The Screengrab : cruising

The Screengrab: Your One-Stop Site for All Things William Friedkin

Phil Nugent — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

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. To judge from his deep thoughts here about how all the best cops have a lot of the dark side in them--"Actually, the best cops are the ones who can think like criminals; and there is a thin line between the policeman and the criminal that street cops cross every day. In spite of a series of laws designed to protect the accused, cops can go off the rails in a crisis, and it has to do with adrenaline and the authority the police officer has to exercise power."--Friedkin may have concluded that it would give his reputation a boost if people got the impression that David Milch filched his world view from him.

Nobody asked me, but...while my esteemed colleague Vadim Rizov recently made an intriguing case for the argument that Friedkin has no sense of social obligation, I can't shake the feeling that it's something else that really sets him apart and that helps to explain why, for two years or so, he was the hottest director in Hollywood as well as why, for the 25 years since then, he's been, well, not so much. Looking down his nose at the young hotshots whose movies make more money than his stuff, Friedkin complains that "cop films have become more visceral, less realistic. The levels of violence that were allowed in the 1970s opened the doors to young film-makers who want to push the envelope beyond all limits." Pushing the envelope beyond all limits is, of course, what Friedkin did in both The French Connection and his other blockbuster, The Exorcist. It was shocking at the time, and can still get your pulse rate rising today, but it was silly at the time when some people, trying to find a justification for how exciting the movies seemed, to claim that Friedkin was introducing a new level of "realism" by having his cop so much meaner and the violence more in-your-face than audiences were used to. The Friedkin of The French Connection wasn't the Strindberg of cop operas, he was a hungry, ambitious young hotshot trying desperately to get the attention of an audience that demanded bigger and better shocks at a time when everyday life provided plenty of them. Over the course of two big hits, Friedkin really mastered the exploding-funhouse style that, thanks in no small part to him, set the standard in big commercial thrillers. Then he got a little complacent, and new directors arrived who contrived shinier, louder explostions.

It's not quite true to say that Friedkin is indifferent to how his movies are seen to reflect, or to effect, society. He did make at least one genuine message movie: Rampage, one of the biggest duds of his career, a courtroom drama about a beyond-evil serial killer which he first filmed in 1987 and which only won limited release in 1992, and which Friedkin tinkered with to turn it into a brief for the death penalty. And he did care enough about the charges that Cruising was a homophobic movie that linked homosexuality with psychotic murderousness by holding that unfortunate press conference where he said that he himself had no idea who had committed the murders in the movie or what the killer's motives or sexual orientaton might have been or what the hell the ending was supposed to mean. It's easy to believe him, because The French Connection and The Exorcist are themselves full of plot holes and loose ends and logical stretches out of the Bizarro World, but when Friedkin was truly on his game, the movies just plowed over viewers in a way that kept them good and distracted from that sort of thing. By the time he had finished The Exorcist, Friedkin was a master at the special craft of keeping viewers transfixed by how ugly and repellent everything onscreen was. He got in trouble with Cruising not because he had anything to say for or against gay lifestyles but because he was still working in the same way that had made him a hot ticket, but this time, because of the setting, the movie boiled down, not as "Ewwwwww!! Heroin dealers shot down in cold blood!" or Ewwwwww!! A little girl vomiting on a priest!" but Ewwwww!! Guys dancing together!" It could be that his subsequent films, such as Jade and To Live and Die in L.A., haven't been as successful just because his moment passed: other directors have stolen his thunder, and no matter how brutally he stages his chases and fights, they no longer pass for daringly ugly commentaries on What We've All Come To. And as his attempts to do something different, such as the "comedies" The Brinks Job and Deal of the Century show, it's not as if he knows how to do anything else.

Related Stories: "The French Connection" Influenced Everything

William Friedkins Has No Sense of Social Obligation

William Friedkin Has No Sense of Social Obligation

Vadim Rizov — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:50:00 GMT

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.

Even in his two biggest hits, plot takes a back story to location shooting: The French Connection is far more memorable for its locales (and the way they ground the famously intense car chase) than the plot. The Exorcist qualifies as an odd horror film, one which spends at least as much time showing you the mechanics of hospital surgical proceedings as the symptoms of Regan's possession. The pattern continues to the present day: in his last film (the underseen Bug), Friedkin gave the actors room to stretch out, but he was equally concerned with capturing, with impressive pungency, what it feels like to live your life in small, cheap motel rooms, or what America's worst rural roadside bars look like.

In the interview, Friedkin says "I never remember talking even once to Mart Crowley [who both wrote and produced the film] about trying to make a statement about gay people. The story wasn't about gay people." In other words, he was oblivious to any sense of alleged social responsibility he might have. (Friedkin also seems to be equally oblivious to the idea that having gay people represented on-screen in any context isn't necessarily desirable in and of itself. "We paved the way for 'Will and Grace,' he says. "I really believe that." Some of us might think that's not such a good thing.) This kind of obliviousness is mildly sociopathic in its disregard for consequences, but it's also the stamp of a true if myopic artist: Friedkin sees the world in terms of atmospheres and sub-cultures. How they play to the outside world is no concern of his. Whether or not the films deserve their current re-evaluation and (sort of) welcome back into the fold is one question, but whatever you think of them, whatever message is there isn't Friedkin's doing; he just doesn't care.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Cruising (1980, William Friedkin)

Paul Clark — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

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.

