Director William Friedkin, one of the most significant filmmakers of the past 50 years, has died at 87. Friedkin is best known for his two great films, The French Connection and The Exorcist, each groundbreaking in its own way. The French Connection, despite an anti-hero with off-putting characteristics and a setting in NYC at its grimiest, had audiences on the the edge of their seats, and its car chase (before CGI) is still the gold standard. The Exorcist was the first horror movie to be nominated for Oscar (a recognition previously unthinkable).
Friedkin also made two LGBTQ-themed films well before other Hollywood mainstreamers – The Boys in the Band and Cruising (the latter controversial in the LGBTQ community).
Friedkin also had a gift for neo-noir, and his To Live and Die in L.A. has become a noir cult favorite. Perhaps burdened by the outrageousness of writer Tracy Letts’ perverse and taboo-centric story, the delicious neo-noir Killer Joe has never received its due. Less colorful than those two, The Brink’s Job is a solid and entertaining crime film.
And The Exorcist wasn’t Friedkin’s only foray into foray. The grievously overlooked Bug still stands up today.
For some reason, Friedkin’s own favorite work was the disappointing slog Sorcerer (although it doesn’t deserve to be reviled as much as Jade, the only really bad Friedkin movie I’ve seen.)
At 87, Friedkin just completed his final film, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.
Like another of my favorite directors, Sam Fuller, Friedkin was never too high-minded to embrace the lurid, which was manifested in The Exorcist, Bug, Cruising and Killer Joe. He enjoyed seeing himself as a bit of a rascal, and claimed to have bribed a NYC transit official $40,000 to permit staging the The French Connection car chase.
Friedkin was also a delightfully irascible raconteur, which I got to appreciate in-person at a San Francisco preview screening of Killer Joe in 2011.
