Adapted from the book Midnight Express by Billy Hayes, with William Hoffer
College dropout Billy Hayes is traveling the world trying to find himself. Instead, he finds some very inexpensive hashish in Turkey, so he decides to smuggle a couple kilograms back to New York, where he knows he'll be able to make a significant profit. Unfortunately, Turkish airport security has just been heightened due to terrorist threats, and the Turkish justice system is extremely harsh on drug smugglers.
This is a true story, and the book is written in first person by the guy it happened to, but the movie is only vaguely recognizable as the same story. The beginning, when he's arrested and first goes to prison, is admittedly very similar, although many of those details are changed, and there are a few later episodes that happen in both versions, but as the story progresses, the two stories diverge significantly. Most of the characters have their names changed, and a lot of the characters in the film are amalgams of several people from the book. I wonder if there are more restrictions on portraying actual people on film than in books, since it seems like similar character changes have happened with other true stories, especially regarding people who are not being shown in the most positive light. But while the character changes in Midnight Express were notable, they were far from the most significant differences.
Movies frequently make things more dramatic than the books they're based on, and that certainly happened here. In the book, Billy effectively conveys how much he suffered - from being in prison, from torture, and from uncertainty about his changing sentence - while at the same time describing coping mechanisms he developed to remain relatively sane through it all. In the movie, by contrast, he goes berserk and bites someone's tongue out, ending up in a ward for the criminally insane, which I guess is in the same prison because one of the same guards is there. In the book he does spend some time in an insane asylum, but it's at a different facility and happens way earlier, and he's just there temporarily for observation. The guards in the book conclude he's not insane and send him back to prison. Also, not to spoil too much, but the circumstances of Billy's escape are completely different in the two versions. The book gives the impression that he could possibly have gotten by without escaping, whereas in the movie his situation was so much worse that if he hadn't escaped he clearly would have died in jail. However, unexpectedly, the movie cuts out probably the most intense part of the book, since after he escapes from prison he still has to get out of Turkey with very little money and no passport. The movie just ends with him walking out of prison and words across the screen saying he crossed into Greece on this date and made it back to New York a couple weeks later; the book actually takes us through how he did that.
Despite their many differences, both the book and the movie have the same very clear message: Whatever you do, don't try to smuggle drugs out of Turkey.
After 3 films in a row I hadn't blogged about before, I'm heading for another string of repeats, beginning with Best Picture winner Kramer vs. Kramer, based on the novel by Avery Corman.
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