Of all the auteurs and iconoclasts to emerge from the New Hollywood era, no one made movies quite as mad as William Friedkin. He wasn’t a romantic, like Coppola with his lyrical Catholic imagery and spiritual opulence, and he didn’t set scenes of murder to The Rolling Stones. He was more visceral, despite having started out directing television, a more constricting medium. He worked comfortably (which isn’t to say that his films are comfortable—save for The Brink’s Job and Deal of the Century, both fairly flaccid, he pretty much only made unhappy movies) in many genres, with upper- and lower-brow heights treated with equal respect; he was always wholly himself, for better and worse. He liked to provoke (it’s a real shame his only collaboration with Joe Eszterhas didn’t work out), and often treated moviegoers like subjects in an unethical experiment. His films were, as Pauline Kael said, “the cinema du zap.”
Wild Bill’s great, inexhaustible theme, his perdurance, was men—the unfettered essence and innate violence of men, thrashing like a captured shark down deep in their heart. Cops and killers and creeps and priests, many characters you root for not because they’re decent guys, but because they’re not as bad as the other guys. In The French Connection, our loose-cannon cops abuse their power over and over. Gene Hackman’s Popeye uses the freedom for sadism afforded him by a job with the police as an acceptable outlet for his tenacious testosterone, that immutable urge to hurt people. The Exorcist is known for its disturbing intensity and histrionics, but it’s really the story of a priest stricken with tremendous guilt over the lonesome death of his poor mother; his faith is tested, but in the end he gives his own life to save an innocent young girl. It’s Friedkin’s most hopeful ending.
Sorcerer follows the insane attempts of four penurious men with wicked pasts hiding in a South American hellhole to transport volatile chemicals in ramshackle trucks across hundreds of miles of phantasmagoric vegetation without blowing themselves up. There’s an Arab terrorist, unafraid to die; a white collar criminal from France; an assassin willing to do whatever to whomever to save his own skin; and Roy Scheider, as an Irish mafia wheelman who’s on the run from Italians who want his head. In this endless verdant realm, the men, none innocent, must use their most primitive instincts to survive. But the question remains: What will they do, hunted as they are, once they’re free? Find another derelict, dolorous corner of the planet in which to hide?
After the herculean failure of Sorcerer, a victim of the advent of family-friendly blockbusters, Friedkin made far smaller, more intimate movies. The unnerving, unflinching yet empathetic Cruising, the first film Friedkin wrote by himself, delves into the unarticulated, perhaps even unknown-to-him identical tumult of a cop sent to survey the underground gay scene of pre-Giuliani New York to find a serial killer. It’s possibly Pacino’s best work: laconic, frightened, intrigued, obsessed, an internalized under-acting performance that, after three decades of Loud Pacino, is now a bit discombobulating. The ending—Pacino’s face fading into a tug boat dragging a heap of detritus across the polluted river—stands alongside the closed door of The Godfather, an insoluble and enduring image that refuses to be understood.
Wild Bill’s great, inexhaustible theme, his perdurance, was men—the unfettered essence and innate violence of men, thrashing like a captured shark down deep in their heart.
The cop of To Live and Die in LA is an adrenaline junky—another rogue alpha-male rule-breaker, but one who doesn’t get to win here. The forgotten, intermittently engaging Rampage concerns another serial killer, one who drinks human blood, and the man whose conflicted feelings on the death penalty make his job as prosecutor difficult. Jade, truncated by producers and left a shambles, stars David Caruso as an Assistant District Attorney investigating a particularly gnarly murder. The deeper he goes, the more he gets steeped in a lurid and lubricious world he’s never even fathomed—which sounds cool, but is fatally underdeveloped and thus not very compelling. It’s a film about, albeit not very successful, the libidinous gaze of men and the ways women can manipulate them for their own desires.
Friedkin’s remake of 12 Angry Men is, as its title implies, about angry men. Blue Chips’s depiction of amorality and capitalism in college basketball has Friedkin’s singular cynicism, with Nick Nolte as the burned-out coach trying to recruit a winning team. The Rules of Engagement is another story of the traditional mettle of American masculinity tested by the dishonorable military machine, and The Hunted is another variation of that—but also, like Sorcerer, a tense tale of dangerous men out in the elements. Compared to the prolonged, patient swelling of tension in that earlier film, The Hunted is terse and effective. And in his penultimate film, the deranged talkathon Killer Joe, Matthew McConaughey plays a corrupt cop and hired killer who wants to bone a simple-minded young trailer park girl, a very red-blooded American manliness. His last film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, released 12 years later, depicts another officer of the armed forces in another trial.
When Friedkin was asked to share 10 of his favorite Criterion films in 2012, he listed, among such aesthetically stylish classics as Last Year at Marienbad and The Red Shoes, (dreamy, swoony, poetic films untethered from reality that don’t much resemble Friedkin’s, in look or feel), Shohei Imumura’s Vengeance Is Mine, which shares the same pitiless soul as the American provocateur’s best works. It’s a film defined by its unwavering commitment to the inexorable violence of its main character, a man who doesn’t even feign an interest in redemption. Iwao Enokizu, clean-cut and traditionally beddable, is, like most psychopaths, seemingly normal. He’s a confidence man, a charmer whose appeal to the lonely women he seduces reflects the traditional gender roles of post-War Japan. The film’s violence is intense and unemotional, dexterously staged without succumbing to sensationalism, shot in long, clean takes with assiduous lighting and compositions. Each act of evil is meticulously detailed and emotionally detached, as banal as it is brutal.
Friedkin says he likes Imamura’s film because it’s antipodal to Ozu’s style, a marriage of the surreal and vérité honesty, which describes The Exorcist, Sorcerer, Killer Joe, and even Cruising. Imamura never pretends to extenuate the horror or comfort us at the end, a characteristic Friedkin shares. Consider: Hackman running after the criminal he’s been so doggedly chasing into the gloaming of a dilapidated gray husk of a building; Scheider’s morose victory cut short by a single bellicose bang; the shocking shotgun-to-the-face death of our lead in To Live and Die in LA; all those unanswered questions in Cruising, Pacino’s sphinxlike reflection devoid of visible emotion; Caruso’s failure to solve the mystery—or do anything, really—in Jade, only for Friedkin to reveal only to us the truth.
Billy believed in the raw sensation of cinema, of intensely immediate filmmaking, emotional duress raised to the highest, sharpest pitch. FL
The Exorcist, Sorcerer, Cruising, Deal of the Century, and Jade are all currently available to stream on The Criterion Channel.
