Word: prisoners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Jimmy Booth and Max figure prominently in Billy's prison years as companions and co-conspirators, but it is another prisoner who most directly affects Billy in his struggle with identity. Parker and Stone have deliberately downplayed Billy's homosexual affair with the Swedish prisoner Erich (Norbert Weisser), presumably to make Billy as sympathetic a character as possible to straight audiences. This is one of several distortions of Billly Hayes' true story that have prompted some criticism of the film, objections that are justified to a certain extent. In all fairness to the movie, however, the relationship between Erich...
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...
...taken on a challenging role, a character whose overwhelming survival instincts constantly inspire new getaway plans while a consuming cynicism eats away any remaining humanity left in him. Jimmy Booth's tough-as-nails bearing clashes with the injured pride of Billy when they first meet in the prison courtyard, but they later develop the unique brand of camaraderie that binds people in times of shared crisis...
John Hurt's codeine-shooting Briton is another permanent fixture in the Sagmalcilar museum of misfits. Know to all the other prisoners simply as Max, he is the old man of the penitentiary, having already served seven years when Billy enters the prison. Max is little more than a shell of a man, balding, emaciated and hopelessly addicted. Hurt has been given the task of portraying the most sensitive character in the film, a broken man who retains an appreciation for the spontaneous quip and the caresses of a pet cat. He most eloquently conveys Max's impotent despair when...
Korchnoi's retinue was equally diverse. It included two young chess experts from England, an Austrian woman who reportedly had spent ten years in a Siberian prison after being convicted of spying for the U.S., and a young Belgian, known only as "Rasputin," whose job was to ward off Zoukhar's "evil eye." A former Soviet grand master who defected to the West two years ago, leaving his wife and son behind, Korchnoi was prepared for all of Moscow's ploys. So unnerving was the prospect of a Korchnoi victory to the Soviet press that it avoided...