WALTER CHAW
William Friedkin was deeply into sin. His films operate on what the disgraced psychiatrist (Robin Williams in his greatest role) of Kenneth Branagh’s bonzer “Dead Again” called the “karmic payment plan,” namely, you “buy now pay forever.” Most often grouped with the film brats of the New American Cinema, Friedkin was an autodidact, starting in the mailroom of WGN out of high school. His breeding was more in line with the John Frankenheimers of a previous generation who cut their teeth on television news documentaries before beginning their feature film careers, and his ethos has always felt to me less in league with Catholic filmmakers like Hitchcock or Scorsese (despite “The Exorcist” serving as the most effective Catholic recruitment artifact in the modern era), awash in rinse cycles of the fallen, than Billy Wilder’s irascible, even noxious belief in the essential lousiness of the world and its inhabitants. Indeed, there are similarities between Friedkin’s and Wilder’s pasts: Friedkin, whose Ukrainian-Jewish grandparents fled their homeland before a violent antisemitic pogrom, and Wilder, who lost most of his family to Hitler’s death camps. Like Wilder’s prickly filmography, Friedkin’s best movies are documentaries of the inevitability of great evil. Dangerous to the touch, I don’t know anyone who has seen Friedkin’s key pictures and has not been lacerated by the experience.
His breakthrough, a documentary called “The People vs. Paul Crump” (1962), which he shot with legendary cinematographer Bill Butler who preceded Friedkin in death by just four months, is shockingly evergreen. Its dramatic recreations, moral outrage, and unfiltered accusations of police brutality earned the film an immediate suppression on the eve of its broadcast. Undaunted, Friedkin smuggled a copy to then-Governor Otto Kerner, who, a day later, commuted Crump’s execution.
Friedkin was never daunted. In stylized documentary style, he told in “The French Connection” the true story of an unstemmed drug operation centering a racist, brutal cop, Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), as the new American hero archetype for our home of the broken trust, land of the betrayed. Joining Popeye in “The Exorcist,” a pair of haunted, haggard priests trying to protect a child from corruption; then a thug (Roy Scheider) who flubs a heist at a Catholic Church run by gangsters and finds himself one of a motley crew of exiles tasked with transporting a cargo of dangerously decayed explosives through the infernal jungle in “Sorcerer.” His manifestations of the naked nightmares of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in the writhing midnight shades of “Cruising” (1980) rival anything in Paul Schrader’s psychosexual hells. He made counterfeiting twenties sexy in “To Live and Die in L.A.” (1985), showed off the ugly, paranoid sweats with “Bug” (2006) and “Killer Joe” (2011), and even left us with one of the great Hollywood memoirs. The first thing I revisited tonight, though, was his episode of the 1980s “Twilight Zone.” “Nightcrawlers” (S1 E4) tells the tale of a Vietnam Vet who manifests his trauma whenever he falls asleep. Wherever Friedkin went, he brought wickedness. His works are magnificent.
SCOUT TAFOYA
I’ve already written about his titanic achievements as a director and the symphonies of terror he composed for this site but I want to take a minute to say few people had a voice for storytelling like Friedkin. Punchlines sounded so funny in his voice. I was lucky enough to see him speak at the Bam Cinématek, where he told somehow uproarious stories about killers and thieves. Generously when speaking about the movie “The Wages of Fear,” which had inspired his remake “Sorcerer,” he took a minute to ham it up and say, “If you haven’t seen “The Wages of Fear,” what are you doing here? Get out! Go! Watch it!” He had this perfect cadence, like a psychotic dentist finally released from lifelong doctor-patient confidentiality. On the executive who he made the mistake of telling he wanted to cast Ellen Burstyn in “The Exorcist”: “He got on the ground and grabbed my leg. ‘Now…walk. You see how hard this is? That’s what it will be like if you try to cast Ellen Burstyn in “The Exorcist.”’” And his reunion with “Exorcist” extra Paul Bateson, who’d been arrested by “French Connection” extra Randy Jurgensen. “I went up to Riker’s Island to see him … he said, ‘Hi, Bill, how’s the movie going?’ I said, ‘Oh fine … did you do those murders?’” Many people could tell that story, but only Friedkin could bring the house down with his enunciation and diction. There was no one else like him.