So, farewell, then, Wild Billy Friedkin; mercurial, mischievous, motormouthed and maverick to the last; definer and redefiner of genres, deconstructer of overused cinematic tropes and trickery, in a career that ran the gamut from men-on-a-mission documentaries to Sonny and Cher slapstick, musical comedies to music videos. And a string of stone cold cinematic masterpieces and ever-challenging cult classics.
Two of them are burned into our collective psyche, of course: THE FRENCH CONNECTION, a pungent, pedal-to-the-metal policier, in which every cop is (close to) a criminal and all the sinners saints; as morally queasy and uncomfortable a study of the ugly realities and petty brutalities of making and breaking the law as has ever been committed to celluloid. Sour, cynical, amoral, unafraid to offer us lead characters who are not just flawed, but actively hateful, and able to get us rooting for them anyway, it utterly revolutionalised the contemporary crime drama.
And THE EXORCIST, obviously. The film that launched a thousand knock-offs, spin-offs, wannabes, parodies and pastiches, but which had its own self-deconstructing black humour built in from the start. A film it is possible to watch one week and be utterly terrified by, and then, a week later, to find the whole thing gloriously absurd and uncomfortably hilarious. And this is entirely deliberate. It’s masterful filmmaking, endlessly inventive, magnificently manipulative; a film that is wired right in to the era that spawned it, to the paranoia of early 70s Nixonite America, and plays right up to that in a way that source novel author William Peter Blatty might not have been entirely comfortable with, but which never, ever mocks or undercuts the seriousness of the religious faith and theological questions that are the beating heart of the story. It’s a tricky, tortuous balancing act, and Friedkin pulls it off as deftly as an Olympic gymnast. Nearly 50 years on, and the film has lost none of its power to shock or startle, to get under the skin in a whole variety of ways; it remains a high watermark in the horror genre, a constant source of inspiration and aspiration for filmmakers ever after.
These were the heavy hitters, the world-shakers, the films that made his name, established his reputation. But there was also the sulpurous SORCEROR, which reworked the Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic THE WAGES OF FEAR into an even more cynical and nihilistic exporation of desperate, driven men and the death impulse; the controversial, complex, challenging, and morally ambiguous CRUISING, the wrily comic heist movie THE BRINK’S JOB, and the glossily brutal TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., the slick and slippery 80s sheen of which hides an even bleaker study of law and disorder than THE FRENCH CONNECTION. Like so many 70s auteurs, his later career is more erratic, as the game changed and the projects became pasturised by producers. But Friedkin was still his own beast, bringing wildfire and wilfulness wherever he could. There was the bizarro, blackly comic folk horror of THE GUARDIAN, the idiosyncratic JADE, born of that early 90s vogue for “erotic thrillers”, and wryly undercutting the subgenre at every turn.
After that, some TV work, including a better than expected remake of 12 ANGRY MEN, and the big-budget, all star Military courtroom drama THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, which was deftly made, slick and intelligent, and strongly played, but like most films of its type, oddly anonymous. And then, just when it might have been possible to suspect he’d calmed down at last, cooled his jets and become a journeyman director-for-hire,, a final, ferocious reminder of just how full-on and unflinching a filmmaker he could be in a brace of collaborations with the playwright Tracy Letts: the unsettling and flesh-crawling BUG, and the truly outrageous KILLER JOE, which outdoes Jim Thompson at his own game.
It is one hell of a career by any stretch, and he is going to be sorely missed, not just for his cinema shaking talent, but for that no-nonsense, no bullshit, take no prisoners, in your face and fuck you if you don’t like it attitude, evident not simply in every interview he ever gave, and every frame he ever shot. He’s not resting in peace, wherever he may be. He’s hit the place like a force ten gale: Hurricane Billy, here and in the hereafter.
