Sugar Pie Lady

In the last years of the Ottoman empire a corrupt police chief, Ziver Bey, has every tradesman in the district paying him off. Cumali, a night watchman newly assigned to the station, is hopelessly in love with Şekerpare, who works in the local brothel. Her heart, though, belongs to the chief. The strength is the script. Yavuz Turgul builds the comedy directly on corruption: nobody is exactly a villain, everybody has found a place inside the arrangement. Şener Şen's Ziver is not menacing but relaxed and entirely at ease, which is what makes him uncomfortable to watch. Atıf Yılmaz directed and Ertem Eğilmez produced, with Şener Şen, İlyas Salman and Yaprak Özdemiroğlu in the leads. Its flaw is that the woman is not the subject of the story but the object of a contest between two men, and the period is confined to a narrow space by the budget. Who it is for: fans of late Yeşilçam comedy and of Şener Şen. Who it is not for: viewers troubled by how passive the woman is written.