sorcerer (w&d william friedkin, w. walon green, georges arnaud)

Back in the Ipswich Film Theatre, half-full for this restored print of Friedkin’s minor classic. I might have seen the Wages of Fear, but if I have I can’t remember when. Friedkin expands the story in a bold opening, stitching together three long sequences which introduce the key characters, all renegades of one form or another, living on the edge of their country’s laws. The long shots, the zooms, have a bravura feel, which echoes the scope of a film that moves from Mexico to Palestine to Paris and New York in the opening twenty minutes. These characters come together in the Colombian jungle, on an oilfield run by the gringos. The colonial aspect of the story is clear: the USA wants the oil and it will do anything to get it. This sets up their trip through the jungle, two souped-up lorries like something out of a Mad Max film. The fact that there are two trucks, as in the original, is a simple but brilliant device to maintain tension. One of the trucks is going to get to the destination, but we don’t know which one. Friedkin is a dystopian anarcho-futurist. A kind of Verlainian Marinetti. These trucks are behemoths, but they are also, literally, timebombs, primed to go off. It makes for scenes of forced but remarkable tension. There’s elements of Aguirre to the movie, the challenge of the white man to tame the untameable terrain. Although the one who survives will be brought down not by nature, but by man.

french connection (w&d william friedkin, w. ernest tidyman, robin moore)

French Connection is a film that can’t stay still. Everyone is constantly on the move. In cars, in trains, in a boat, but more often than not, on foot.  Freidkin has a similar restless energy to early Godard. It feels as though he wants to devour every corner of the city and in many ways the film ends up being, as much as anything else, a portrait of New York. This is cinema as flaneur. The film moves from high end hotel district to Harlem to the riverside, and it crossed my mind whilst watching it to wonder how those cities I know well, London and Montevideo, might have looked had the film been set there. This capturing of the city helps to reaffirm the director’s desire to shoot the film with the realistic feel of a documentary, (there’s also a hint of Cassettes’ roaming NY camera), transporting the slightly generic thriller material into something harder-edged, straight off the streets. At times this makes for a film that has the feel of a whisky hangover: life is washed out, desperately needing sleep or the blackest of black coffee, struggling to stay alert, numbed by the inevitability of the next chase, the next frenetic declaration which will reassure the detectives, Gene Hackman, even you, the viewer, that we are not hovering at the edge of coma; we remain riotously alive. 

to live and die in LA. (w&d william friedkin; w. gerald petievich)

Friedkin’s frenetic film stars William Petersen as a character who can’t walk past an obstacle without jumping over it. A chair, a fence, a table. The energy is great but there’s always the danger that you’re going to trip and fall flat on your face. There’s probably no way of knowing whether Petersen and Friedkin purposefully built this in as a metaphor, but whether they did or not, it works, because the golden boy, Chance, (Petersen) is heading for a mighty fall, a fall that is in part the result of this propulsive energy. The great thing about this quintessentially 80s movie is that it has no qualms about jackknifing the script and character in directions you never quite expect. Whilst Chance’s mission seems to be one of virtuous vengeance, it turns into a clusterfuck, (which permits for a truly gripping car chase). Morality becomes an abstract idea which has no application to the plastic realities of the here and now. The director’s bravura use of soundtrack, palette and even costume feel like a brash fuck you to any arbiters of taste: in this city we do things faster, harder and louder than anywhere else. Which leads, inexorably, to the sense that there’s a second metaphor at work here: the arbitrary nature of ethics in policing reflecting the arbitrary nature of ethics in film-making, where being beautiful is something to be turned to your advantage, where stars live fast and die young, and life moves on without missing a beat. 

killer joe (d. william friedkin, w. tracey letts)

This curious movie feels like something of an anomaly. In part Hollywood star vehicle in part faithful homage to Letts' play; in part another comeback movie from a lost great of the 70s. Where does it sit in the canon?

I didn't know Letts' play, but it feels as though the adaptation is probably not unfaithful, all the more so given that the playwright is also credited as screenwriter. As a play it does what it might have said on the tin: deep South, Southern Trash, Trailer Trash, Southern Gothic, etc etc. Not a million miles away from the work of Martin McDonagh, a world where little people have to make big but hopeless decisions. As such it has a cynical sheen and requires some grandstand acting. 

The latter is supplied in spades by McConaughey, whose performance drives the film. He seems to be having fun and Friedkin gives him license to go as big as he can. In many ways this contributes to the impression that this is an "anti-film". Where we're encouraged by the Michael Caine school of acting to believe less is more, McConaghy et all rip up the rulebook and hope that the camera keeps up. Similarly, this feels like anti-film because, no matter how well done the adaptation, it retains the resolute feel of a stage play, where dialogue is king and the narrative can be as overblown as it wants to be.

The strange thing about all this is that it kind of works. There's a verve and an energy to Killer Joe which means it rides the obstacles in its way and like a limo with a healthy suspension comes bouncing back on the other side. It doesn't feel like a great film or great filmmaking; it doesn't come across as a great play; but as a package it's more interesting than your run-of-the-mill Hollywood fare, perhaps because it's not afraid of being a bit rough around the edges.