Word: sagmalcilar
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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...
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...
...body of Rifki (a scene that ranks up there with the most wanton exercises of filmed violence marking Jaws and The French Connection), and he winds up in the ward for the criminally insane. Like some Hieronymus Bosch painting suddenly come to life, the ward makes the rest of Sagmalcilar seem like Allenwood in comparison. Any glimmer of self-respect and dignity has been apparently extinguished in Billy Hayes as he wanders zombie-like among the blubbering semblances of human beings that populate the ward...
...ease their cases. Ronald Lee Emmons, 22, a black Chicagoan and a former basketball player at the University of Illinois, was picked up in Istanbul for possession of two kilos of hash. Despite the efforts of his mother, he waited 13 months in Istanbul's Sagmalcilar prison before his case came to trial last February. He was sentenced to five years in jail, where all he can look forward to are the letters, books, money and extra food that U.S. Consul Douglas Heck brings on his twice-monthly visits. As a U.S. consular official in Lebanon confesses: "The truth...
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