King of The Guards

Written and directed by Osman F. Seden, this Kemal Sunal comedy follows Şaban, a night watchman assigned to a neighborhood in Istanbul's Zeytinburnu district who throws himself into the job with enormous enthusiasm. Inspecting the area, he finds the headman and the shopkeepers exploiting local people and starts issuing warnings, but the whole mechanism of the film rests on a misunderstanding: because of his surname, the police chief takes him for the interior minister's nephew and ignores every complaint against him. With that immunity, Şaban takes on the official who won't collect the rubbish and the factory owner poisoning children with industrial waste rather than build a sewer. The kinship with Gogol's The Government Inspector is plain but inverted: where Gogol's impostor exploits a corrupt bureaucracy, Şaban turns the mistake to the public's advantage. Notably, Seden reused the same device seven years later, having also written the screenplay for Deli Deli Küpeli. After becoming famous as the dim witted Şaban in the Hababam Sınıfı films, Kemal Sunal went on to play characters named Şaban in twenty one films, almost always a poor man trying to get by. Who it's for: Fans of Yeşilçam comedy and of the Kemal Sunal films that carry social criticism. Who it's not for: Not for viewers wanting finely worked satire, since the film runs on the broad, direct comic idiom of its era.