American film director William Friedkin dies

William Friedkin, one of the fathers of the New Hollywood of the 1970s, died yesterday in Los Angeles, the great revolutionary of genre cinema, whose fate exemplifies the maxim “this is how the glory of the world goes.” He did not live a few weeks before his 88th birthday and before the premiere at the Venice Film Festival of his latest film, “Cane Mutiny Tribunal”.

In 1971, a new hero broke into the screen streets of New York: America had never seen such a fighter for justice, law and order. Looking like either a charlatan preacher or an evil clown, Gene Hackman’s dazzling cop Jimmy Doyle was nicknamed Popeye after the comic cartoon sailor. Lonely, unkempt, flesh of the flesh of an equally unkempt city, promiscuous, terrible on the face, unkind on the inside, unrestrained in language and shooting, this proletarian policeman, on pure adrenaline, tried to defeat the international heroin import network in the United States.

“The French Connection” by 35-year-old William Friedkin won five Oscars and made a real genre revolution: in fact, it was the first neo-noir.

Friedkin, a Chicago television curiosity, had by then made several quite anemic films, musical or absurd. The state of Hollywood at that time would be best described as clinical death, an urgent need for a transfusion of fresh blood, and The French Connection was perhaps the first injection of this kind into the body of an agonizing giant. Friedkin, along with Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas and Bogdanovich, created the New Hollywood.

According to legend, the idea of ​​​​the film was brought to him by the old man Howard Hawks, whose daughter he met. The author of the great gangster film “Scarface” (1932) reasonably assessed the “son-in-law” opuses as “garbage” and advised filming a “pretty chase”, which the audience only dreamed of. Friedkin learned his lesson: Popeye’s car chase after the elevated train, captured by the mafia hitman, is still stunning.

At the peak of his fame, Friedkin stepped up to another genre that was then almost insignificance – the horror film. And broke the bank again. Filmed for $12 million, The Exorcist made $402 million worldwide.

And this despite the fact that, filming a ridiculous novel about a 12-year-old Regan possessed by an African demon Pazuzu, the director did not deny himself literally anything. Viewers should be sick of scenes in which Regan spewed green goo into the face of a priest, masturbated with a crucifix, or rotated her head 360 degrees. But no: the director masterfully owned not just aesthetics, but the poetics of the disgusting, and fierce trash was organically combined with serious metaphysics. In fact, The Exorcist (along with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, filmed in 1968) “grows the legs” of the lion’s share of modern horror films, in which, wherever you spit, you will fall into a satanic child.

The higher you rise, the harder the fall – says evil wisdom. Feeling like “king of the hill”, Friedkin took on the film, which until the end of his life he considered his main opus and which became his biggest financial defeat. With a budget increased from 2 million to 22.5 million, The Sorcerer (1977) grossed only 9 million at the box office. Due to the complexity and length of filming in the jungle of the Dominican Republic, due to the painful casting, it may well be considered a mini-analogue of Apocalypse Now , then filmed in the Philippines by Coppola.

“Taxi Driver” was an adaptation of the novel by French writer and adventurer Georges Arnaud’s “Pay for Fear”, already exemplary transferred to the screen by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1953. Friedkin bowed to the classic of French cinema, and he willingly gave him the rights to the novel, which, by the way, he did not possess. Friedkin over-engineered the story of an international of dangerous losers suicidally driving nitroglycerin trucks down unthinkable tropical roads, but he created his own misanthropic and baroque masterpiece.

Then everything went from bad to worse. Friedkin was not exactly losing his gift. It’s just that with every failure in the eyes of the public and business, he seemed to become hardened, shocked, did everything to be loved less and less.

Scouting (1980), a thriller about a cop chasing a sadistic gay killer, had to cut 40 minutes of action in the sadomasochistic bars where Al Pacino’s character was drowning. A little more successful was the excellent and “stylish” neo-noir “To Live and Die in Los Angeles” (1985), where two operatives also drowned in a maelstrom of unpunished violence and corruption.

“Rules of Combat” (2000) turned out to be an unsuccessful digression into the field of militaristic cinema, and even caused reproaches for racism and Islamophobia. “Hunted” (2003) seemed like a hardened version of Rambo. “Glitches” (2006) – a puzzling hymn to paranoia. Although the story of a crazy veteran, crowned with an auto-da-fé of heroes, who is sure that he became a victim of experiments by special services and picks invisible bugs out of his body, now looks not so much as a splash of directorial misanthropy, but as an excellent metaphor for everything that is happening in the modern world. Friedkin’s latest film threatens to become the same metaphor. No wonder he transferred the famous story about the disobedience of the team to the insane captain from the era of World War II to the present day.

Mikhail Trofimenkov