William Friedkin is going to explain himself to us if it takes him all night. His latest telegram from his subconscious is an article in the Guardian to which he has signed his name, ostensibly on the subject of the release of The French Connection on Blu-ray. "The myth of the incorruptible lawman persisted until policing scandals started multiplying [in the late 1960s]. The age of innocence was over with the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Vietnam War, so that after Watergate in 1972, people would believe anything about corruption in all walks of life." According to Friedkin, "Those of us who made films in the 70s were not following the zeitgeist: we shaped it. We no longer believed in a man on a white horse. We knew he was flawed because we were flawed." This all has such a nice ring to it that you kind of hate to point out that everything Friedkin writes seems to be canceled out by his next sentence. Either he "shaped" the zeitgeist instead of "following it", which would seem to indicate that he was out ahead of the curve, or The French Connection, with its racist, trigger-happy supercop antihero Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), was a reflection of attitudes that people had already formed from reading the newspaper. When discussing what set Connection apart back in the day, one factor that Friedkin doesn't bring up is Costa-Gavras's Z, the 1969 political thriller that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and whose slam-bang style, with its percussive editing, was heavily influential on Friedkin's picture. Friedkin was very open about his debt to Costa-Gavras back when he must have thought that it was real artistic for a commercial Hollywood director to know enough about European movies to copy his moves from one.

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On the occasion of the DVD release of 1970's The Boys In The Band, Andrew O'Hehir has interviewed William Friedkin. Friedkin is best known to the general public as the man who engineered the back-to-back successes of The French Connection and The Exorcist, then flopped forever more. For hardcore film nerds and auteurists, he's either a constant failure or an underrated master.

Aside from small cult affairs like 2003's The Hunted — a fairly brilliant pared-down continuous chase film derided for its deliberate lack of characterization — the reason Friedkin annoys a lot of people are a twin pair of gay-themed films viewed fairly continuously as homophobic. The Boys In The Band annoyed post-Stonewall gays for its ostensibly stereotypical portrait of self-loathing queens going at it for condescending straight viewers having their worst fears confirmed. 1980's Cruising — cop Al Pacino vs. gay murderers in New York's S&M scene — was reviled even before it was filmed; as Trenton Straube wrote when the film was re-issued on DVD last year, the Village Voice's Arthur Bell predicted it would be "the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen." When it was released, the National Gay Task Force compared it to The Birth Of A Nation.

Whether or not the films are inadvertently homophobic is beside the point. What O'Hehir's interview shows is something I've suspected for a long time: Friedkin is a director so sociopathically honed in on exploring environments, he's completely indifferent when it comes to any sense of social responsibility.

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Usually, when I watch a potential When Good Directors Go Bad title, I’m pretty sure of how I feel about it. Generally, it’ll be a movie I already know that I dislike, or one that I’ve heard enough negative things about that I’m almost positive I’ll join the chorus of naysayers. Occasionally, I’ve tried to defend movies which are much better than their reputations would suggest. But I don’t think I’ve ever been so conflicted about my feelings about a selection than I was with William Friedkin’s Cruising.

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What is it about alternate cuts? A cynical marketing tool to sell an old movie or the chance for the filmmakers to finally unveil their true vision of the film? In the old days, studios wouldn't bother with keeping trims and outtakes; better to dump them in the sea and save the space for something more worthwhile. Most of the great filmmakers suffered from this. Orson Welles couldn't reconstruct his version of The Magnificent Ambersons, and even more recently, William Friedkin couldn't find the footage to finally unleash his preferred cut of Cruising. In the old days, if you wanted to see the alternate cut of a movie, you had to go to another country. Graham Greene didn't dig the shortened version of Once Upon A Time In The West, so he told his readers to go to Paris to see the uncut version. Friedkin went apeshit when he found out that Sorcerer, his beloved remake of The Wages of Fear, had been completely re-cut by the European distributors, so that the opening character prologues instead appeared as flashbacks, usually whenever a character was just about to blow up. Here, though, is a list of ten alternate cuts that are well worth your time. — Faisal A. Qureshi

BLADE RUNNER (1982, Dir. Ridley Scott)

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