Midnight Express is a masterpiece, a mess, and a mystery. Sensual music and a syrupy Turkish milieu showcase one of the most homoerotic performances in cinema, but apart from these elements, the film is thoroughly average. That these elements lift an otherwise forgettable film into the classic league is what’s so fascinating about the movie.

Brad Davis, who died of AIDS in 1991, would have been a good silent-film actor, or a great gay porn star. Though of limited regular acting talents, Davis had a metaphysical power which was off the scale. Very handsome and athletically built, his tendency to growl, mumble and scratch his chest during scenes leant him a magnetic, blue-collar sexiness, while his mix of boyishness and femininity created a compelling erotic charisma. His two famous roles, this one and Querelle, have him shirtless and sexual a lot of the time, struggling to survive in an s&m prison, and stabbing and fucking guys at a homoerotic sea-port. Not incidentally, he plays objectified bottom in both, stripped, spreadeagled and ogled then repeatedly raped and beaten here, but taking control and aggressively bending over in Querelle.

Davis’ performance uses the simplistic, hysterical choices of Midnight Express’s director and writer to create a pulsating big-screen persona of a one-man homo sex god, a sultry Saint Sebastian who moves from one dimly lit scene to the next like a character in a hardcore gay porn film, navigating bondage, torture, solitude, torment and rape and ending the story completely, innately expert in passive and hardcore gay sex. Surrounding Davis are casual references to every inmate “doing it” with each other every chance they get, and the apparently common practice of rival inmates stabbing each other in the buttocks with knives.

Like Giorgio Moroder's synth score, Davis’ performance permeates this otherwise mediocre film with class and top-shelf sexiness. Thanks to Brad, the film is intoxicating, and addictive, despite its many moments of stupidity. As the container of Davis’ horny fusion of James Dean and Joey Stefano, Midnight Express is worthwhile and important.

Based on a true story of Billy Hayes, whose autobiography gave the film its title, Midnight Express jazzes up the journey of a young American busted for smuggling hash out of Turkey in the early 1970s. Initially imprisoned for a couple of years, which he obediently served, Hayes’ sentence was expanded to life in jail on the eve of his release, as he became the victim of the Turkish government’s tough new anti-drugs policies. In his book, Hayes outlines how he sought to escape, but also how he grew and evolved while behind bars, having a loving sexual relationship with another man, and reinterpreting his existence.

These elements are excised from the film, which uses the basics of Hayes’ imprisonment as the starting point only for a quasi-horror film that shows off American xenophobia and sickly hypocritical morals like few other movies ever have.

Oliver Stone must have been gearing up to vent his fury at the US government over Vietnam, practising here with a young innocent trapped by dumb bureacracy in a deadly world where insanity lurks. Stone does better by himself, and here, his indignant heart and Alan Parker's dreamy eye don't really mix. On the other hand, the soapy and steamy yoga/shower sequence, though it may end with Brad refusing to go all the way with his smitten Scandavian cell mate, is the most tender and sexy part of the film. As Moroder's score surges, the two men, lit in shawdowy sepia and caressed by swirling mists as they perform sensual yoga rituals and come close to kissing as they soap each others thighs in the shower provides the only moment of romantic release in a film of otherwise relentless brutality and tension. Compared to the film's only other quasi-sex scene, a heterosexual one where a crazed and dishevelled Billy masturbates while licking and biting at the glass partition that separates his mouth from his shamed and weeping girlfriend's breast, we have to wonder why the whole Russo crew jumped onto Midnight Express and condemned it as "homophobic". The real Billy may have gone all the way in jail, but the omission of this fact should not obscure the delicacy and beauty of its substitute.

Ultimately Davis saves the day: his sensual presence in Midnight Express an unforgettable, vicarious fuck.

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Interview with Billy Hayes