William Friedkin

William Friedkin, who passed away a couple days ago at age 87, was a director best known for two (some might say three) movies he made in the early '70s--The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973). In 1977 he made Sorcerer, an adaptation of a French novel called Le Salaire de la peur that had previously been made into a movie by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1953, The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur).

Sorcerer was not successful at the box office on its original release but critics and filmmakers have heaped praise on it ever since. It can be a difficult film to get into but, while I feel Clouzot's film is superior, Friedkin made an astounding vision of humanity pitted against elements. The rawness of those massive trucks on rickety old bridges in a rain forest is captivating. At their best, there was something arrestingly tactile about Friedkin's movies, something about the cumulative minutia that makes the overall effect spellbinding.

Like in that fantastic chase in The French Connection when the sniper, desperate to get away, shoots the train attendant in the side. This follows decades of guys getting shot square in the chest in action films. It's just a tiny moment in a scene of breakneck pace but it's all those tiny moments surrounding Gene Hackman's relentless pursuit in the foreground that makes it all feel so captivatingly urgent.

I first saw The Exorcist when I was a kid and didn't appreciate it. When I was older, and had some mature understanding of how religion functioned in society, I understood the terror inherent in The Exorcist as being the fundamental structure of human life falling apart. Not from a distance, but on the very personal level of a family. The Exorcist may seem dated for many because, like me when I was a kid, many people don't believe in these underlying threads stitching civilisation together. It's not about tearing down an abstract power structure in the church, it's about dumping the meaning people perceive in relationships. Maybe it is all mental constructions, mind games we play together. Maybe not. The Exorcist shows why you'd better hope they're not.

All three of Friedkin's greatest films are effective because they show people teetering on the edge of a precipice he makes very real. Whether it's the moral disregard of Hackman's character in The French Connection, the fight for a child's soul in The Exorcist, or the seemingly impossible task of not only surviving but making a profit in The Sorcerer. You could say that's the objective of almost any film but few could approach what Friedkin accomplished.