Let’s get this out of the way- as straight-up narrative, Cruising is pretty terrible. Plotlines are introduced and abandoned, the central mystery doesn’t really work, and there’s a final “twist” that’s borderline incoherent. Yet for all it faults, Cruising is too haunting and strange a piece of work to be dismissed lightly. It made me scratch my head and occasionally pissed me off, but I was never bored.

Much of the narrative muddiness can be doubt be attributed to the film’s provocative nature. Released in 1980, Cruising tells the story of a murderer who’s prowling New York City’s gay S&M underworld. It was the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era, when homosexuality had become more visible in society yet was still misunderstood and frowned upon by most Americans. Naturally, Cruising aroused quite a bit of controversy from both sides. The increasingly-vocal gay rights groups protested the film for its portrayal of homosexuals as being scary, violent psychopaths. Meanwhile, United Artists was looking to make a commercial thriller, so many of the more risqué elements of the film were left on the cutting room floor.

Friedkin has stated that his original cut of Cruising was 140 minutes long, which means that nearly one-fourth of the movie had been shorn away by the time the 102-minute final cut hit theatres. And boy, do the seams show. There’s at least one major subplot- involving a pair of crooked cops who strong-arm a drag queen into performing sexual favors- that the film does absolutely nothing with. Likewise, the film presents a sympathetic homosexual friend for undercover officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), only to forget about him for a long stretch of time until he turns up dead.

Faring even worse is the character trajectory of Burns himself. After being sent undercover to investigate the killings due to his resemblance to a number of the victims, Pacino is purported to be changed greatly by his experience in the gay underworld. Unfortunately, the film has to come right out and tell us this, having Pacino tell his girlfriend (Karen Allen) that “what I’m doing is affecting me.” Really? It seems to me like he isn’t really touched by most of what he sees. It doesn’t help that the film shies away from the more graphic details of Burns’ experiences inside a club called The Ramrod. Does he ever actually have sex with any of the other men, or does he simply walk into the clubs, look around, and leave? The film doesn’t seem to know.

Some of the blame can no doubt be placed on United Artists and the MPAA for demanding such liberal re-cutting of the film. Yet Friedkin is not altogether blameless. Looking back at Friedkin’s Oscar-winning The French Connection, one can find another cop character- Popeye Doyle- who gets far too caught up in his work. But while Friedkin had Popeye define himself almost entirely through his work, Cruising gives Burns a personal life to make him more three-dimensional. However, the scenes we see both of Burns’ personal life and his undercover work are unrevealing, and so he remains largely an enigma. Popeye Doyle was similarly enigmatic, but while we liked him we weren’t meant to care about him. By contrast, we’re meant to get caught up in Burns’ psychological journey, so the fact that we don’t should be construed as a failure on the film’s part. What’s unfortunate is that Pacino gives a fine, surprisingly low-key performance in the role that might distinguished a better film.

In addition, the gay rights protestors did have a point when they spoke out against Cruising. While Friedkin’s portrayal of the S&M underworld is certainly not meant to be a definitive statement about all homosexuals, the character of the killer is nonetheless pretty troubling. The killer is eventually revealed to be a musical theatre student whose father made him feel guilty about his homosexuality, and who takes his guilt out on the denizens on the men he picks up in clubs. After he seduces them, he stabs them repeatedly with a knife while telling them, “you made me do that.” Unfortunately, the killer-queen stereotype was one that wouldn’t go away, as evidenced by the character of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. To say nothing of the film’s ending, which seems to be saying that Burns’ experiences have turned him into a killer himself. If this is the case, then it’s both laughable and highly troubling.

Yet while Cruising has a multitude of problems, I found myself fascinated by it, and not in a train-wreck sort of way. For one thing, the film’s portrayal of its seamy underworld is still bold by Hollywood standards. In a time before the PC police patrolled every big-studio release and homosexuals became dependable romantic-comedy sidekicks and prestige-picture martyrs, it’s bracing to see a major motion picture that actually allows its homosexual characters to be sexual beings. Although Burns is ostensibly all about the ladies, Friedkin doesn’t shy away from the details of the sex lives of the other denizens of The Ramrod (how’s THAT for un-PC?). There’s a tangible allure to the danger this world presents to those who inhabit it, yet when you consider that the very real danger of AIDS still hadn’t announced itself, these scenes feel almost poignant. Also, it’s hard to believe Friedkin got away with a shot in which a character lubes up his entire forearm, but there you go.

