To Live and Die in L.A.

Darlanne Fluegel and William Petersen in To Live and Die in L.A. (dir. William Friedkin, 1985).



Dean Stockwell.



Willem Dafoe.

Friedkin is a very hit-and-miss director. His approach--and I believe he would admit to this--is for the most part to throw stuff on the floor and see if it makes interesting patterns. A lot of the time it does, but a lot of the rest of the time, as with The Exorcist (in my opinion), you just have a messy floor. The floor is a little messy in To Live and Die in L.A., but it's a big enough floor that ... agh, I'm abandoning this stupid metaphor. What I want to say is that this is a very good, if flawed, movie. The flaws are weirdly hard to pinpoint, but I think they have a fair amount to do with the casting of William Petersen and John Pankow as the two Secret Service partners who go after counterfeiter Willem Dafoe. They're both fine as actors, but they look so eighties, in that fratty young white guy way. I can't get past that.

The look of the film is one of its main strengths. Wim Wenders' sometime cinematographer Robby Müller drenches the screen in evocative colors, shifting elegantly from pastels to neons, tight compositions to sprawling vistas. Moreover, the one scene that Müller didn't shoot, an out-of-control chase sequence that won't quit, had me squirming on the couch. Dafoe gives a restrained, intense performance as an artist who's really a criminal who's really an artist etc. And can I just say, Dean Stockwell (who is onscreen only about five minutes total, and doesn't really do much, but still saturates the picture with his scary quietness) is God? Why the hell doesn't he get more big-screen roles? Did he piss off some powerful person?

Sorcerer

Roy Scheider in Sorcerer (dir. William Friedkin, 1977).

Here is yet another film I became aware of years ago through its soundtrack, but did not see until now. The music in this case is by Tangerine Dream, and it plays permanently in a small, dark area of my consciousness. No movie could ever live up to the one I had imagined for it: a swirling, poisonous odyssey of hallucination and peril, a radioactive rain forest in hell. Some of Friedkin's footage does actually approach this "ideal," although there is disappointingly little of the full soundtrack in the film itself. Disappointing, because little else in it is fully realized, though Friedkin has said in interviews that of all his projects, it is the one that comes the closest to realizing his starting vision (although he also ungraciously blamed Roy Scheider for its failure at the box office, claiming that he was not capable of pulling off a strong leading role). It is certainly not in the same league with the original The Wages of Fear. Friedkin adds a ton of backstory that does absolutely nothing but delay the main narrative. A lot of fuss has been made over the elaborate car crash scene in the Philadelphia sequence, but please. It's a car crash.

There is still enough effective moviemaking here to make it a crime that the DVD is only available in full screen (Friedkin has been promising a new edition for years, but I haven't heard anything concrete about when it's coming out, if ever). The South American scenes are sometimes so nightmarish that they place an obligation on the rest of the picture to follow through on their gravity--an obligation it simply can't meet. And Friedkin was wrong about Scheider. He is really just right for this role, precisely because he embodies a particular strain of weakness-in-ruggedness, of corrupted masculine confidence.