Visionary, innovative, demanding, reckless, uncompromising: William Friedkin was, in many ways, the archetypical 70’s director. He may not have been the greatest filmmaker to emerge from the prodigal pantheon that shaped the New Hollywood of the 1970’s, but he remains, in all his glorious vices and virtues, my personal favorite.
A true enfant terrible, he had no qualms about assaulting his actors, endangering his crew, or contemptuously defying his studio bosses, if it meant getting what he needed on film. He spent the better part of the Hollywood Renaissance blazing trails and burning bridges with devil-may-care aplomb, becoming the poster-boy for what would be deemed “auteurist excess.” But he left in his wake a handful of films that will be eternally regarded as cinematic classics: The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer…
His career had actually started well before the 70’s, directing some well-regarded television episodes and acclaimed documentaries before delivering a string of uneven features in the mid to late 60’s. His early films range from the noteworthy (his particularly intense adaptation of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band) to the negligible (Good Times aka “the Sonny and Cher movie”). But it was in the 70’s that his cinematic voice and vision found their fullest realization, beginning with 1971’s gritty, grimy, grim and gripping The French Connection.
Based on the true story of one the largest drug busts in law enforcement history, Friedkin brought the full force of his documentary experiences and cinematic influences (from the French New Wave to the German “street films” of the 1920’s) to The French Connection, and the result was something American audiences had never seen before: a boots-on-the-ground, matter-of-fact depiction of cops, criminals, and the worlds they inhabit.
The dingy alleyways, seedy dive bars, and decaying neighborhoods of New York City’s underbelly, the casual racism, brutality and disregard for procedure inherent in the urban American police force, and the criminal underworld’s ties to wealth, fame, and political power were virtually unseen onscreen up to that point. (It’s worth noting that Dragnet had only left the TV airwaves the previous year.) The fact that Friedkin portrayed it all without any kind of authorial moral judgement only served to intensify the impact.
But for all the power of its pull-no-punches realism, The French Connection was no mere exercise in cinema verité. The film is, first and foremost, a searing portrait of obsession.
Gene Hackman’s rough and reckless narcotics cop, “Popeye” Doyle, follows a casual late-night hunch, only to uncover a massive international drug smuggling operation masterminded by a suave, sophisticated French entrepreneur, Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). Doyle’s dogged pursuit builds to a fever pitch, as Rey’s Prince of Darkness leads him in an infernal dance through the city’s streets, subways, and skyscrapers, driving him ever closer to the ragged edge.
Hackman’s Academy Award winning performance is now legendary, but it took a lot of poking, prodding, teasing and taunting from Friedkin to strip away the actor’s soft-spoken midwestern charm. It didn’t help that Hackman strongly disliked Doyle’s real-life counterpart, New York detective Eddie Egan, and would bristle every time Egan favorably compared Hackman’s performance to himself. Friedkin used Hackman’s discomfort to his (and the film’s) advantage, pushing him – much like Chernier’s taunts and evasions push Doyle – until there was nothing left on screen but a raw, exposed nerve. Hackman has delivered a career’s worth of brilliant performances since The French Connection, from the subtly restrained to the quietly intense to the cartoonishly over-the-top, but never again has he burned through the screen the way he does as Doyle.
Friedkin’s own reckless obsession perfectly mirrored his protagonist’s, often going to extraordinary lengths and taking extraordinary risks to realize his cinematic vision. Perhaps nowhere is this more dynamically and dramatically rendered than in the film’s celebrated chase. Following an attempt on his life, Doyle commandeers a civilian’s car in pursuit of the hitman who has escaped onto an elevated train. The sequence was not in the script, but dreamed up by Friedkin on the spot, and captured without any kind of permit or precautions. Camera in hand, he goaded stunt driver Bill Hickman from the back of a car, careening through New York City traffic at 160 miles per hour.
“I wouldn’t do that today,” Friedkin has said many times in the years following, always sounding more pragmatic than genuinely remorseful.
But this willful determination to push the limits – narratively, dramatically and, of course, cinematically – became one of the hallmarks of his directorial style. As a result, The French Connection, like all his best films, practically seethes on screen, its ostensible realism anchoring the audience’s suspension of disbelief as the film hurtles towards ever more excessive extremes with near demonic intensity.
