William Friedkin

Sorcerer

Cruising

The legendary director William Friedkin passed away last week, which got me reminiscing. I’ve been a fan of his iconic film The Exorcist for years, because I feel like its horror is timelessly effective—especially as the subgenre of Catholic/demon/religious horror becomes muddier and muddier. I watched his Oscar-winning film The French Connection on this very blog, and more recently watched his famously-ahead-of-its-time pre-AIDS gay dramadey The Boys In the Band—which, I of course LOVED. Friedkin, like Bogdanovich, was a member of the “New Hollywood” film movement of the 1970s, as evidenced by his subversive storytelling methods and multiple wives. Friedkin was the son of Jewish-Ukranian immigrants, and though his father worked in many different fields, apparently never cared about making money—which may or may not have influenced William’s ambition to graduate high school at 16 and immediately start working. By the time he was 18, Friedkin was directing films—including a documentary about football called Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon, the last episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and a Sonny and Cher movie called Good Times—which Friedkin has called “unwatchable”. Friedkin never seemed to stick to one particular genre or aesthetic, his movies do not necessarily offer similar lessons or experiences, other than just simply being memorable and iconic. If there is an element that connect his films, though, I’d say its in their boldness—because not every filmmaker would have the blockbuster balls to make the movies that I watched this evening. There are still quite a few Friedkin movies to cross off of my list, but tonight, I’m ecstatic to share the two films of his that now belong in the grand pantheon of Double Feature Thursday: Sorcerer and Cruising. In my experience, Friedkin’s films, no matter their premise, are reliably compelling, and often anxiety-inducing—but, you know, in a fun way. After the success of The French Connection (which won 5 Academy Awards) and The Exorcist (which essentially revolutionized the horror genre and its capabilities), Friedkin was about to enter an uncomfortably unsuccessful time, as his later films hardly received the praise of his earlier work. For his 1977 film Sorcerer, an adaptation of George Arnaud’s 1950 French novel Le Salaire de la peur, Friedkin originally proposed a 2.5 million dollar budget, and for this film to mostly act as a side project while he worked on a sequel to The Exorcist called “The Devil’s Triangle”. That sequel never happened, Sorcerer’s budget grew from 2.5 million to 15 million to 22 million after months of difficult shoots and creative disagreements among the crew, and by the time the film was released shortly after the unprecedented success of George Lucas’ Star Wars, Sorcerer flopped gloriously at the box office. (For some persepctive: $15million in 1977 would be worth roughly $76 million today, which is about how much it cost Adam Sandler to make his movie Jack and Jill) The incredibly fraught production, post-production, and reception of this movie, could all be movies in and of themselves, so I highly suggest that you read more about this wild movie and the wild story of how it came to be so I don’t have to try and explain it succinctly here. (We all know I am anything but succinct but here I go trying to explain this complex movie:) Sorcerer follows four men, all from different corners of the Earth, all on the run from the different crimes they’ve committed. There’s Nilo (Francisco Rabal) who we see murder a man in Veracruz, Kassem (Amidou), who is part of a planned bombing at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, Victor (Bruno Cremer) a banker who is accused of fraud and must come up with a large amount of money in a short amount of time, and finally there’s Jackie (Roy Scheider) an Irish-American gangster who robs a church that is affiliated with a rival mob, effectively making himself the target of police, and the biggest mafia boss on the East coast. All of these men eventually land in Porvenir, a remote village in Colombia that is heavily-reliant upon an American oil refinery. Their previous lives as free, organized crime-committers have fallen into dank, desolate, disarray, and each man now works tirelessly just to feed and clothe themselves, as everyone else in this town does. The arrival of Nilo, still donned in a fresh suit and hat, raises some suspicion, but that is quickly forgotten when Porvenir’s oil refinery explodes. For some reason, the only way to extinguish this intense fire is with dynamite, which has been unsafely stored, 218 miles away. Desperate, depleted, and under dire circumstances, these four men volunteer to transport this highly-unstable nitroglycerin over 200 miles across the bumpy, rocky jungle—where even the slightest disturbance could cause a deadly explosion. The rest of Sorcerer follows Nilo, Victor, Kassem, and Jackie, as they take on one of the most perilous and harrowing journeys to ever be captured on film—since Scheider’s perilous and harrowing journey in Jaws. Sorcerer presents its audience with one of the most anxiety-inducing, heart-pumping, seat-gripping, pearl-clutching adventures, as we watch these helpless, hapless men drive old trucks full of hazardous nitroglycerin around narrow cliffs, over rocks, on water, across rickety bridges, through mud, past indigenous villages, in the rain, wind, heat, sweating, breathing, anticipating the worst but hoping for the best and planning as well as they can throughout this unforgivable jungle. I’d been warned of Sorcerer’s supreme stress levels, but nothing could’ve prepared me for the horrifically worrisome, dreadfully bleak, and almost laughably-dangerous circumstances that this film forces its cast to endure. The impossibly daunting task these men are faced with, combined with their equally-impossible-to-define ethics makes Sorcerer a truly riveting and endlessly unpredictable film to watch—one that, with more time, I cannot wait to watch again. After all of the drama and turmoil and financial loss that occurred behind the camera, Friedkin still claimed that Sorcerer is the only movie he made where he wouldn’t reshoot a single shot, which makes sense when you see how stunning this distressing movie is. The brutality, the intensity, the humanity, or lack thereof, of Sorcerer is something that has to be experienced for oneself, because the horrors presented here are practically as terrifying as the ones in The Exorcist. Despite Sorcerer’s complicated production and poor reception, the film has found itself a cult-following in more recent years, and has been hailed as a “thinking man’s action movie”. Even with Sorcerer’s heady, ethical complexities on and off screen, even after pissing off some members of the Catholic church with The Exorcist, none of Friedkin’s films could compare to his controversial and electric film from 1980: Cruising. Before watching it, I only knew Cruising through its unfortunately negative history—as explained in the queer film historical documentary that I always mention: The Celluloid Closet. When Philip D’Antoni, the producer of The French Connection, first approached Friedkin with the idea to adapt Gerald Walker’s 1970 gay thriller novel Cruising, Friedkin wasn’t interested. D’Antoni then approached Steven Spielberg, who also wasn’t interested. Then, after a rash of unsolved murders in the NYC leather bar community, Jerry Weintraub brought the idea back to Friedkin, who suddenly became interested. These killings, largely covered by Arthur Hill in The Village Voice, would become associated with Friedkin before his mind was even made up—Friedkin was friends with a cop named Randy Jurgensen, who’d been in a similar deep-cover situation as Al Pacino is in the film. But that’s not even the wildest coincidence. Paul Bateson, a doctor’s assistant who played a radiologic technician in The Exorcist, was implicated (but not charged) in six of the leather bar killings. He would also be convicted of the murder of film industry journalist Addison Verrill and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison, and in 2003 he was released. But enough with the wild and chaotic backstory, lets get into the wild and chaotic story at the center of tonight’s second film. Cruising follows NYC Officer Steve Burns (sweaty, sexy, twinky Al Pacino) who is given the opportunity to be promoted to detective if he goes undercover in the gay leather daddy scene, where a series of senselessly brutal murders have taken place. After a man’s arm is spotted in Hudson River, Friedkin shows us a typical night on the beat for a couple of sixth precinct officers, who gawk at leather-clad gentlemen going in and out of BDSM bars, call them terrible names, curse their bitch-wives, and hassle a couple of trans women for blowjobs in their squad car. Immediately, I am impressed by this movie. Not since any given John Carpenter movie have I seen such a specific and scathing but accurate portrayal of the police and all of their potential for predatory behavior. While the cops are “busy”, another boy in black leather and tight pants is seen walking right past their car, into the club, and exiting with a man. There are several scenes in Cruising that depict the horrific murders of gay men, but there’s something about the first killing that is utterly unnerving. Maybe it’s because the scene starts so innocently, maybe it’s because both men are initially so kind and trusting, maybe it’s in the way that the killer asks his victim if he’s afraid, but it’s in these moments where Friedkin’s horror skills really shine, and one can really feel the dread begin to settle in. Chief Paul Sorvino is desperate to catch this killer, so he selects beat-cop Steve because he fits the killer’s type to a T, and asks him, in the most casual way possible: “Ya ever had your cock sucked by a man?” to which Steve responds “Oh!” or “Ay!” (depending on which New York Italian dialect you identify with) And thus begins Steve’s deep undercover mission, where he leaves behind his girlfriend Karen Allen, his nice apartment, and his normal, heterosexual life, for a promotion by way of a glory hole. Cruising is an incredibly dark, surprisingly deep, and wildly daring movie that introduced heteros to such gay culture as cruising, the hanky code, gay men being caddy to one another, feeling bad about your body, and fisting—so it’s no wonder that Friedkin caught so much heat from straights and gays alike in 1980. Arthur Bell, who’s coverage of these murders somewhat inspired the film, wrote that “Cruising promises to be the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen, the worst possible nightmare of the uptight straight, and a validation of Anita Bryant’s hate campaign.” Bell encouraged gay people to protest at the film’s New York locations, which they did, and even more recently in 2007, Nathan Lee at A.V. Club said “In its shameless excavation and exploitation of the killer-queen archetype — the homosexual so riddled with self-loathing and guilt that they feel an insatiable urge to kill and punish others — the film is bad politics and dodgy, flawed filmmaking, but it’s weirdly resonant and thoroughly haunting all the same.” But as time has gone on, Cruising has been reexamined by the LGBTQ+ community, with Peyton Brock, a trans woman and LGBTQ+ rights activist at Collider writing, “It’s clear that the film is intended as a subversive take on the status quo of its time. Friedkin wasn’t wrong for making a movie that ultimately tells a subversive and risque story, and the protestors were not wrong for putting up their guards against another perceived attack on their community, an all too real threat at the time. However, it’s time to put aside the prejudices and judgments of the past, and to allow Friedkin’s film to speak for itself.” I quote these other writers because I, myself, am still deciding how I feel about Cruising, particularly its ending. I shan’t spoil it here, but it is perhaps Friedkin’s most ambiguous ending to his most ambiguous movie. While this story was based on specific crimes in the gay community, the film’s curious way of unfolding its tale makes it easy to attach meaning to moments small and significant. There’s a trippy, turbulent, almost hallucinogenic quality to Cruising, not just in its depiction of a certain kind of hardcore queer nightlife, but in its quieter, less salacious scenes too. There were details to this film that were made to be intentionally confusing, characters who look intentionally similar, and while I at times questioned where this film was leading, its overall bleakness and lack of specific closure felt apt for a movie about loss in a community that has always had to fight extra hard to be recognized and respected. Cruising’s legacy is rightfully complex, but I was pretty blown away by this dizzying, convoluted, but undeniably iconic movie. Where else can you see a man ask Al Pacino “how big he is” and hear him reply “Party size”? Actually, that probably also happens in Adam Sandler’s film Jack and Jill, because Al Pacino is in that, and does contain multitudes. Rest in peace, William Friedkin, and thank you for supplying us with freaky, fucked-up, frenzied cinema that will keep us talking for generations. And thank you, dear reader, for reading along. Cheers to the Friedkin weekend!