculture for his entire life/career), we also get scenes like the ones where Billy and the Captain get arrested for “parading without a permit” in a small town and are, essentially, chased out of a diner by a group of locals (including the sheriff) that are a few pitchforks away from the mob in Frankenstein. If the counterculture isn’t necessarily who they say they are, then the average middle-American “square” is exactly what they seem to be: small-minded, suspicious, frightened and utterly resentful of the “freedom” that Billy and the Captain represent. That these small-town folk and rednecks will, ultimately, end up being the undoing of Billy, the Captain and George (Nicholson) is certainly telling: although the counterculture has begun to collapse from the inside, its greatest threat still comes from the outside – the world at large.

All of these events eventually culminate in a truly apocalyptic ending for Billy and the Captain (and poor George, of course), although it’s a finale that would probably only provoke a shrug from the kinds of people who helped perpetrate it: those long-haired, weird bastards got what was coming to them. While the finale few moments of Easy Rider holds the answer to Billy and the Captain’s fates, it’s a moment just before that actually spells everything out for an entire generation. After finally achieving their “goal” of visiting New Orleans for Mardi Gras and surviving everything that came before, Billy is absolutely triumphant: they’re both “rich” now, thanks to the opening drug deal and have finally “made it.” “That’s what you do, man,” he tells the Captain, “you go for the big money.” The Captain’s response, however, takes the wind out of not only Billy’s sails but our own, as well: “We blew it, man.” By compromising their principles and losing sight of the “big picture” (changing the world for the better), Billy and the Captain (along with the entire “Free Love” movement) have truly “blown it.” The true extent wouldn’t be felt for some time, of course, but the writing was on the wall: whatever moment might have existed was now past and the movement would continue to spin out into irrelevance.

As a pivotal moment in the history of the counterculture, Easy Rider, much like Kerouac’s On the Road, cannot be easily discounted. Although certain elements have, by necessity, become dated, the overall themes and angles of the film hold up surprisingly well. As a film, Easy Rider is quite good, with sterling performances from Hopper, Fonda and Nicholson, along with some excellent cinematography that is reminiscent of the same year’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It’s always a hoot to see Hopper play the “straight” guy, particularly with the decades of crazy characters that would come after this. Nicholson, in particular, is excellent, providing yet another example of why he became one of the most beloved actors of all time. There’s a sense of playfulness that easily recalls Depp’s work in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, although Nicholson owned this type of role for some time before Depp wandered down Jump Street.

If there can be any complaints, it would have to be that the film definitely becomes formulaic well before the ending, although the final 15 minutes are still some of the most powerful film moments ever. Even though the film seems a bit dated now (the commune scene, in particular, is of its era, complete with a truly bizarre mime performance and some really hippy-dippy philosophizing), it’s held up much better than similar films of the era, such as Fonda’s ultra-silly The Trip from a few years earlier. In the end, Easy Rider exists as both a fascinating curio of a forgotten era and a timely reminder that we must be ever vigilant, if we hope to truly change the world. As Sisyphus knew, the moment you quit pushing forward and forging new ground is the moment where the boulder begins to slide back down the hill. In the ’60s, the hippies managed to push the rock quite a ways up the hill. The tragedy, of course, is that it crushed them all on the way back down.