I first came face-to-face with that intensity at the tender age of 8 or 9 years old, when I accidentally caught a short clip of Friedkin’s French Connection follow-up, The Exorcist…
I walked in on Kitty Wynn leading a small group of doctors up the stairs to where Ellen Burstyn’s distraught Chris MacNeil is helplessly watching her young daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), convulse wildly on her bed. Pitched back and forth like a ragdoll in the teeth of some invisible rabid animal, Regan is violently thrown back against the mattress. Her eyes roll back in her head and she emits an unnatural, tortured growl. The lead doctor – calm, collected, rational – steps forward to take control only to have Regan lurch forward and hit him hard enough to knock him to the floor. Whatever beast had her in its jaws is also inside her, in control, and it speaks through her: “Keep away! The sow is mine!” In an act of shocking perversity, the little girl hikes up her nightgown. “Fuck me!” the beast demands. “FUCK ME!” The doctors, dazed, simply stare, utterly at a loss. Her mother cries out in impotent anguish. All hell has literally broken loose in this child’s bedroom.
And that was it for me. I ran to my bedroom, hid under the covers, and spent the rest of the night shaking and sweating, trying to permanently banish it all from my brain. I had a loose idea of the film being about demonic possession, but it wasn’t the Devil that I was afraid of. It was the sensation the sequence evoked. Those few minutes were so relentless, they felt like an assault.
It was four or five years before I would watch the film in full. Even as an angry, angsty adolescent – by then obsessively well-versed in the horror genre – I still found it to be a pretty merciless experience. What surprised me was that rather than braving my way through two hours of relentless assault, I found myself enrapt in a tense, haunting drama, depicting a mother’s desperation and a young priest’s crisis of faith. What gives the film its particular intensity is the pervasive sense of dread that hangs over its character-driven narrative, threatening to erupt, at any moment, into infernal madness.
Friedkin makes the most of these tonal contrasts, shifting between extremes of light and sound, to keep us on-edge and off-balance, our senses constantly on alert. Dark shadows and dimly-lit rooms smash-cut to harsh hospital fluorescents and blazingly white walls. Diabolical cacophony collapses instantly into dead silence, only to quickly and overwhelmingly crescendo again. Documentary style camera-work spirals into frenzied quick cuts and whip-pans, only to be arrested by sudden stillness – the camera seemingly as stunned as the viewer.
More than mere visceral thrill, these jarring juxtapositions of light and dark, tumult and silence, turbulence and stillness also drive the film thematically, powerfully rendering the struggles between good and evil, faith and despair, known and unknown that fire its deeper conflicts and inquiries. If The French Connection’s verité style serves as a catapult for launching its lead character toward ever more obsessive extremes, The Exorcist’s headlong collision of character-driven drama and unflinching supernatural horror only serves to intensify the harrowing believability – and, by extension, the implications – of its most over-the-top scenes.
“I made the film as a believer,” Friedkin said. Despite being an avowed atheist during the film’s production, he knew the only way to deliver the desired effect was to treat the story with total respect and utter conviction.
The Exorcist’s cast and crew, as well as Friedkin, himself,[1] have often recounted the outrageous lengths he was willing to go to achieve that authenticity, from pushing the stunt work to dangerous limits (Burstyn suffered a permanent back injury), to erratically firing off shotguns on set to keep his actors looking rattled and scared. To get an acceptably distraught performance from non-actor Rev. William O’Malley, Friedkin slapped the priest hard across the face before calling action. And perhaps most infamously (though it’s, admittedly, a close race), to capture the distinctive guttural rasp of the demon possessing Regan, Friedkin tied actress (and recovering alcoholic), Mercedes McCambridge, to a chair, feeding her a steady diet of booze, cigarettes, and raw eggs, while recording her increasingly ragged and unhinged vocal performance.
Many today (including several of the film’s cast and crew) might denounce Friedkin for going too far, but there’s no denying that his efforts, no matter how extreme, ultimately paid off. At the time of The Exorcist’s release, news stories abounded with tales of audience members fleeing the theater in fright, vomiting in the aisles, and even suffering heart attacks during the film. While some of these stories were probably exaggerated by the media, the shock and awe only served to pique popular interest in the film and The Exorcist quickly secured its place in the horror pantheon. Even 50 years later, it retains much of its terrifying power.[2]
I would be in college before I managed to get my hands on a pitiful, pan-and-scan VHS copy of Sorcerer. A remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear, before Apocalypse Now, before Heaven’s Gate, it was Sorcerer that – thanks to its bedeviled runaway production and dismal box office failure – was branded as the film that killed the American New Wave. Expecting an embarrassingly overwrought disaster, I instead found myself utterly riveted. And when I was able to view the film in all its widescreen glory a couple of years later, courtesy of a screening at the American Cinematheque, I was blown away.
