The
director William Friedkin died this week.
Over a fifty-year career, his movies included, most famously, The Exorcist , as well as The French Connection , The Boys in the Band , To Live and Die in L.A. , the notorious Cruising , and the hugely underrated Sorcerer , a moody, Gothic remake of
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s bristling existential thriller, The Wages of Fear .
It’s easy
to misremember what a jolt The French
Connection was, when it came out.
For context, Bullitt had been
released in 1968, Midnight Cowboy in 1969,
M*A*S*H in 1970. There
was still plenty of room for the traditional -Westerns, musicals, rom-coms –
but the new American cinema, so-called, was opening up, and the European
influence was strong. Friedkin
specifically mentions Z , the
Costa-Gavras political thriller, as a direct influence on The French Connection . He and his DP, Owen Roizman (who shot The Exorcist , as well), were looking for
a documentary feel, a sense of the randomly found . Particularly in the first act, when Popeye
and Buddy are following the hoods around, not knowing what it might lead to,
but knowing it could lead to something ,
they’re shot from a distance, but with a tight zoom, as if they’re themselves under
surveillance. They’re being eavesdropped
on; it’s a violation of privacy; the camera is stealing glimpses. Everybody
knows the celebrated car chase, when Popeye commandeers a civilian’s TransAm to
run after the train on the elevated tracks, but less celebrated is the way the
picture internalizes Popeye’s
obsessive, manic fury. The script is by
Ernest Tidyman, best known for Shaft ,
and it’s elliptical,
circling the objective. The structure is
formal, but it’s deceptive, because the story isn’t linear. It
seems intuitive, or somehow organic, just lifting off the pavement like the
steam coming through the subway grates.
It’s about street sense. Popeye
and Buddy are like, Oh, we know those creeps, what are they doing out so
late? And what are doing with those other guys, since when do they hang together? The
whole story, in other words, hangs on a hunch, and it proceeds by small, dogged
increments, routine footwork, ear to the ground. And like that other marvelous observer of New York ’s particular
urban energy, Sidney Lumet, Friedkin taps the nervous, animal muscularity of the
city to manifest a sense of dread, a presence, just outside the edge of the frame. Roizman later said what he and Friedkin were
after was to make you uneasy. They were
helped enormously by Gene Hackman. He gives
the character terrific physicality, and his single-mindedness is close to pathological. You begin to wonder whether Popeye is just plain
nuts. Even though you know he’s right
about the Frenchman, he does in fact go over the edge.
William
Goldman once said his obituary would lead with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , and of course he was right, even
though he’d written plenty of other stuff – and me personally, I’ve never liked
Butch Cassidy that much. Billy Friedkin’s notices led with The Exorcist , natch. I guess that’s fair, but The French Connection put
him on the map. You could do worse.
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