William Friedkin’s death from heart failure on August 7 feels like it came and went with barely an acknowledgement. Perhaps that’s because nobody tells me anything around here anymore, but more likely it’s because Friedkin remains strangely underrated outside of film lovers as one of the greatest directors of ’70s New Hollywood; Coppola, Scorsese, and Friedkin are a peer group that Spielberg joined only midway through the decade. Media obituaries of his life inevitably focus on The Exorcist — with justifiable reason, given the lingering fingerprints the film has left on American cultural consciousness — but to do that is to neglect his other masterful turns helming movies such as The French Connection, Sorcerer, and To Live and Die In L.A. (As for 1980’s Cruising, well, it will always feature Al Pacino in a police interrogation cell getting slapped by a man wearing only a jockstrap and a cowboy hat. Billy Friedkin played for keeps, people.)
I do not speak the formal language of cinema (we have accomplished critics here who have forgotten far more than I can ever hope to learn about film), so I can only characterize Friedkin’s style as a director in general terms: His greatest works have a sense of psychological vividness and realism that verges on the aggressive without ever tipping over into the manic sensibilities of later, lesser artists such as De Palma. There is a verite approach to his cinematographical and editing style — where the ugly, gritty, and inconveniently or tragically random details of real life as it is actually unglamorously lived always intrude — and all of his mature films are wrought with such you-are-there intensity that it verges at times upon the feverish. Friedkin’s greatest films play as hyperreal, in a way that I have to suspect reflects his own personality as a brash, intellectually sure-footed Chicago kid making his way in Hollywood.
His mature phase — after laboring in the late Sixties with amusingly random dues-paying fare like The Night They Raided Minsky’s — really begins with 1971’s The French Connection: a “cop drama” unlike any previously made until then, including the still-recent Bullitt starring Steve McQueen. The film’s incredible visual and narrative style was imported sans pretense from French avant-garde cinema, along with its worldview: Friedkin presented us with a morally ambiguous hero in Popeye Doyle who set the tone for the whole of the Seventies, from Michael Corleone to Travis Bickle. (Friedkin actually wanted McQueen for his film — one of his great regrets was that he never got to direct him — but had Gene Hackman forced upon him instead and for once lived to be thankful for studio interference.)
Doyle is a much darker character than Lieutenant Harry Callahan in Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films; The French Connection’s famously frenetic car-chase scene — which was entirely too dangerous to shoot and which resulted in multiple unplanned collisions that (also typical for Billy Friedkin) he kept in the final cut — culminates in Doyle simply shooting the unarmed perp in the back as he attempts to flee. The guy had it coming to be sure, but the movie never lets you forget that Doyle is a man so consumed with what he believes to be his professional mission that people get hurt in the crossfire; he later accidentally kills another police officer in the midst of a foot chase and doesn’t even pause to express regrets. There are real-world consequences for his behavior, ones the film clearly depicts but never sermonizes about.
As for The Exorcist, does its appeal even need to be explained? I suppose it does, since you often see people — typically the younger generations — grumbling that “it’s not really scary.” The infamous and shocking scenes involving pea soup and crucifixes in The Exorcist have been cheapened by countless years of parody (“Your mother sews socks in hell” is a prime example — I can print that here, but I cannot print the original line of dialogue it modifies). It cannot be emphasized enough, however, that The Exorcist’s strength — the true source of its horror — arises out of its incredible realism.
That might sound like an inapposite point to make in favor of a film about demonic possession wherein a small child’s grey and mottled head slowly pivots around as if on a spindle in two separate scenes. It is true nonetheless: What makes The Exorcist one of the most profoundly unsettling films of its era is its clinical patience. It does not rush into the supernatural horror, rather it sets up, step by step, the philosophical opposition between modern Western rationality and an escalatingly panicked realization that there are things it is unequipped to answer, because (as the old country song goes) “Satan Is Real.” A mother notices something is wrong with her daughter. She seeks answers. The police notice soon as well, for other reasons. They seek answers and are not even antagonistic but genuinely perplexed. And the idea that modern science or forensics not only have no answers to help, but in fact are exacerbating the torment of the possessed girl is what haunts all parents of small children who watch this film. The most terrifying scenes in The Exorcist are not of Fathers Merrin and Karras in the bedroom, but of young Regan in the hospital, undergoing brutally painful medical procedures, shrieking in agony as a spinal tap extracts fluid from her body for a series of tests that, we viewers know already, will avail her nothing.
