7th August 2025 marks the second anniversary of the death of maverick filmmaker William Friedkin. CHAINLINK publishes a series of articles on his work throughout the month.
By the mid-Eighties, William Friedkin’s star was in the descendant. The one-two punch of The French Connection and The Exorcist was a decade behind him. Sorcerer, his cripplingly over-budget remake of H.G. Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, was a box-office failure that did his already fractious reputation within the industry no favours. The Brink’s Job garnered some cautiously appreciative reviews but didn’t connect with audiences. He lurched into the Eighties with Cruising, which at least made a respectable profit but was mired in controversy. Deal of the Century, a misconceived comedy about arms dealing, opened to universally negative reviews and barely broke earned its budget back.
To say there was a lot riding on To Live and Die in L.A. is an understatement. And despite the relative disappointments of his last few movies, expectation was high. The source material was a novel by U.S. Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich, which thrummed with the minutiae of insider knowledge, trod a vertiginous line in moral ambivalence and was as rooted in its sense of place as Friedkin’s French Connection had been in New York. Petievich contributed to the screenplay, which retains most of the structure and action of the novel; Friedkin added the opening sequence detailing a terrorist attempt on the life of the President, and a car chase designed to recapture The French Connection’s big set-piece.
Friedkin. Noir-ish crime thriller. A criminal operation requiring lightning-fast exposition of its logistics (counterfeiting in place of The French Connection’s drug smuggling). A reckless protagonist operating on the cusp of the law. A calculating and charismatic antagonist. A high speed car chase.
What could go wrong?
In fairness, To Live and Die in L.A. gets a lot more right than it gets wrong. A hell of a lot more. And there’s a case to be made for its legacy that informs the work of Michael Mann and the Coen Brothers. It found favour with the critics and did decent business (though nothing like the licence-to-print-money returns from The French Connection and The Exorcist). It remained one of Friedkin’s personal favourites from his own oeuvre.
Working to a constrictive budget, Friedkin’s opted not to cast any major stars (though he lucked out in bagging future heavy hitters Willem Dafoe and John Turturro in key roles) and salaries were parsimonious. The result is that what money there was is all up there on screen, quite literally in the counterfeiting scenes (Friedkin flirting with legality in having money printed in front of the camera), aesthetically in DOP Robbie Müller’s gorgeously hazy cityscapes, and kinetically in the poundingly exciting 9-minute car chase.
The film is on less stable ground with its casting of William Petersen as Secret Service Agent Richard Chance, Michael Greene as his partner Jim Hart and John Pankow as John Vukovich, whom Chance reluctantly partners with after Hart is killed by artist-turned-counterfeiter Eric Masters (Dafoe). In his first lead role, and only his second big screen outing, Petersen exhibits a certain stiffness and a tendency to stilted line delivery, something that was still dogging his performance style in Manhunter, a year later. (He would develop, in time, into a fine character actor.) Greene plays Hart, whose early demise – three days prior to retirement – is the film’s most lumpen cliché, with such hangdog fatalism that you feel like humming the Funeral March every time you see him. Pankow has the trickiest character arc, much of which has to occur surreptitiously in order for the final shot to deliver its nasty kick, but he never quite sells it.
Dafoe, who had memorably essayed a villainous role in Streets of Fire a couple of years earlier and who was just on the cusp of stardom with Platoon, is the film’s ace in the hole. Serpentine and electrifying, he brings Masters to life, revelling in the character’s villainy and sybaritic lifestyle while subtly suggesting his frustrations and failures as a creative artist. He’s introduced tacking a canvas to the glaring white exterior wall of a mansion-like hacienda and setting it up in flames, the first genuinely iconic image in a movie that doesn’t struggle for memorable visuals.
Equally impactful is John Turturro’s performance as Carl Cody, Masters’s mule who is arrested by Chance after an intense foot chase through an airport. His subsequent regression to snivelling informant kowtowing to Chance only to viciously turn on him once his guard is dropped and make good his escape, is doubtless the reason the Coens cast him as Bernie Bernbaum in Miller’s Crossing five years later. In fact, the whole “look into your heart” scene is basically a variation on the theme of Cody’s escape in To Live and Die in L.A.
Likewise, the influence of Friedkin’s near masterpiece seeps through the celluloid of Michael Mann’s greatest nocturnes and cityscapes. Mann was two feature films into his career – the excellent neo-noir Thief and the almost career-derailing The Keep – when To Live and Die in L.A. was released. Both showed that he had a keen sense of the visual, but the quantum aesthetic leap he took with Manhunter, Heat and The Insider (not to mention the grainy shot-on-video nocturnal poetry of Collateral) can only have had their genesis in Friedkin’s half-love-letter-half-hate-fuck to L.A.
Müller’s cinematography is one of the high points of his career. Which is a bold claim given that he has at least eight Wim Wenders films on his CV, not to mention some of Jim Jarmusch’s most distinguished outings and Lars von Triers’s visually astounding Breaking the Waves, but it’s a claim I stand by. He conjures the essence of Los Angeles as well as mythologising and demonising it – mostly within the space of a single image. Yes, the grimy locations of The French Connection and the application of a cinema verité aesthetic to supernatural horror in The Exorcist are key to the success and lasting impact of those films, but nothing else in Friedkin’s filmography looks as goddamn good as To Live and Die in L.A.
And then there’s the car chase.
A staple of action cinema, there have been plenty of good car chases. Damn good ones. From Vanishing Point to Gone in 60 Seconds (I refer here to the 1974 original) – where the entire film is essentially a car chase – to the squealing tyres and belly laughs of Smokey and the Bandit or The Blues Brothers; from the frenzied B-movie brilliance of Fear is the Key to intense realism of Ronin. But there are only three that are truly great, that take the car chase and turn it into art: The French Connection, Bullitt and To Live and Die in L.A. In that order. And with only a short head – no more than a coat of paint really – between them.
To Live and Die in L.A.’s car chase distinguishes itself as much by its deconstruction of tropes as by its sheer immersive propulsion. The inversion of the villains chasing the protagonists rather than vice versa sets the tone, after which Friedkin forgoes the rigidly delineated route of ‘Popeye’ Doyle’s pursuit of an L-train in The French Connection for an automotive free-for-all involving bridges, underpasses, warehouses (scenes of the various cars almost being hemmed in by articulated trucks are queasily claustrophobic), railway tracks and drainage canals, before climaxing in a weaving pursuit against the flow of traffic.
There’s even a fake climax to the chase about four minutes in where Chance and Vukovich shakily congratulate themselves on eluding their antagonists, only for gunfire to erupt again and the pursuit recommence. All bets are off at this point and To Live and Die in L.A. revels cynically in its own ambivalence, an atmosphere it tries hard to replicate in its closing scenes but just misses.
The film as a whole is agonisingly close to being a masterpiece. Its car chase genuinely is a masterpiece, an assemblage of kinetics, tension, drama, immediacy and location that leaves the sum of its parts way behind in the rear-view mirror, drenched in neon and shimmering in the haze of the dusty air.
Neil Fulwood
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