I was a little worried a couple of months back when, after a multi-pronged approach, I couldn’t get William Friedkin to talk with me. It isn’t that I believed myself so special that I’d earned the right to have the protean filmmaker talk with me. It’s more that for an entire decade, pretty much since the 2013 publication of his entertaining and unusually useful memoir The Friedkin Connection, the filmmaker appeared extremely eager to hold forth on any topic with almost anybody, provided the point to be gotten at was that topic as it related to him. 

One can’t blame him for having loved to talk about himself — he’s a fascinating subject. I was right to be worried — one of the contacts with whom I tried to contact him was concerned that he was ill. And, in fact, Friedkin went silent yesterday, dying at age 87.  

Not to make it about me, but he shuffled off this mortal coil without having answered the particular question I had wanted to put to him. Which was whether he himself had in fact approved the scene-butchering cut in his classic 1972 film The French Connection that’s now part of the movie’s permanent record, one that removes a couple of racial slurs but also makes the picture look like what Friedkin himself once derided as a splice-damaged “projectionist’s cut.” This version of the movie, running on all streaming platforms in the U.S. and on available-for-purchase digital files of the movie, is something of a travesty. And yet it’s offered as a director-approved version. And now the likelihood of finding out just what happened is lessened considerably. 

Friedkin’s work will outlive him in a literal way: his final film, an adaptation of Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, starring Kiefer Sutherland and everyone’s favorite Oppenheimer villain Jason Clarke, among others, will screen in Venice, at the Biennale, about four weeks from now. If we were excited about seeing Friedkin return to feature-fiction film (his prior picture, 2017’s The Devil and Father Amorth, was a documentary), we can also admit we were a little underwhelmed that it would be with the umpteenth cinematic reiteration of a classic albeit by now a little well-worn “the-problem-with-America-stated-metaphorically” drama. 

The fact is, though, that when working on all cylinders, which he readily admitted he was not always doing throughout his career, Friedkin could bring a particular dynamism to anything at which he aimed his lens. He was, at the height of his career, nicknamed “Hurricane Billy,” for both his indefatigable energy and his awful, ruthless temper. But the tag also reflected the nature of his art. 

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The 1972 film, now streaming on Netflix, doesn’t play or feel... By Glenn Kenny @glenn__kenny

We have to start with The French Connection. It was his fifth feature film but his breakthrough for a very good reason. Literally this: you’d never seen anything like it before. Connection, the story of dogged, obsessive cop “Popeye” Doyle’s pursuit of international drug runners, was steeped in the seedy world of its characters, often feeling like a documentary. But its major set piece, in which Doyle chases down a hitman on an elevated train in a car he steals from a civilian, was a breathtaking redefinition of the chase sequence the likes of which no one had had the nerve to attempt since the uninsurable silent era. It was at the top of the list of things that people could not stop talking about with respect to this movie. And I have to tell you, in my recollection as a cinema-crazed 11-year-old, this was a movie people could not stop talking about. 

Which put Friedkin in a bit of a bind. His prior work had been intriguingly eclectic. A precocious kid, he parlayed a job in the mail room at a Chicago public television station into a directing gig there. He played poker with Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren. He began making films out of a sense of social justice — his first, The People Versus Paul Crump, in 1962, was an anti-death-penalty picture that got its subject’s death sentence commuted.

He approached Hollywood with a sense of pragmatism rather than vision — his first feature gig was directing a Sonny & Cher movie, 1966’s Good Times, one of the many pastiche attempts to capture the lightning in a bottle Richard Lester got with the Beatles. No such luck, but Friedkin came away from the experience with serious admiration for Sonny Bono, a guy who knew what he wanted and how to get it. And in his memoir, Friedkin also averred, “I’ve made better films than Good Times, but I’ve never has so much fun.” An avid Harold Pinterite, Friedkin directed a not-bad adaptation of the British playwright’s The Birthday Party; he gave bawdy period comedy a sincere but misguided shot with The Night They Raided Minsky’s; and he scored something of an artistic coup with 1970’s The Boys In The Band, a snappy and spectacularly acted adaptation of Matt Crowley’s play, a work some took as a shameful expression of gay self-loathing.  It is in fact an acute exploration of gay self-loathing, entirely apt in the closeted age in which it’s set and was made. When it was released on home video in 2008, I described it as “a gay No Exit.” 

Getting back to the bind of being a moviemaker whose work people couldn’t stop talking about — how could he keep that up? The answer was The Exorcist, an adaptation of the hysteria-inducing best-selling novel by an author whose belief in its subject matter was both profound and somewhat digressive. A Jewish agnostic, Friedkin made the movie with the fevered intensity of a guy who believed its every premise and the near-giggly enthusiasm of a twisted carnival funhouse engineer. It is one of the most furiously effective horror movies ever made and one that still provokes near-insane arguments among cinephiles: Is it a genuine Work of Art or Grindhouse Garbage on a High Budget? No 1970s film besides Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange can still get people so riled up. 