Both Friedkin and screenwriter William Peter Blatty were irked in later years about how viewers tended to misinterpret the meaning of the ending of The Exorcist — the demon loses, his terrible plan is foiled at the cost of Christian sacrifice, and it is not meant to be ambiguous — but Friedkin arguably has only himself to blame for the misinterpretation of what might actually be his greatest achievement, 1977’s Sorcerer. Friedkin claimed the film — about four people who (through unrelated crimes, errors, or life decisions) find themselves in a Colombian village undertaking an insanely dangerous trucking mission to earn enough money to leave — failed at the box office because it was released on the same day as Star Wars.
It’s an excuse. Its failure was overdetermined in almost every way except artistic merit. There was only one known star (Roy Scheider, a Friedkin favorite he first cast in French Connection). The title of the film was willfully perverse, revealing nothing about what audiences could expect (this is a grittily realistic story of desperados undertaking a near-suicidal quest in the South American jungle) and indeed actively misleading people whose last experience of Friedkin had been The Exorcist into thinking they were getting another supernatural tale. Even more to the point, what audiences actually got was a harrowingly intense depiction of desperate men, antiheroes all, working together under extreme conditions to achieve something impossible, and failing to benefit from it in any way. (The last five minutes of Sorcerer are the most subversively bleak ending to any major Friedkin film.) Were they damned by their sins from the start? The four-part prologue suggests enough. Was the effort they gave sufficient to redeem them? The rest of the film leaves you to answer that question without offering even the blandest of reassurances or guidance.
Sorcerer’s failure at the box office — and Star Wars’ success, as Friedkin ruefully pointed out in later years — meant that he would never be given a truly unlimited budget and full creative freedom again by the studios. It affected his later work, which while uneven never ceased to demonstrate his intensity. By far his greatest later film was 1985’s To Live and Die In L.A. — a symbolic bookend to The French Connection, about authorities (in this case Secret Service agents chasing counterfeiters) whose recklessness in pursuit of their criminal counterparts ends up having disastrous and predictable consequences. To Live and Die was made on a low budget, quickly, using guerilla filmmaking techniques and a cast of unknowns (Willem Dafoe, who would later go on to stardom, had only one serious credit prior to filming). In a funny way, it almost feels like “punk” Friedkin — the frank realism of his Seventies work updated for the Reagan Eighties. It works not only on its own terms as a gripping thriller, but also — right on down to a car-chase sequence that explicitly tries and somehow manages to top that of The French Connection in terms of reckless insanity — a brutal punctuation mark on the Popeye Doyle myth of the “rogue cop.” It is a story that does not end happily, and should not, which was Friedkin’s point.
Friedkin’s filmography stands on its own; to the extent it does not, I hope I have intrigued you enough to revisit its highlights. But one other thing that must be mentioned about him is how much he is missed as a true personality: He was a hilariously opinionated interview, more than a little cocksure and grandiloquent, but with an arrogance earned by his manifest achievements and an abiding love for great moviemaking. (His interview with pompously self-impressed director Nicolas Winding Refn about that subject has become the stuff of legend.) People also occasionally rediscover him on YouTube and on commentary tracks and note how he sounds exactly like an erudite version of Donald Trump down to phrasing and cadence, which is pure coincidence given Friedkin is a Chicago Jewish kid and Trump a WASP from Queens.
He will be dearly missed, not only because his greatest movies are genuine artistic milestones, but because his filmmaking spirit has also seemingly vanished in the safely corporate and algorithmicized movie system of the 21st century. Directors like Friedkin represented America’s artistic continuity with, and evolution upon, a world filmmaking tradition — one ineffably American, but with eyes toward France, England, Japan, Italy, or anywhere art was being made. As he goes, so too goes out another light linking us to that artistic tradition, and further drawing nearer to an uncertain future of increasingly cramped expression and creativity. Billy Friedkin refused to recognize boundaries in pursuit of his artistic visions, which is one reason his protagonists mirrored such a desperate obsession. Would that Hollywood had a hundred more of him, instead of obedient company men.
