Biyograficim
Baba Kartal

Father Eagle (Baba Kartal) (translated)

Movie · 1978 · 5 people

Shot in colour in 1978, Baba Kartal belongs to Turkish cinema's adventure-drama and gangster vein. Cüneyt Arkın directed it and plays the lead. The screenplay is by Safa Önal and the producer is Hürrem Erman, with the film made under the Erman Film banner; it reached cinemas on 1 March 1979. İzzet Akay was the director of photography.

Kartal Arıcan is a father of two who leaves his village for Istanbul after the local landlord's pressure becomes unbearable. Failing at every job in the city, he meets Rafet (Bilâl İnci) in a bar fight and is given money and a gun, which takes him into the underworld. Over the years he rises to the post of deputy chairman of a holding company. Everything he does is for his sons Binali (Nejat Özbek) and Ahmet, but the dirty system he serves rots the family from within. Binali goes as far as pointing a gun at his father. Ahmet is shot on the orders of the holding's boss Osman (Aytaç Yörükaslan) once he learns of his father's dirty business. Driven wild by the loss, Kartal settles accounts with everyone responsible.

Tuğrul Meteer, Deniz Akbulut (Zeynep) and Merih Fırat also appear.

DirectorCüneyt Arkın
Production companyErman Film

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Cast

Cüneyt Arkın Cüneyt Arkın Actor · died at 84 Bilâl İnci Bilâl İnci Actor · died at 69 Tuğrul Meteer Nejat Özbek Aytaç Yürükaslan

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Through different eyes

Action & Thriller Fan Puts pace, tension and set pieces first; little patience for slow drama.

Cüneyt Arkın directing and starring is an action promise on its own. A man who arrives from the village, enters the underworld through a bar fight and climbs to a seat at a holding company: the story's spine is tough and clear. The pace drifts into family drama at times, and those stretches may feel a bit long to me. But once the father's anger boils over, the film finds its full speed.

History & Society Lens Asks about the period, the social background and what the work reflects.

Baba Kartal tells the migration story of the seventies through a gangster mould. Driven from his village by the landlord's pressure, Kartal Arıcan fails to find his footing in Istanbul and takes refuge in the underworld, a harsh take in the cinema of the period on the despair rural-to-urban migration produced. What is interesting is that his criminal career peaks at the deputy chairmanship of a holding company; the film points to how thin the line is between dirty money and legitimate business. A father doing everything for his sons, only for that effort to rot the family from within, is a strong moral question too. Still, the revenge-driven structure pushes the social observation into the background towards the end.

Cinephile Looks at script, editing and directing choices; keeps a distance from formula films.

With Cüneyt Arkın behind the camera, the film builds a classic rise-and-fall narrative on Safa Önal's screenplay. The structure is familiar: migration, first crime, the climb, the crack in the family and the reckoning. The script's strongest idea is that the order the father builds for his sons drives them apart; one studying while the other doesn't is a simple but functional contrast for two separate paths. İzzet Akay's camerawork offers a chance to capture the street reality of the period. The weakness is that Arkın's direction leans too heavily on his own star image; the shifts between drama and revenge seem shaped more by genre expectations than by depth of character.

These are not reader reviews: they are short editorial takes written from different viewer perspectives with AI assistance. Reader reviews are below.

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