A pitilessly bleak and battering meditation on fate and endurance, Friedkin pulls out all the cinematic stops to tell the tale of four fugitive criminals hired by an unscrupulous oil company to transport two trucks freighted with unstable dynamite across even more volatile South American terrain. In his hands, Clouzot’s taut suspense thriller becomes a white-knuckle descent into Hell.
Like all of Friedkin’s films, Sorcerer is intensely physical. If French Connection’s wild chase left us with our hearts in our throats, if we could feel our stomachs tense and coil every time we climbed the stairs toward Regan MacNeil’s bedroom in The Exorcist, Sorcerer seems to subject us bodily to every trial and ordeal faced by our four fugitives in their Sisyphean struggle. From the suffocating jungle humidity, to the preternatural lashings of rain and mud, to the treacherously rough and ragged roads they must navigate, spurred on by some vain hope of deliverance or reprieve, we are made to feel every second of their journey, resulting in a harrowing ride.
As in Friedkin’s previous films, these blistering onslaughts find their poetry in stretches of stillness and silence that highlight theme and character, while also intensifying the film’s full-throttle attacks. A nearly wordless sequence in which our desperate drivers must find a way to navigate around a massive fallen tree is as enthralling – and as freighted – as their attempts to steer their payload across a rickety rope bridge in the middle of a savage storm.
Never one to sit in judgment, even of humanity’s darkest tendencies, Friedkin allows his protagonists genuine moments of courage, cooperation, and resourcefulness. But a specter of futility haunts even their most Herculean efforts. If they fail, they’re dead men. But if they succeed, it’s only as pawns of a powerful corporation even more ruthless and corrupt than they are, gaining a small sum and a momentary semblance of freedom they’ll likely squander. For all that they talk greedily of their promised reward, in the end, what really keeps them moving forward is that they have nowhere else to go. Their lives have been used up.
If Wages of Fear was an existential parable, Sorcerer’s relentless extremes push the story’s inherent fatalism further into hopelessness, positing failure and damnation as the unavoidable consequence of modern existence. “That’s one of the themes of Sorcerer: No matter how much you struggle, you get blown up,” Friedkin said, “Fate is waiting around the corner to kick you in the ass.”
Friedkin’s infamous on-set antics and excesses while making Sorcerer are chronicled with tabloid salaciousness in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and with matter-of-fact amusement by Friedkin, himself, in his memoir, The Freidkin Connection. A temperamental tyrant with his cast and crew, he would gleefully turn and play court jester to his studio bosses, using their photos to represent the fictional oil company’s corrupt board members, or getting falling down drunk in meetings and insisting that any changes they asked for, no matter how small, would require lengthy and expensive location shoots in the Dominican Republic.
Whether because of the stories surrounding the film’s out-of-control production, or Friedkin’s reckless ambition and erratic behavior, or just because Sorcerer, like its protagonists, was fate’s unwitting victim (Star Wars came out almost exactly a month prior), the film was ignored by audiences, almost universally disparaged by critics, and quickly buried by the studio following its release. The similar fates befalling Apocalypse Now and Heaven’s Gate in the following years only served to push it further into obscurity.
Thankfully, in the last couple of decades, Sorcerer’s reputation has been significantly rehabilitated. Given a long overdue remastered widescreen DVD and Blu-ray release in 2014, many today – myself, included – consider it to be Friedkin’s masterpiece.
Though he may never have reached the heights of The French Connection, The Exorcist, or Sorcerer in his post-70’s career, Friedkin nonetheless directed several brilliant films throughout the 80’s, 90’s, and into the new millennium, and while he also made his share of critical and popular flops, even his lesser efforts bear his indelible mark, making them worthwhile viewing for any fans of his unique take-no-prisoners style.
