![]() There's Randy Quaid, as the totally strungout American John Hurt, as the pensive British prisoner, absorbed in his drug habit and Norbert Weisser, as the Swedish kid who becomes Hayes' lover in the year's strangest romantic scene. Parker found an old British fortress on Malta to use as his prison, and he populates it with a freemasonry of the world's criminals. His years in prison are stunningly well seen by the film's director, Alan Parker - whose last film was the engagingly odd " Bugsy Malone," in which a cast of children played gangsters. Hayes has a great deal of time to ponder that irony, during an imprisonment that supplies the bulk of the movie. ![]() It is possible, however, to discover the irony in the fact that Turkey, whose economy is richened by an opium poppy crop that supplies much of the world's heroin, should have such draconian drug laws at home. So it's hard to feel much pity for Billy Hayes. And although Hayes has had a great misfortune (and penal reform is obviously much in need in Turkey), we have to remind ourselves that Hayes did, after all, decide of his own free will to smuggle the hashish, and thus entered into a tacit contract with the Turkish legal system, a contract in which he stood to gain as well as lose a great deal. When Hayes, only 54 days short of his promised freedom, is given a new 30-year sentence, he stands in the prisoners' dock and delivers himself of a long condemnation of all Turks: They are, he screams, "a nation of pigs." Surely not. It's the indignation that's hard to take.
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