And so, after saying farewell to Kenneth Anger a few months ago, we mark the departure of another bad tempered, uncompromising, fiendishly inspired director whose work succeeded in turning American film culture upside down and shaking the hell out of it.
It probably shouldn’t be a surprise when someone passes away at the age of 87, but, Friedkin always seemed like one of those guys who’s just going to keep on banging away forever.
Personality-wise, he was... abrasive, to say the least. I’ll admit that I’ve increasingly started to find interviews and commentaries with him painful to sit through in recent years, but -- he sure could get shit done. And he continued to get it done too, fighting to get provocative and divisive material up on the screen right to the bitter end (for better or for worse). He could easily have just rested on his laurels in his later decades, played the Hollywood game and taken it easy; but such was not his way, and at the very least we got unsettling films like ‘Bug’ (2006) and ‘Killer Joe’ (2011) as a result.
Ultimately in a case like this though, what can you say, except: look at the work.
‘Sorcerer’ is a serious contender for my favourite film of all time. Every time I see it, I’m just stunned by the sheer intensity of the imagery Friedkin managed to get onto the screen. It is awesome, in the original / primal sense of the word.
But, on some days, ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’, ‘Cruising’ and ‘The French Connection’ could all easily make it into my all-time top 10 too – a trio of superlative crime films, all perfect examples of Friedkin’s stated preference for what he modestly called “off-kilter action-adventure movies”, each of them leaving genre/audience expectations dead in the gutter as they explore uncomfortable, liminal realms, mapping out both the disintegration of the line separating crime from the law, and the disintegration of individual identity itself.
And yes, I’ll even grudgingly admit that ‘The Exorcist’ is pretty flawless in technical terms, even though its heavy-handed literalism and self-serious attitude has always left a bad taste in my mouth.
Meanwhile though, away from the provocation and self-immolation, there was another Billy Friedkin out there too, wasn’t there? The classicist golden age Hollywood devotee who made odd, old-fashioned pictures like ‘The Brink’s Job’ and ‘The Night They Raided Minsky’s’? Is anyone going to sing his praises, before the moment passes? Well, I’m not going to, but someone probably should.
Friedkin is deserving of a much longer, more in-depth tribute, of course, but what else can you say at this point -- a great loss to cinema. RIP.
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