1985’s To Live and Die in L.A. transposes The French Connection’s themes of obsession and self-destruction to the west coast. Further bulldozing the boundary between cop and criminal in its depiction of a loose-cannon Secret Service agent’s rabid pursuit of an eccentric counterfeiter, the film paints Los Angeles as a desert hellscape in day-glo drag, turning Michael Mann’s Miami Vice aesthetic (which had debuted the previous year) inside out. A masterwork in its own right (if not quite as sublime as its forbear), critics initially decried To Live and Die in L.A.’s brutality and amorality, complaining that there were no characters to root for (a notable sea-change from the arty 70’s sensibilities that greeted French Connection), but later came to see that soullessness was part of the point.
Dismissed by many, The Hunted (2003) is actually a better-than-average action thriller that pits Tommy Lee Jones’ grizzled Special Forces vet against a renegade former student, played with parallel intensity by Benicio del Toro. Despite its unfocused script, the film delivers Friedkin’s trademark punishing action sequences, balancing the intimacy of mano a mano combat with almost apocalyptic motifs, as viewers are made to feel every slice and stab of our main characters’ dueling knives and the slippery, sticky warmth of each drop of blood shed between them.
Even 1995’s almost universally despised Jade – its screenplay as lurid, turgid, and sordid as anything to ever spurt from the priapic pen of Joe Eszterhas – is a stylistic tour-de-force, featuring some truly breathtaking sequences and flourishes. If not a good film, per se, it’s at least far more cinematically impressive and accomplished than either of Paul Verhoeven’s more popular – if excessively garish and campy – Eszterhas-scripted offerings from that same decade.
A brief artistic partnership with playwright Tracy Letts in the new century resulted in two controversial late-career classics: the claustrophobic, nerve-shattering Bug in 2006, and the pitch-black rodeo ride, Killer Joe, in 2007. Both films plumb the depths of the human psyche – albeit in very different ways – with Friedkin’s characteristic unflinching flair, and boast terrifyingly intense performances from their respective leads (Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon and Matthew McConaughey). It’s rare to find an artist in their 70’s delivering such unapologetically provocative fare, but entirely befitting a filmmaker with Friedkin’s trademark audacity.
His final film, a contemporary update of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, released a few months after his passing in August of 2023, is a restrained and riveting courtroom drama that stands in stark contrast to the stylistic dynamism of much of his previous work, decisively answering any accusations of sensationalism lobbed at him throughout his career. Reminiscent of – and better than – his 1997 made-for-TV remake of 12 Angry Men, the film is anchored by Jason Clarke’s carefully modulated turn as the titular court-martial’s conflicted defense attorney, and features an unsettling, career-best performance from Keifer Sutherland as Queeg. Though some might balk at the film’s matter-of-fact minimalism, the story’s grubby, grey morality make it a perfect fit for Friedkin’s sensibilities, and it would be a mistake to discount his cinematic skill – his camera methodically capturing character and theme with a precision that mirrors his protagonist’s shrewd, juridical approach. As valedictions go, you could do a lot worse.
At his peak, Friedkin brought all the invention, immediacy and intensity that were the hallmarks of his generation of American filmmakers to his oeuvre, amped up by his own unique full-throttle fuel-injection of relentlessness, recklessness, and despair. As ruthless, obsessive and irreverent as any of his characters, his willingness to push his cast, his crew, and himself past all reasonable limits, while defiantly demanding total creative control from his bosses, often resulted in the reality of his sets reflecting the harsh realms he explored on film. (Not for nothing did they call him “Hurricane Billy.”)
Modern moviegoers might decry his tactics and approaches as everything that was once wrong with Hollywood (and maybe still is). But while I sympathize with those seeking a kinder, gentler, more responsible approach to filmmaking, I don’t know that I’d trade a French Connection, Exorcist, or Sorcerer for the sake of a safer, more secure and well-mannered cinema. It’s a personal preference, but I’d rather have great art than good behavior. Few filmmakers today feel as dark as Freidkin, none feel as dangerous.
At their best, Friedkin’s films burrow under your skin, squeeze the pit of your stomach, seize you by the throat, and knock the wind out of your lungs. It’s only when the credits roll that you realize his films have also burrowed into your mind, leaving you grappling with troubling questions as you struggle to catch your breath.
[1] In addition to being a superlative filmmaker, Friedkin was also a gifted raconteur, and his discussions and recollections of his work are often as energetic, entertaining and unflinching as his films.
[2] Ideally, in its original, theatrical version. The 2000 re-release, though some of its additions are not without interest, is ultimately a weaker film.
But is it Art...? 