Word: istanbul
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Turkish judicial system, not to mention Billy Hayes' unbelievably easy escape? Not one technique is spared to impress on the audience the repulsiveness of Turkey. Violent scenes are accompanied by Turkish folk music as if to show the necessary relationship between the two. Even the normally beautiful Istanbul skyline is transformed by the camera into somber and gloomy scenery--a feat in itself...
...hopeless amateur in the contraband business, the kind of sunglassed shmuck who chews gum and smokes a Winston at the same time while a suspicious customs agent checks his bags. Naturally, Billy does not read the papers; otherwise he would have known about the tight security checks at Istanbul airport caused by a rash of hijackings and terrorist bombings in the summer of 1970. His smuggling escapade comes to an abrupt end; and his ordeal is only just begining...
BILLY IS CONFINED to Istanbul's Sagmalcilar prison, and its human managerie has a telling effect on him from the very beginning. The brash swagger becomes a distant memory, its place taken by a deep sense of shame and humiliation. Billy has been given a new role to play, the new kid on the cell block trying to learn the prison ropes from his more experienced fellow inmates. Everything about the new Billy suggests the chastened boy he has become. He asks about lawyers, means of escape, the life histories of the other foreigners whose follies landed them in Sagmalcilar...
...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...
...been the nation's favorite means of flexing its muscles. A 1976 survey by the Brookings Institution found that in the 215 cases since World War II in which military force was used for political goals, the Navy was deployed 177 times. A visit by the battleship Missouri to Istanbul in 1946 countered mounting Soviet pressures on Turkey, for example, while in 1958 U.S. amphibious activity off Lebanon's coast bolstered a friendly government in Beirut. More recently, the rescue of the U.S. freighter Mayaguez in 1975 after its capture by Cambodian Communists demonstrated America's continuing interest in Southeast...