William Friedkin (1935-2023) was born August 29; we choose this year to add him to our annals as he passed away a couple of weeks ago; his final film is being released next month; and this year marks the 50th anniversary of my favorite of his movies, The Exorcist (1973).
Friedkin started out as a local TV director in his native Chicago, eventually turning out some critically acclaimed documentaries and a 1965 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. His first feature film was the Sonny and Cher vehicle Good Times (1967) which we wrote about here. At around the same time he directed the pilot for The Pickle Brothers sit-com, which I wrote about here. A member of the trio Peter Lee, whom I interviewed for my upcoming book Electric Vaudeville, devotes a couple of pages to the experience of working with him in his book Leave 'Em Laughing, and quotes him as saying it was one of the best projects he ever worked on, and that he had intended to direct every episode if it was picked up. Unfortunately, it wasn't. As Lee puts it, "the suits at ABC passed on it to run instead a clunker named Custer which folded after one year." And Friedkin put all of his black-out sketch directing ambitions into The Night They Raided Minksy's (1968).
Now, you could be forgiven for assuming that The Night They Raided Minsky's was my favorite Friedkin movie. It was, after all, Bert Lahr's last movie, is narrated by Rudy Vallee, and is all about the eponymous New York burlesque house. And there are some genuinely funny people in it, like Norman Wisdom, Jack Burns, and Richard Libertini. Norman Lear produced and the cast includes Jason Robards, Elliott Gould, Brit Ekland, Forrest Tucker, Harry Andrews, Joseph Wiseman (Dr. No), and Denholm Elliott (very well cast as a morals crusader). Theoretically there ought to be a lot to love, but in my recollection, when I watched it (around the time I was researching No Applause) I found the directing too flashy, self-conscious, and "contemporary" in the Richard Lester vein that was so popular at the time it came out. It was less in the spirit of the old burlesque than a 1968 commentary upon it.
His head appears to have been in the theatre at the time. He went from Minsky's to the 1968 screen adaptation of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (1968), then to a 1970 version of Mart Crowley's Off-Broadway phenomenon The Boys in the Band, one of the very first American movies to show openly gay characters in a positive light. Released mere months after Stonewall, it was way ahead of its time, though now it comes off as somewhat clunky and dated. Interestingly, that one, too, is set during a birthday party.
Friedkin came into his own with his next movie, the French New Wave-influenced, multiple-Oscar winning hit The French Connection (1971). I have to confess that my chief pleasure in watching this film has little to do with the story, how it was shot, or how it was edited. I simply enjoy watching what amounts to documentary footage of New York City in the early '70s. I have little interest in police stories or car chases, and Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle is kind of a reprehensible guy, somewhere in a league with Archie Bunker and Peter Boyle's Joe. The moral greyness is a point of interest, I suppose. People work themselves up into frenzies of enthusiasm for this picture, however. Personally, things like this are not why I watch movies.
I am a huge fan of The Exorcist, however, and have lost count of how many times I've seen it. I'm perplexed and saddened when I hear younger people declare that they don't find it that scary. I struggle to understand what could possibly be missing for them. It seems to me that many contemporary horror fans are like drug addicts. Nothing moves the needle for them except constant high voltage jolts. And this movie isn't like that. Among its chief virtues is the hyper-realism of its opening beats, establishing a baseline reality that gradually gets violated as the supernatural entity bubbles up into the world. Much of what occurs is initially subtle, often infinitesimal. This makes it so much more powerful when the shackles come off in the climactic scene.
The other element that lends the story its power has to do with where the country was at in 1973. It was still at the crest of a wave of social change that scarcely can be imagined by those born after it happened. The country went from being a place where NO ONE used foul language publicly, or talked graphically about sex, or expressed sacrilegious sentiments to one where young people were commonly doing it as a form of rebellion. The power in the film wasn't in the fact that it depicted such acts -- it's that doing so was a manifestation of the fact that it was happening in society. The younger generation was behaving like Regan, a girl possessed by the devil. Such bewildering was confounding and even terrifying to many mature people of the day. It seemed like evil forces were being unleashed that they couldn't control. At the same time, some of the people engaging in previously forbidden behavior surely felt conflicted, even guilty. Were they going to hell?
At the same time, superstition is itself an irrational force. The Exorcist feels in some ways perhaps like an unconscious manifestation of reactionary forces in the country -- an early harbinger of the Holy Roller Renaissance that would bring Ronald Reagan to power and has damaged the country ever since. (The same is true, now that you mention it, of the rogue cop at the center of The French Connection). A decade earlier, the heroes in Hollywood movies were social workers and Freudian psychologists. Now, they were nihilistic cops and prayer-muttering priests. The original William Peter Blatty novel, by the way, as we wrote here, was intended as a satire.
Friedkin's next intended film The Devils' Triangle (with Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, and Charlton Heston!) would have built on this embrace of the irrational, with its "UFOs are real" premise. Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind beat it to production however and it was scrapped. But I'm beginning to detect a pattern here, aren't you? These movies seem to reflect a culture that is losing its moorings, going off the rails. (Interesting to note that at this time, Friedkin produced a documentary in which he interviewed Fritz Lang for over two hours. Who is more irrational than Fritz Lang? Or more "Weimar"?)
Friedkin's next narrative film was Sorcerer (1977), a movie that has been embraced by critics over the decades and that Friedkin felt was his best, but which fared poorly at the box office at the time. It starred Roy Scheider, who had been in The French Connection but was particularly hot at the time on account of Jaws. But Star Wars had come out the week before -- and suddenly even more potent dream-fantasies were there to drug the public. Spielberg and Lucas were an even newer "New Hollywood" than Friedkin.
Friedkin continued to be a major Hollywood director going forward, but was now somewhat eclipsed by the vogue for big-budget popcorn movies. His ensemble comedy The Brink's Job (1978) was the only one of his movies I saw in a cinema during its initial run, I think. This was followed by his controversial gay S/M subculture serial killer thriller Cruising (1980) starring Al Pacino. (Actually, controversial is probably the wrong word, since everybody hated it.) This was followed by Deal of the Century (1981), one of a string of critically-panned Chevy Chase movies. Friedkin then rebounded in a big way with To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), his last unambiguously successful movie.
His next films included Rampage (1987) which went unreleased until 1992; and The Guardian (1990), which made Roger Ebert's "Most Hated Films" list. Jade (1995) was a widely-panned Joe Eszterhas scripted erotic thriller produced by Robert Evans and featuring NYPD Blue's David Caruso and Linda Fiorentino. This was followed by a made for TV remake of 12 Angry Men (1998) and another courtroom drama Rules of Engagement (2000) which was mildly profitable at the box office but tepidly reviewed. In the new century, he directed lots of live opera, and two films written by playwright Tracy Letts, Bug (2006) and Killer Joe (2011). At one point he was to direct a Harvey Fierstein penned bio-pic about Mae West for HBO starring Bette Midler and Natasha Lyonne! It broke my heart when that one fell through. His upcoming posthumous film is a remake of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.
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