In 2023, we lost William Friedkin, one of the most fascinating of the "New Hollywood" directors who came to prominence in the early 1970s. Most cinephiles, especially of the Boomer and Gen-X variety, consider the ‘70s the greatest era of filmmaking because it was the time in which directors were most powerful and revered. That power and reverence came as the result of the collapse of the studio system and the rise of influential film critics who popularized the idea "the auteur theory." Critics of this school elevated the director's fundamental importance over that of studio executives, writers, producers, editors, and any other member of a film&'s creative team. After the commercial failure of many bloated Hollywood productions, like The Fall of the Roman Empire, Doctor Dolittle, and Tora! Tora! Tora! and the success of seemingly anti-commercial pictures like The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Night of the Living Dead, The Wild Bunch, and Easy Rider, movie executives were desperate to lure in younger audiences, who had largely rejected the popular entertainment of their parent’s generation. And with widely read critics pushing the notion that directors were the sole artistic authors of movies, the time was ripe for a group of young, arrogant, visionary men to grab the reins of the industry and make radical changes to what we consider mainstream cinema.

Friedkin was and remained one of the most fascinating of these men because he was so outspoken and articulate right from the start. And, unlike some of his fellow young guns, he never lost his cocky sense of himself, even though his was one of the more sporadic careers in terms of hits and misses. After his incredible one-two punch of box-office and awards champions The French Connection and The Exorcist in 1971 and ’73, Friedkin's success rate with audiences and critics was well below 50 percent. By the late 1990s, he was considered a has-been by many in Hollywood. People joked that the only reason he was still working in the industry was because he was married to the head of Paramount Pictures, former actress turned uber-executive Sherry Lansing.

But Friedkin was always a master storyteller who could spin a yarn verbally with every bit as much flair as he brought to the silver screen. Despite his decades of low status, he capitalized on the reverence for his early films and the respect he garnered for continuing to work long past his reputation as a "has-been" and parleyed those successes into a kind of unshakably high status that lasted his entire life. Unlike so many of the directors from the "New Hollywood" movement—Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Bob Rafelson, Brian De Palma—who all claimed to not care at all about popularity and box office, Friedkin genuinely didn’t seem to, in his words, "give a flying fuck into a rolling donut" whether or not any film he made was successful. And the frank yet hilarious way he talked about his work was consistent, well thought-out, and designed to entertain.

Friedkin is one of the only filmmakers (perhaps the only one of his generation) who understood that a director standing on stage and introducing a film or talking with a moderator afterward for an audience Q&A was every bit as much of a show as the film itself. I never saw Friedkin sit down during a live appearance. He seemed to insist that he and the interviewer stand and address the audience at all times. When you saw Friedkin give a Q&A, you knew you were going to be entertained. There was never the feeling that you were watching some pretentious conversation between two people who just happened to be sitting on stage with microphones. You were an active part of the show. And, whether it was genuine or not, Friedkin always seemed to be speaking off the cuff, even though his stories were honed over decades of retelling.

For example, for many years, Friedkin never disclosed the name of the actor who had originally been cast to play Father Karras in The Exorcist, whom he’d replaced at great expense when he decided playwright Jason Miller was better for the role. When people at Q&As would ask him who the original actor was, Friedkin would say that he didn't want to name him, "because he's a fine actor who is still working." But at one event, Friedkin said to the audience, "If you can guess who it is, I'll confirm or deny." Someone yelled out Stacy Keach, and a surprised-looking Friedkin confirmed that was indeed the actor who was initially contracted for the part, and the studio had to pay Keach his full salary when Friedkin changed his mind. I have no idea if this revelation was made in a genuinely spontaneous way, or was something Friedkin set up because he was writing his autobiography and wanted to tell the full story in the book. I like that I have no idea. Friedkin was such a good storyteller, his motivations for telling his tales are not important. 

Film buffs love behind-the-scenes stories about our favorite movies, but we tend to accept as fact the established legends and stories told by those who are still around. In reality, tales from the set are really just tales, and nearly every cherished production story of any film is somewhat dubious. The number of perspectives on key events that shaped a picture's production are as bountiful as the number of creative people responsible for making any film. Despite what adherents to the auteur theory would have us believe, movies are not the creative vision of a single artist.

It is notable that many of Friedkin's greatest pictures can just as easily be claimed by another member of the creative team. His best and most famous film was marketed and is still known as "William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin." That is hardly the possessive "a film by" credit that many hack directors (empowered by their strong union) think nothing of placing on the movies they helm, even if they had nothing to do with the screenplay development and left the project before editing even started.