It takes an uncompromising man to make uncompromised films, especially when working for the studios, even in the Easy Riders, Raging Bull days of studios sponsoring maverick moviemakers. Speaking of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the portrait of Friedkin painted by author Peter Biskind in that book is particularly unpleasant and maniacal. Anecdotes include his verbally abusing composer Lalo Schifrin, originally tasked with creating a score for The Exorcist, and rolling the master tape of Schifrin’s work like a bowling ball down a street. He reportedly made that movie’s star Ellen Burstyn perform a stunt in such a sway as to cause her permanent back injury. Friedkin tells the Schifrin story differently in his memoir and admits that his refusal of the score destroyed a long friendship between the men. But he apologizes for nothing. In his view, he’s only always doing what’s best for the movie. (Incidentally, one piece of music he did use for the film, Mike Oldfield’s instrumental “Tubular Bells,” became a monster hit that made the first fortune of the guy whose record company had released the Oldfield album as its debut — Richard Branson, then the hippie founder of Virgin Records.)  

In any event, although his movies were sensations, Friedkin was not, in Arthur Miller’s formulation, “WELL LIKED.” If others in his Easy Riders cohort were burned out by drugs and other lifestyle issues, Friedkin was burned out by arrogance, at least as far as that book’s argument is concerned. 

Except Friedkin never actually burned out. At the time of its release, his Exorcist follow-up, 1973’s Sorcerer, a remake of the French 1950s thriller The Wages of Fear, was celebrated by Friedkin dissers as a career-killing act of hubris. High-budgeted obscure sacrilege, the critics said, and the box office took note. Except, while this picture might have ended the days in which Friedkin was trusted by studio heads with barrels of their money, this nerve-wracking film is now regarded as a stone classic and really plays like one. The scene in which one of the nitroglycerin-bearing trucks goes over the lease reliable-looking wooden bridge is a bravura sequence that even cinematic daredevil Werner Herzog would have thought twice about attempting. 

Look at Friedkin’s filmography from that point on and he’s maintaining a steady output through 1995. Not a lot of it was stellar, or got talked about, but there’s plenty in there that’s astonishing, including, of course, 1980’s Cruising, the twisted tale of a serial killer of gay men and the straight undercover cop who’s assigned to catch him. This picture, like The French Connection, underscored Friedkin’s mania for realism, or rather his mania for the aggregate of realistic detail he could turn lurid in his fevered directorial portrayal. Cruising is not a homophobic movie, as was feared at the time of its much-protested making, but it’s certainly an anti-humanist one. As is 1985’s To Live And Die In L.A., the coastal inversion of The French Connection, in which dirty sooty cold winter NYPD undercover work contrasts with sunny lurid neon squalor Secret Service work. And featuring a car chase — freeway this time, no metropolitan trains to speak of in L.A. yet — nearly as crazy as that of French Connection. This time the critics tsked-tsked instead of going gaga — in The Washington Post, future screenwriter Paul Attanasio clutched his pearls and called the movie “recklessly violent” — but this picture, too, has revealed itself as, yes, a kind of masterpiece. (If you’re programming your own Friedkin mini-retro in memoriam, don’t sleep on 1978’s The Brink’s Job, a heist picture that’s unusually playful by Friedkin standard.) 

His latter-day adaptations of two Tracy Letts plays, 2006’s Bug and 2011’s Killer Joe, are electric, lurid evocations of cruelty and madness that have an energy you wouldn’t ascribe to a filmmaker entering his seventies. As his directing opportunities became fewer, Friedkin took to stewarding his work and telling his own life anecdotes. In correspondence with the sensibility that’s part of the dirt of his hometown Chicago, Friedkin was a guy of great learning and erudition who also had no use for the trappings of bourgeois refinement relative to his expression of his own brilliance. Which made him an endlessly entertaining speaker, among other things. I attended a screening of a restored print of Sorcerer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2013, where he introduced the film and sat for an extensive Q&A with critic Scott Foundas afterwards. It was funny to see him attempt, and nearly achieve, an avuncular mode. He was a tad more crotchety in “Friedkin Uncut,” a 2019 documentary in which he jokes about the high-waisted old-man trousers he’s wearing for the interview segments and which also contains tributes from the likes of Tarantino, Willem Dafoe (so great in a very early role in To Live and Die in LA) and Ellen Burstyn, who appears to have forgiven him for that back injury. Well, you live long enough…

But like all inveterate filmmakers, what he really wanted to do, up to the end, was direct, and so he did when he could, including the aforementioned The Devil and Father Amorth. About, you guessed it, a real-life exorcist. Going back to that thematic well was something Friedkin had no qualms about — The Exorcist was part of his brand, and later this summer there’ll be a 4K disc of the movie, with both the amazing theatrical cut and the less-well-considered “director’s cut” in which Friedkin ill-advisedly restored some effects scene that didn’t work then and don’t work now. Am I looking forward to seeing The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial? You’re damn right I am. We shall not experience the likes of Hurricane Billy again. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.