WILLIAM FRIEDKIN
(29 August 1935 - 7 August 2023)
The American director, producer and screenwriter William Friedkin has died at the age of 87 from pneumonia and heart failure. It was he, in the space of just four years, who gave us The Boys in the Band, The French Connection and The Exorcist, all quite innovative in their own gutsy way. The Boys in the Band (1970) gave Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking play a wider audience by showing gay men at a party, playing truth games, getting drunk and fighting, with the evening ending in tears but not before closets have been opened and acid-drop jokes aired at their expense. Kenneth Nelson, Leonard Frey, Cliff Gorman, Laurence Luckinbill and the rest repeated their stage roles with gusto.
The French Connection (1971) was a different canister of film, being the adventures of the real-life New York ‘tec Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle (Gene Hackman) and his cohort Cloudy Russo (Roy Scheider) as they try to track down a heroin-smuggling gang from Marseille. The highlight, of course, was the hair-raising car chase beneath the elevated BMT West End Line in Brooklyn. The film won five Oscars including best director, best actor (Hackman) and best picture. The Exorcist (1973) was even harder to take with the demonic possession of a girl and the attempts to exorcise her. It was a difficult film to make with unfavourable desert locations and freezing sets, many injuries, accidents and even deaths among the cast and crew and it ended up costing three times its original budget. But it became a colossal hit, grossing $428.2 million on a £12m price tag. People just seemed to want to be shocked - and they were. It was nominated for ten Oscars, but won only for best sound and for William Peter Blatty’s screenplay.
William Friedkin came to films via TV. He was born in Chicago to Ukrainian Jewish emigrants Louis and his wife Rachael. Their son attended Senn High School in Chicago and he nearly became a pro basketball player. No academic, he developed an interest in film and reckoned that Citizen Kane was a major influence on his career, alongside Les Diaboliques, The Wages of Fear and Psycho. His first job was in a TV mailroom but he was soon making documentaries for live TV and progressed to directing one of the last episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1965.
His first feature was Good Times, Sonny and Cher’s musical comedy Western, but it lost over a million dollars. Then he filmed Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party and did a very good job of evincing menace in a seaside boarding house with Robert Shaw being victimised by two strangers, Patrick Magee and Sydney Tafler. Then Friedkin directed The Night They Raided Minsky’s which claimed that in 1925 striptease was invented in the New York Burlesque theatre by accident when a dancer’s dress was torn off. With Jason Robards, Forrest Tucker, Britt Ekland and Norman Wisdom, it was a delight but is now sadly long forgotten.
After Friedkin’s three major hits he filmed Sorcerer with Roy Scheider, a remake of Clouzot’s Wages of Fear, but it was not initially well-received. Friedkin took the studios to court to determine who owned the film, so that he could restore it for DVD and Blu-ray release. The Brink’s Job was less sensational than his previous films and was a realistic stab at covering the notorious Boston bank robbery of 1950. However, Cruising (1980), with Al Pacino, was a poor attempt at depicting gay life in New York while a serial killer was at large. It brought howls of protest from the gay community and received a lukewarm reception. Friedkin did better with To Live and Die in L.A. - with more thrilling car chases in search of counterfeiters, with William Petersen and Willem Dafoe.
Friedkin continued working in a number of genres and filmed 12 Angry Men for TV and in 2017 made a documentary about a real-life exorcist called The Devil and Father Amorth. His final feature was The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial with Kiefer Sutherland as Phillip Queeg. It is to be premiered at the 2023 Venice Film Festival.
William Friedkin married the actress Jeanne Moreau in 1977 but they divorced in 1979. He then married the actress Lesley-Anne Down in 1982 and they have a son, Jack, and divorced in 1985. In 1987 he married the journalist Kelly Lange and they divorced in 1990. Lastly, he married the studio executive Sherry Lansing from 1991 until his death. He also had relationships with Kitty Hawks, the daughter of Howard Hawks, and with the Australian dancer Jennifer Nairn-Smith, by whom he has a son, Cedric.
MICHAEL DARVELL