Friedkin's abilities as a storyteller are what make people think of him as a great auteur, more than the fact that he was also sometimes the screenwriter and occasionally a producer of the films he directed. Consistent with Friedkin's gift for storytelling, he was drawn to stage plays by highly regarded playwrights, themselves powerful storytellers. It is another fascinating aspect of his career that such a visual stylist was a frequent and skilled adapter of theatrical material that he typically did not "open up" when transferring it to the screen but rather made the inherent stage-bound qualities into something cinematic. The director’s third feature was an adaptation of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, a play he'd seen and loved so much he became obsessed with making a filmed record of it. His follow-up project was an adaptation of Mart Crowley's Off-Broadway play The Boys in the Band. Released in 1970, it was Friedkin's first great picture, even though the heterosexual Chicagoan seemed an odd choice to adapt for the screen and to direct a movie about the culture of gay men in late-'60s New York City.

Much later, in the 1990s, after the colossal failure of his distinctly unerotic thriller Jade, Friedkin entered an interesting stage of his career in which again he focused on theatrical work. Specifically, he was invited to direct a series of operas. Despite never having even seen an opera before, he created productions that classical music connoisseurs considered excellent. The director would continue to stage opera until his death in 2023.

While he continued to make thrillers (Rules of Engagement in 2000 and The Hunted in 2003), he soon focused his efforts on the much smaller canvases of his early film career. He met the up-and-coming Steppenwolf Theatre actor and scribe Tracy Letts, whose first three plays, Killer Joe, Bug, and Man from Nebraska, had won much acclaim. Friedkin and Letts would adapt Bug and Killer Joe into small, independent pictures that, despite being aimed at a narrow audience, returned the director to his prominent place among film critics and cinema buffs. A few years before those successes, he made an all-star television remake of one of the most iconic TV films of all time, Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men. Friedkin's final film, completed in 2023 shortly before his death, is a distinctive adaptation of another classic play, Herman Wouk's oft-revived The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.

Even though I am not a proponent of the auteur theory, I'm most drawn to filmmakers, writers, musicians, and artists with a large, impressive body of work. Friedkin's fifty-five-year career in movies yielded twenty feature films, as well as four TV movies and eight made-for-television documentaries of various lengths. He also directed nearly a dozen operas, as noted above, and he wrote one of the best memoirs about a life in filmmaking, The Friedkin Connection: The Movies That Made My Life (2013).

Following his career and revisiting all his films in a single year, as I did in 2023 while preparing for a tribute to the filmmaker on an episode of the Brattle Film Podcast, I was struck by how much this artist used his work to wrestle with the issues that were consuming his mind rather than to make statements about matters he'd long since made his mind up about. It's fascinating that a man whose first professional project, The People vs. Paul Crump (1962)—an hour-long documentary made for Chicago television about a potentially innocent death row inmate—would write and direct the 1987 crime drama Rampage, a film that makes a strong case for the death penalty in certain circumstances. And that a man who once celebrated the racist and illegal tactics of New York City detectives on which his Best-Picture-winning film The French Connection was based would become squeamish about his characters using "the N-Word" in his later years. Or even that the Jewish-born agnostic director of the ultimate Satan picture, The Exorcist, would later in life become a big fan of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

This director was open to exploring the wide-ranging subjects of his films, including the ancient history, beliefs, and rituals of Catholicism in The Exorcist; 1960s New York police culture in The French Connection; the gay underworld of '70s New York City leather bars in Cruising; the Los Angles art scene; the world of counterfeiting and the life of secret service agents in To Live and Die in L.A.; the corruption in college basketball recruiting in Blue Chips; and U.S. Special Forces military tactics in The Hunted. Regardless of how brilliant or how terrible any given one of Friedkin's pictures is—and they run the full gamut—each one feels like the passion project of a deeply engaged director.

What follows is not a ranked list, but a brief chronological look at each of William Friedkin's feature-length movies. I include my star rating for each picture, but this filmmaker's work is best considered in relation to his choices from project to project, rather than in a best-to-worst summation.

1967: GOOD TIMES ★


Good Times is probably not the film William Friedkin would most like to be remembered for, but it is the one he felt kicked off his career. This ultra-low-budget romp stars Sonny and Cher as themselves in a story about the husband-and-wife duo trying to star in a movie. George Sanders plays an evil Hollywood executive who traps the overeager Sonny and recalcitrant Cher into a contract that will force them to do a bad film that is not a good fit for them. When they refuse, Sanders gives them a few days to come up with something better. They dream up various genre ideas, including a Western, a detective mystery, a Tarzan picture, and a spy thriller. But none of the ideas are good. And neither is the actual film, Good Times, the flaws of which resemble those of the production, but not in a clever way.

