Farar az Taleh AKA Escape from the Trap (1971)
hirvi 14 for KG, his rip from a retail VHS
IMDB quote: Farar az Tale is an unknown film out of Iran. Even in Iran nobody remembers of this beautiful little masterpiece. There are so many successful visual and musical devices all along the film. The first one is just at the opening and before the opening credits. A man is dropped on the street. Another man tries to see if he is still alive. In finding that he is not, he turns his head towards Morteza (Behrooz Vosooghi) and by his eye expression lets him know that. All that in silent cinema and taking only 23 seconds. That is truly cinema, The art of image! Then the opening credits start, during which we see Morteza in prison, his moustaches are little by little growing. This is economy of great cinema. Using the time of the credits for letting us know that he is in prison and making us feel the length of his stay. The proper plot will begin now, when he comes out of prison and looks for his beloved woman Mehri (Nilufar). Another great moment of the film is when Morteza is looking for a solution to find somehow the 10 000 tomans that he needs to give to the man who married his beloved to get her divorce. Now wandering in the city and its outskirts he walks, stops and sits and looks at people working. Great music of Rubik Mansuri covers this sequence, and still shots or pans get dissolved to each other and gives us impression of boring time that Morteza is experiencing under the hot sun of the South. Iranian cinema is full of so great films... It is a pity that they don't get any chance to be known... The actors, Behrooz Vosooghi, Davood Rashidi and Abbas Nazeri are absolutely great.
serdar
As hirvi said about Tangna 1973, this film too has the accomplished cinematography and editing of the Japanese gangster films of the 60s (I also thought of Fuller's Underworld USA.) And although this is a westernized genre and hero and soundtrack (does anybody else hear repeatedly the first chords of Mozart's Masonic funeral music?), we get the extra oriental touches as well.
Again, this makes the Turkish films of the era look really bad: they are either village films or gangster-melodramas set in the Istanbul suburbs or ultra-modern villas of the rich. In Farar az taleh the westernized gangsters act before a background of medieval cities, archways, stone bridges (and in the desert - great scene of gypsies dancing, huge petrol flames on the horizon). I could follow the story easily except for an extraordinary scene where the hero tells a long story to his gangster buddy while a silent dancer-prostitute (like a Greek chorus) comments his tale by lolling around and fiddling with her jewels, I have certainly never seen anything like it before.
hirvi
... The scene you're talking about is certainly extraordinary and memorable. The "gangster buddy" first tells a lot about his thoughts of honesty and how he has got his richdom through not letting anyone else stepping on his feet/taking his rights. The hero then tells about how he went to jail, he retells the background for the quarrel we witness in the beginning of the movie. How he even drove the wounded himself to the hospital but that it was to late. He tells this with perspective and humor to life. At the following scenes where the gypsies are dancing we are told about "the gangster buddies" experiences of brotherhood and how he got back-stabbed!
... However it's so darn sad that the height of Iranian (pre-revolution) cinema coincided with history in such a way that not many good copies even seem to exist of important movies. It seems the best ones are telecine-copies to VHS (or the likes of it). I wonder if remastered versions are even possible. If there are good copies at some archives in Iran or if most of them got burnt down in the cinemas after the revolution. ... There is, here in ... a man renting out almost unwatchable VHS-tapes from mainstream films... and also many Indian dubbed (to persian) movies are found in those kind of places... I managed to watch some of the old important pre-revolutionaries through him in the year of 2000, like Gaav, Postchi, Dayereye Mina a.s.o., I haven't checked with him again, but I'm planning to as soon as I get my lists organized and know which movies I can find in better quality through other sources.
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File Name .........................................: 19710000 - Farar az Taleh (Escape from Trap) (Jalal Moghadam, 1971) (VHS-rip).avi
File Size (in bytes) ............................: 1,565,165,568 bytes
Runtime ............................................: 01:39:32
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B-VOP, N-VOP, QPel, GMC.............: [B-VOP], [], [], []
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19710000 - Farar az Taleh (Escape from Trap) (Jalal Moghadam, 1971) (VHS-rip).avi [1.46 Gb] 
