Turkish Cinema Icon Cuneyt Arkin is 70 Today

The Turkish Chuck Norris was born on this day in 1937 in Eskisehir, Turkey. Cuneyt Arkin was a matinee idol throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

My personal favorite Arkin film is "Hayatim Sana Feda/I Love You Feda," a romantic comedy which was influenced by Douglas Sirk films of the 1950s. In the 1970 film, Arkin is a playboy who befriends a female singer played another Turkish film icon Turkan Soray. He acts like a jerk. She goes blind......Well, we've all seen this sort of film before, but Feda was a unique Turkish film experience nevertheless. Oh, of course, they fall in love and get married.

But, in the West, Arkin is best known for starring in "Dunyayi Kurtaran Adami," aka "The Turkish Star Wars." The 1982 film has become the most popular Turkish film on the Internet Movie Database. The film's director Cetin Inanc said that he wanted to make a science-fiction movie in Turkey because it was something that had never been done before. Ironically, he chose to rip off George Lucas, but when one considers how much money American films have made in Turkey, often at the expense of the domestic film industry, one really can not fault Inanc for feeling the way he did. Though, one should fault him for his filmmaking!

Arkin was the hero of Inanc's film, and he did things that most box office icons in the West would have refused to do, including ridicilous high jumps over 'alien invaders' which should have made him the Turkish Bart Conner.

Arkin was also a contradiction. He frequently starred in films which correlated with his own nationalist political views, incluing the "Battal Gazi" series of the '70s and "Once Vatan/My Country First," in which Arkin goes to Cyprus ala James Bond to liberate Turkish Cypriots from the 'evil Greeks.' That film was made in 1975, only a year after the Turks and Greeks had a brief, but bloody war in Cyprus. But, in 1977, Arkin actually joined socialist-leaning actors in a May Day parade in Istanbul. And, in 1978, Arkin was in the ensemble cast of "Maden/The Mine," which was a scathing indictment of labor abuses in Turkey. Thus, in many ways, Arkin is the epitamy of Turkey, which is also a contradiction of cultural and geopolitical trends.

Arkin does not make many movies now, though he did star in a sequel to "The Turkish Star Wars" that was made recently. My understanding is that is 'not quite as good as the first!"

For more info on Arkin, go to http://www.imdb.com

And, to see some hilarious movie clips of his, some of which are in archive editions of this blog, you can go to http://www.youtube.com