According to Friedkin's memoir, an arrogant screenwriter named Nicholas Hyams was brought in to craft a plot, which none of them liked. He was fired, and Sonny and Billy pretty much made the rest of the film up as they went along. It shows. About half the picture comprises the tedious genre spoofs filmed on ABC studios, with Sanders playing the fictional villain and some contract players rounding out the cast. (The Searchers' Hank Worden shows up in the Western spoof.) The rest is shot on the streets of LA and at Sonny and Cher's house with a skeleton crew—not even a sound man is present for this connective tissue, as the obvious looping attests to. So there is little more to this feature film than you'd find on a Sonny and Cher variety special, but the TV shows have a live audience, tighter sketches, and much more enjoyable musical numbers—which is the real failure of this movie. One could forgive the fact that most of this picture is filler between songs if the songs were good, but they're dreary. When combined with flat attempts at comedy, the movie comes off as a fourth-rate episode of The Monkeys dragged out to a 91-minute running time. At least Cher looks like she's having a good time.

1968: THE BIRTHDAY PARTY ★★★

Friedkin's adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party was made in close collaboration with the great playwright. It features several of Pinter's close friends, who are also fantastic actors. Robert Shaw stars as Stanley, a man in his late 30s living at a seaside boarding house. Two mysterious strangers, played by Patrick Magee and Sydney Tafler, soon arrive to stay at the house as well. After the landlady (Dandy Nichols) tells the men it's Stanley's birthday, the two menacing guests offer to host a most unusual birthday party.

When adapting theater, Friedkin claimed always to follow that important element of the physician's Hippocratic oath: "first, do no harm." He approached his stage-based films with the view that he was documenting an author's work and never wanted his directorial flourishes to overshadow the text. I would say he succeeded in nearly all the films he made from theatrical works. This movie does require a bit of cinematic sleight-of-hand, which, I think, serves the text well. The picture comes off like a surrealistic Mike Leigh movie or a British "kitchen sink drama," playing out in the mind of someone who has gone insane.



1968: THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S ★★

This (quasi)musical-(ostensible)comedy (a)historical fiction film about how the striptease was accidentally invented in 1925 at Minsky's Burlesque features a terrific ensemble cast. Unfortunately, many of them don't seem to be in the same movie. Jason Robards, Elliott Gould, Britt Ekland, Norman Wisdom, Harry Andrews, Joseph Wiseman, and Denholm Elliott share the screen with Jack Burns, Forrest Tucker, Chanin Hale, and Bert Lahr (criminally underused in his final film). Robards, Gould, and Lahr play things straight, while others act as if they're in a satire. Eliot and Andrews play such broad, one-dimensional types off-stage that they might as well be doing shtick on stage. Ekland, so funny in earlier films like A Shot in the Dark and After the Fox, never comes off credibly as the naive Amish girl around whom everything is built. Based on a 1960 novel by Rowland Barber, the film was produced by a pre-All in the Family Norman Lear, at a point when he was still searching for his voice in media, and it was directed by a pre-auteur William Friedkin, who was still floundering around trying to define himself as a director.

Minsky's falls flat as an attempt to blend different styles and tones. It is a throwback to films of the 1920s that endeavor to capture both the nostalgic glamour of Burlesque and the dirty, smelly, poverty-ridden reality of that era. At the same time, the film tries to be a wild and wacky late-'60s comedy along the lines of what Charles K. Feldman was producing or what Richard Lester was directing. Friedkin abandoned the project after shooting wrapped, leaving editor Ralph Rosenblum to turn it all into a movie. The legendary editor worked the type of magic he would later use to transform Woody Allen's Annie Hall from a long, discombobulated series of uneven comedy sketches into arguably the greatest romantic comedy ever made. But unlike Annie Hall, Minsky's feels patched together. Many of the obvious editorial jokes feel like desperate attempts to breathe life into the picture, such as laying in Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" at a point where silence would have been funnier.

The film successfully creates a tangible atmosphere that feels authentic, if not especially pleasant, to be in. It ends up the kind of movie that is more compelling for its backstage tales—as written about in both Friedkin and Rosenblum's autobiographies—than for the finished product. But the movie does give us a glimpse of a bygone style of theater performed by some of the last living actors from that era.