On top of it all, the movie’s just too damn weird to dismiss, and it’s easy to see why Cruising has amassed a sizable cult since its original release. What can one say about a movie that pauses for Powers Boothe to describe the meanings of the various bandanas that are worn by the cruising men, to say nothing of a police interrogation that’s abruptly interrupted by a hulking black man wearing only a cowboy hat and a jockstrap? On balance, I suppose Cruising does indeed qualify as a case of Friedkin “going bad,” another step in the downward spiral that torpedoed the career of the once-hot director of The French Connection and The Exorcist. But damn if it’s not fascinating.

The Top Ten Movies With Alternate Cuts, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

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, Ridley Scott)

How many different versions of this film are there? Warner Brothers did everyone except eBay bootleggers a favor when they put all five on one platter. First there was the U.S. voice-over cut, then the international cut (for a few frames of ultra-violence that those decadent Europeans dig) and then the authorized director's cut. Hold on a minute though, Ridley Scott kept saying that actually wasn't his final cut, so he went back to the editing room and came out with his definitive final cut (and let's not forget the 70mm Workprint that kicked the whole thing off). Basically, film lovers wouldn't have alternate cuts of movies if it wasn't for Blade Runner. It was the film that showed that ten years after the first release and proved you could still make cash from your old films. Which version is the best though? Well, that's up to you. I thought changing Rutger Hauer's "I want more life, fucker" to "father" kind of sucked and spoiled an otherwise decent flick, but WB did the decent thing and actually made sure all of them are there for your perusal. Heck, maybe I should go into the editing room and cut my own personally approved cut of Blade Runner. I mean, they do give you everything in this package.

THE SHINING (1980, Stanley Kubrick)

How can a filmmaker allow two different cuts of a film in release? If you're Stanley Kubrick, you can do everything. Whilst US audiences had the pleasure of a 147-minute cut of the Stephen King adaptation, the rest of the world just had the pleasure of a two-hour cut of the film, both approved by the director. Sure, Eyes Wide Shut had CGI figures covering some naughty bits, and he trimmed twenty minutes from 2001 after its world premiere, but this is different: Kubrick allowed both cuts to co-exist. What's the difference between them? Well, it's mostly scene shortening and dialogue trims, including bits where Scatman Crothers' character is going back to the Overlook Hotel to see what the heck is going on there. At one point you could get both versions on DVD, but with the recent re-release of the longer cut of The Shining, expect to see the shorter cut to disappear from existence. And did you know that there's a third version that had an alternate ending that was trimmed from all prints a week after its US release?

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)

As far as I'm aware, there are four versions of this film lying around, the longest being a five hour workprint that you can probably bit torrent now from bad VHS dupes. But Coppola re-released the original theatrical and the Redux edition together. Which one's better? For my money, I prefer the theatrical release, as Sheen just comes out as a mean brooding muthafucka. Redux is good to have, but for me, that music in the French plantation scene just spoiled the entire mood of the flick and the film never recovered completely from that moment on. Currently available on DVD but without the excellent Hearts of Darkness documentary included, what really spoils the film is cinematographer Vittorio Storraro's insistence that the film be transferred at his preferred retrospective Univisium 2:1 aspect ratio instead of 2.35:1 of its original release. If you want to see it properly, best to record a HD broadcast straight onto your hard drive, cause Storraro ain't having you watch it any other way.

EXORCIST 4 (2005, Renny Harlin, Paul Schrader)

Orson Welles had his ending for The Magnificent Ambersons re-shot by a studio hack, but enough of the film survived to be eventually regarded as a butchered classic. When Paul Schrader was kicked off the Exorcist prequel by Morgan Creek, rumors started circulating of his cut being some horror classic that had been 99% re-shot by studio hack Renny Harlin. A vocal internet campaign and the disastrous reception of the Harlin version resulted in Schrader's film being released to re-coup some of Morgan Creek's investment in the film, but the response was indifferent. Harlin's cut is goofy fun, with OTT sequences that make no sense but do crank up some foley effect on the soundtrack. Schrader's is Bergmanesque in comparison, interesting to watch and with a great performance by French pop star Billy Crawford as the possessed boy in need of exorcism. Both prequels are interesting to see a study in rhythm: Harlin has the actors play it fast and cuts every couple of seconds, whilsts Schrader meditates on his scenes, trying to build the tension up slowly.

TOUCH OF EVIL (1958, Orson Welles)

Orson Welles' sleazy cop thriller was first known only in a ninety-minute version, then in an extended 108-min cut that was found and re-released in 1976, but cineastes had to wait until 1998, when Rick Schmidlin and Walter Murch did a re-cut of the film based on a fifty-eight-page memo that Welles had sent the studio. (Needless to say, the studio ignored him completely.) After the restoration was released, the 1976 cut was retired to the vault, and what a pity that was. I'm not a fan of the restored edition; the limitations of the picture restoration can be seen in the opening sequence, when the picture softens at each point where a title had originally appeared. But the worse aspect is the removal of the excellent Henry Mancini score. Universal has no plans to re-release both cuts on DVD so until then, compare both openings and see what you'd like.

Click here for Part 2!