William Friedkin’s Tough-as-Nails Cinema Leaves a Legacy as Unique and Resolute as He Was

One of cinema history’s most iconic car chases: “The French Connection” (1971). A nightmarishly possessed teen in a menacing horror classic: “The Exorcist” (1973). A killer drama in the so-called Matthew McConaughey rejuvenation era known as the McConaissance: “Killer Joe” (2011).

William Friedkin, the grittily virtuosic, famously tough straight-shooter passed away at age 87 Monday, leaving behind a legacy and wide-ranging career as unique, complex and tough as nails as the filmmaker himself was known to be. Both a crafty auteur of nonfiction fare where he got his earnest start and a popular household name thanks to “The Exorcist” — who among us have not spent many a sleepless night traumatized by visions of Linda Blair’s evil grin and weightlessly spinning head? — Friedkin did it all for the moving image, with over 40 credits across film, TV and music videos to his name.

Documentaries and TV are where Friedkin started his storied career, on the heels of a mailroom job at Chicago TV station WGN, where he observed and self-learned the basics of visual storytelling without a college education. From that hands-on experience, and Friedkin’s recent viewing of Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” — that’s when he admits to have realized that films could be works of art — came “The People vs. Paul Crump,” a rule-breaking documentary about a death row inmate and the insufficiencies of the justice system that studiously gestures to the newsreel sequences of “Kane.”

“The People vs. Paul Crump,” as well as the likes of “The Bold Men,” “The Thin Blue Line” and an episode of “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” Friedkin directed in the mid ’60s, are imperative to mention in any cinematic appreciation of him, not only to note the filmmaker’s roots but to understand his urgent, immediate and effusively off-the-cuff style he owes to documentary filmmaking. It’s one he seamlessly transposed to the much mythicized New Hollywood period, when he shifted his focus from TV and non-fiction to narrative features. His demeanor and technique meshed well with the burn-it-all-down attitudes and sense of freedom that a parade of easy riders and raging bulls brought to American studio filmmaking in the ’70s, before “Jaws” kicked off the blockbuster era.

For evidence, pick any one of his defining features, starting perhaps with his first hit “The French Connection,” an action-thriller about a gruff and racist New York cop — Popeye Doyle, played by a fiendish and obsessive Gene Hackman — and the self-consuming lengths he’s willing to go to in order to bring down a European drug operation. The picture was a surprise success that came after Friedkin made four financial bombs in Hollywood (gaining himself a less-than-desirable reputation amongst the studios that deemed him difficult) and won five of the eight Oscars it was nominated for, including Best Picture and Best Director for Friedkin.

The iconic and (pardon the cliché) thrillingly edge-of-your-seat car chase — which Friedkin’s friend and “Bullitt” star Steve McQueen apparently referred to as “the second-best chase in movie history” — was filmed in actual traffic without any permits across Brooklyn in a verité style second nature to Friedkin by then. Indeed, few chase sequences come to mind that might near the genius of that of “The French Connection” — ironically, one of them belongs to no other than Friedkin himself, with 1985’s “To Live and Die in LA.”

Another preoccupation “The French Connection” reminds us of was Friedkin’s knack for comprehending the worth and appeal of morally dubious characters in cinema, with sides both despicable and noble, as well as good and evil. That split between good and evil takes a literal form in his second smash hit (and across Linda Blair’s face) in “The Exorcist,” a film as much about demonic possession as it is about the anxieties of teenhood and single motherdom.

It’s hard to overstate what “The Exorcist” did for horror cinema, becoming for a period, synonymous with the genre itself, breaking barriers to its name. Among those barriers broken is the film’s 10 Oscar nominations from the Academy, known to be notoriously biased against genre films to this day.

Being the more populist (and decidedly less “arty”) director of the American New Wave — he always favored impeccable craft over making a thematic artistic statement — Friedkin didn’t attract the same kind of high-brow fame as some of his New Hollywood peers like Martin Scorsese or his friend, Francis Ford Coppola. His films that followed “The Exorcist” did not help, including “Sorcerer” (1977) which sadly flopped in its day but has deservedly found a renewed appreciation since then, and the Al Pacino-starring mixed bag “Cruising” (1980), a film that is both vexingly bigoted and offensive about gay culture and somehow ahead of its time when it comes to its depiction of the harsh realities (like police harassment) the gay community still faces.

While both his heady “Jade” (1995), that died under the shadow of better and more popular erotic thrillers of the era like “Basic Instinct,” and his austere crime-drama “The Hunted” (2003) deserve a renewed look, Friedkin thankfully managed to launch a new phase of his continually morphing career in 2006 with a pair of collaborations with playwright Tracy Letts. The first one of these efforts was the gritty psychodrama “Bug.” But the real punch came with the aforesaid McConaissance flick, “Killer Joe,” an unforgiving thriller that didn’t win at the box office but at least received the critical acclaim it deserved upon its release.

Friedkin writes the following words in his 2013 memoir, “The Friedkin Connection”:

“Just when you learn how to do it, you’re too old. Except in your dreams. Lately, I’ve been remaking my movies, reshooting scenes in greater detail that I did originally. Several times in the middle of the night I aware and think. Well that was a dream, and it’s over. Then I fall back to sleep but the work continues. At this rate I’ll be shooting forever. The scenes aren’t from one film, they’re from many, but somehow they seem to connect, to make dream sense. I’m relaxed and in control. No anxiety, no sense of dread. I haven’t made my ‘Citizen Kane,’ but there’s more work to do. I don’t know how much but I’m loving it. Perhaps I’ll fail. Maybe next time, I’ll fail better.”

Let us remember that few did it better than William Friedkin through only a handful of legendary highs that marked and altered the cinema history. He will be missed.

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