• Midnight Express is easily one of the great prison break films. Surely, The Shawshank Redemption, A Man Escaped and The Great Escape are there on the short list as well in this nice little subgenre. There is even a mention that “This is not Stalag 17” in the text during Midnight Express.
  • Alan Parker is at the helm- and the ambitions are grand. The writing is big (this is the screenplay that put young Oliver Stone on the map), the score is big (Giorgio Moroder’s synthesizer score is his breakthrough as well- and he and Stone would be part of the crew assembled for Scarface just a few years later), and the drama is big. Both Stone and Moroder won Oscars for their work here in 1978.
  • The opening airport drug bust set piece is a standout. Moroder’s thumping heartbeat score is not subtle, but it sure is effective.
  • The film was shot in Turkey (and banned there for quite some time I believe).
  • A quick blame for much of this (this is a true story) on Nixon from writer Oliver Stone who would later make an entire epic movie on Nixon in 1995.
  • Parker’s choice not to produce subtitles for the dialogue in Turkish is an authorial choice to capture Billy’s (Brad Hayes) experience.
  • Hayes does strong work as the film’s driving center- but John Hurt steals every scene he is in, and Randy Quaid is hard to turn away from as well as his two pals and cellmates. The prison warden Paul L. Smith is a near dead ringer for Paul Sorvino.
  • At the 92-minute mark Parker uses slow motion to emphasize the importance of the scene where Billy snaps. He shoots from a low angle, then Parker zooms in within the same shot on Billy’s dead eyes. The makeup (or whatever they used to get these guys looking like this) deserves praise. Smith and Hurt look like guys who have been in a Turkish prison.

John Hurt, in particular, looks so damn authentic: a pirate’s earring, cracked spectacles, ranting and drifting out of rationality. Apparently Hurt did not bath while he was shooting the film.

  • There is a little monologue about “bad machines” in the asylum that is certainly a showcase of Stone’s talent for writing. Billy walks the wheel and Moroder’s heartbeat comes back again to close out the film during the intense escape.
  • The final sequence is a long zoom in on Billy as he escapes down a dusty road- a freeze frame as he jumps for joy.
  • Highly Recommend- top 10 of the year quality