After “Sorcerer” turned out to be a box office disappointment, Friedkin again looked for movies he could make without too much fuss. This, alas, was a feint. His two comedies, 1978’s charming “The Brink’s Job” (which reunited John Cassavetes’ leads Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands) and his 1983’s disappointing “Deal of the Century,” were also flops, which didn’t help Friedkin rejoin the A-list.
In between was “Cruising.” “Cruising” started life the Friedkin way; he caught up with his pal Randy Jurgensen, who had worked a serial killer case in the 1970s, and discovered that a man named Paul Bateson (who just so happened to be an extra in “The Exorcist”) was the likeliest culprit. Friedkin visited Bateson in jail and got a first-hand account. Bateson claimed he was so high during that period that he didn’t remember doing half the things he was accused of, but it was as likely as not that he was guilty. Friedkin turned his and Jurgensen’s accounts into “Cruising,” starring Al Pacino as a rookie detective who goes undercover in New York’s leather bar scene to find a killer. The film was picketed during production as it was made clear that Friedkin hadn’t sought any input from the gay community in New York before embarking on the project, and people were worried he was harmfully othering them to the mainstream (not that conservative America needed any help from a director as polarizing as Friedkin). Pacino, for his part, was deeply upset when he saw the final project and discovered reasonable doubt as to whether his character had been the killer all along. It’s a grubby, grim film, pure Friedkin in its ambiguity and excitement at transgression, the kind of thing people barely attempt, let alone achieve these days without it becoming a tired pose. There are a million great pieces about the movie (maybe its crowning achievement is that it inspired so much scholarship and activism), even if watching it can be a perplexing and disturbing experience.
Friedkin’s days as a box office fixture may have been numbered, but his life as a provocateur was hardly over. 1985’s “To Live and Die In LA” is his last masterpiece, a sexually charged movie of moral backsliding. William Petersen plays a secret service agent who goes undercover to bust up a counterfeiting operation run by Willem Dafoe. Between its world-historic car-chase (Friedkin set himself the task of one-upping his work on “The French Connection” and managed) and its Wang Chung-scored seductive fascist mindset (Petersen is an unapologetic bastard who leaves little but destruction in his wake, which eventually rubs off on his nervous partner, played by John Pankow), this is a great Friedkin movie as well as just a great action movie. Friedkin existed to make you question what you suspected you knew about how the world worked, and “To Live and Die in LA” wanted you to wonder what you’d put up with to stop one wrong.
1987’s “Rampage” asked the same thing. In that film, Michael Biehn plays an attorney who gets a murderer off death row, only for the fellow to go out and kill again when he escapes from a prisoner transport. Friedkin was very interested in making people squirm regarding their thoughts on the death penalty (something he waffled over in his personal life, like so much else). Though he re-edited the film in 1992 when the film was released properly, it’s an open question what Friedkin wants us to think about the police after so many years documenting their exploits. In 1995, he released his Joe Eszterhas-scripted “Jade,” and, in 1997, his adaptation of Reginald Rose’s “12 Angry Men” (originally directed by Friedkin’s colleague Sidney Lumet), which comes at the problems of law and order from two deliberately disparate points of view. The contradiction is the point.