Reframe: William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A.

I think it’s safe to say that William Friedkin had one of the more star-crossed careers of any director from the ‘auteur era.’ Arguably, only Peter Bogdanovich had a more meteoric rise and steep fall of the directors who made their names in the 1970s, changing the face of cinema forever in the process. 

Friedkin actually made three films in the ‘60s, but none made a notable impact. Then in 1970, Friedkin helmed The Boys in the Band, a progressively dark drama about a group of gay men at a party that goes sideways when a straight man enters the room. The film may play a bit dated today, but it was one of the first films from a major studio to address the lives of homosexual men. 

However impactful The Boys in the Band may have been, it would be his next two films that would establish Friedkin as an extraordinary talent: The French Connection and The Exorcist. One of the greatest one-two punches in the history of film. In just a three-year period Friedkin made arguably the best cop movie and the best horror movie ever. Let that sink in for a moment. 

After the remarkable success of those two instant classics, Friedkin set upon remaking The Wages of Fear, calling it Sorcerer. It’s a grueling movie that would have made Herzog proud as four desperate men try to move unstable dynamite through a South American jungle across rickety bridges and in a driving rain. Sorcerer was a massive flop and a critical disappointment as well. Time has been quite kind to the film though and many now see that one-two punch as a one-two-three. 

Unfortunately, Friedkin’s next three films (The Brink’s Job, Cruising, and Deal of the Century) also fell flat. Of the three, I’ve often felt that Cruising, a drama starring Al Pacino as an undercover cop searching for a serial killer of gay men through leather bars, deserved a better fate. It’s certainly not a perfect movie, but it sure as hell is bold, and Al Pacino’s performance as a man who may have gone too deep into a world not his own that he might not be able to make it back is genuinely complex. 

All of that history was just that when I discovered William Friedkin. I was too young to have seen or appreciated his brief 1971-73 peak. But I was just the right age to have my socks knocked off by the first film of his I ever saw: To Live and Die in L.A.

Like Sorcerer, To Live and Die in L.A. was not appreciated at the time of its 1985 release. Most reviews were modest, and some were brutal. The film didn’t turn a profit, and for a time, it was probably best known as the film the ‘80s new wave band Wang Chung supplied the music for (the best work of the group’s career, I might add). 

Starring a way before CSI fame William L. Petersen as a secret service agent attempting to bring a counterfeiter named Masters (a stunning Willem Dafoe) to justice, To Live and Die in L.A. is a scorcher of a film. It’s a movie with no heroes, no characters of any great moral fiber, and a relentlessly grim tone that has the courage to play out its dark convictions. 

It’s painful to think of how little Petersen gained from starring in To Live and Die in L.A. and just one year later in Manhunter for Michael Mann. Petersen gives an extroverted and electric performance in the former, and delivers an intensely subdued turn in the latter. In just two films, he showed a massive range of possibilities and never got the opportunity to take on such complex roles ever again. The fact that both films and his performance in each has been reassessed favorably since must be cold comfort. 

The same could be said of Friedkin, who directs To Live and Die in L.A. as if he were set alight. Both grimy (L.A. has seldom looked so filthy) and gorgeous (there are twilight shots that look like they were taken on Mars), To Live and Die in L.A. is Friedkin working at the top of his game, as both a director and a writer. 

The hard-boiled script (co-written with Gerald Petievich) has some of the toughest dialogue ever committed to film noir. A brief sampling:

“You want bread, go fuck a baker.”—Petersen explaining to his criminal informant that he’s having relations with that she’s not getting anything more from him than what little he is already providing. 

“You want a pigeon, go to the park.”—John Turturro as a mule for Dafoe’s Masters who won’t sell out his boss.

And quite possibly the nastiest line in the history of any film outside of Mike Nichols’ Closer, delivered again by Turturro: “And the check is in the mail, I love you, and I promise not to…” I best not even finish. Let’s just say Turturro has trust issues with Dafoe’s promise to get him out of jail and he expresses them colorfully.

There’s wonderful efficiency in how Friedkin shows you Dafoe’s nihilism as his character produces a beautiful painting from his own brush and then burns it shortly after completion. Or how he avoids making the film a typical cop movie thriller about a man trying to avenge the murder of his partner by establishing Peterson’s agent as a thrill-seeker who gets off on putting himself in danger. What you find as the film moves forward is that Petersen’s Chance would have followed through on every reckless choice he made regardless of his partner’s death. In fact, when he references his partner’s death, it seems more like a tool to get others to do what he wants, not his driving force. As Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen said of Timothy Olyphant’s Sheriff Bullock in Deadwood, he’s “an insane fucking person.” Petersen’s Chance is an insane fucking person.

As for the direction, To Live and Die in L.A. runs just under two hours and it feels only half as long. The pacing is expert, the character development perfectly lean, and the car chase going down the Los Angeles freeway in the wrong direction truly has to be seen to be believed. With no special effects, Petersen and his partner (well-played by John Pankow) storm away from multiple cars trying to track them down while heading full speed into oncoming traffic. As great as the car chase scene is in Friedkin’s own French Connection, he outdoes his own lofty standard here. 

The film’s crescendo and close culminate with a truly gasp-inducing death, followed by a near literal descent into hell. The final shot, which can only be seen if you sit all the way through the closing credits, is of a dead-eyed and soulless-faced Petersen, looking like a man who is only nearly there, and but for a flip of a coin would have been a criminal all along, instead of a law man who becomes a thief and an accessory to murder. 

To Live and Die in L.A. is a bracing film. Perhaps too much for the audiences and the critics of the ‘80s to appreciate. Cop films took a lighter turn in that decade. Think of Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, and Die Hard. Don’t get me wrong, I like all four of those movies to varying degrees, but none of them can touch the beautiful bitterness of To Live and Die in L.A. 

I think Friedkin’s film is a masterpiece that belongs in the holy trinity of modern Los Angeles crime sagas, along with HEAT and L.A. Confidential. Sadly, the film’s failure sent Friedkin spiraling into the wilderness for two decades, making one mediocre to worse film after another. 

Friedkin did have a late career mini-comeback with Bug and Killer Joe, two uncompromising movies that are the very definition of a “hard sit” while still being worthy of being viewed, if maybe only once. 

Of course, there are those who would take Bug, Killer Joe, The French Connection, The Exorcist, and Sorcerer over To Live and Die in L.A., and I’d only put up much of a fight against the first two. 

But for me, Friedkin is To Live and Die in L.A. That film was my portal to the rest of his work. And you never forget your first time, that sense of discovery, that feeling that more is artistically possible than you were aware of, no matter how dark the spark is that lit the flame that didn’t just open a door, but burned it to the ground.