1970: THE BOYS IN THE BAND ★★★★

Friedkin's first great movie is a richly cinematic yet appropriately confined adaptation of Mart Crowley's groundbreaking play about a group of gay male friends in Manhattan who gather at an apartment for a birthday party. The play and film were both celebrated as milestones in gay representation and despised for depicting homosexuals as pathetic, self-loathing, shallow, and narcissistic. Over time, that latter view has all but faded as younger generations of gay men have come to see the play as an accurate time capsule depicting prevalent attitudes and behaviors of the day. Crowley's text was his honest account of how he and his friends felt about themselves and acted with each other during this period in time. The distinctive camaraderie and sharp self-deprecating humor on display were alluring to me when I first saw this film in the 1980s. I can understand how audiences of the time might have been shocked or upset by this material. But, to me, this play epitomizes what live theater does best: you get a bunch of characters with repressed emotions or suppressed secrets; you place them in a confined space and watch the fireworks. Each one of the guys Crowley creates is distinctive and memorable. Different audience members, regardless of sexual orientation or gender, will find much to identify with in all of these individuals. Over time and subsequent viewings, the characters we empathize with may shift from one to another, which is a sign of a great, lasting work.

Friedkin, an outsider to this project in every imaginable way, must have seemed an odd choice to helm this picture. Crowley and producer Dominick Dunne wanted to capture the play as closely as possible to the way it had appeared in the Off-Broadway production, using the entire original cast and the director Robert Moore. However, the financial backers wanted a film director with experience transferring a work created for the stage into cinematic language. Since Friedkin had just made a film of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, and this play was also about a birthday party set in a single location, they figured he was the right man for the job, despite the radically different tones and styles of the two theatrical works. I can't imagine the film turning out better.

Friedkin brings a clear, unbiased eye to this material. He doesn't seem to favor any of the characters nor push any of the subtexts in one direction or the other. He captures the action with shots that never draw undue attention yet feel fresh and inventive. The movie does not feel claustrophobic, partly due to production designer John Robert Lloyd's spacious set with its open-air balcony. Not once do the controlled performances devolve into over-the-top histrionics, which is a risk when actors who have been performing a play for months in front of live audiences recreate the same roles for the more intimate reality a movie attempts to capture. The ensemble works wonderfully together, with standout turns by Kenneth Nelson, Laurence Luckinbill, and especially Leonard Frey as Harold, the late-arriving guest of honor at this birthday party.



1971: THE FRENCH CONNECTION ★★★★★


There are many years one could set as the demarcation point where the classic Hollywood studio system began to break down and be replaced, albeit briefly, with the American New Wave (or the New Hollywood movement) that defined the 1970s. Most point to 1967, which saw the release of The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and In the Heat of the Night. Or 1969 with the complete upending of all studio norms via The Wild Bunch and Easy Rider. For me, the 1970s wave of director-driven, anti-glamour, street-level cinematic storytelling solidified with The French Connection and its five Oscar wins—Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Film Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Producer Philip D'Antoni had scored a major hit in 1968 with his action thriller Bullitt, directed by Peter Yates and starring Steve McQueen. Bullitt became famous for many things, one being its magnificent car chase through the streets of San Francisco. D'Antoni was eager to top himself. The rights to Robin Moore's nonfiction account of the infamous "French Connection" drug-trafficking scheme had passed through several producers and studios that had failed to set it up. D'Antoni pounced on this true crime book about narcotics detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso and their exhaustive investigation of a major drug ring that brought in copious amounts of heroin from Marseille.

Friedkin had made five features and a lot of television by this point but hadn't yet become the name director he saw himself as. He signed on to helm The French Connection, which had been adapted into a screenplay by Ernest Tidyman (who would also co-write Shaft this same year). Friedkin shared a common desire with D'Antoni—to shoot a car chase to top the one in Bullet. There was no such car chase in the book or screenplay of The French Connection, though both men thought that was easily fixed. But Friedkin and D'Antoni didn't see eye to eye on much else when it came to the production of this movie. Their main issue was casting. Friedkin wanted a sexy, tough guy in the Steve McQueen mode, and offers went out to established stars like Robert Mitchum, Paul Newman, and Lee Marvin. James Caan and Charles Bronson would have also fit the bill, but D'Antoni could not afford any of those names.

They ended up with Gene Hackman. The actor had made a name for himself in Bonnie and Clyde, Downhill Racer, and I Never Sang for My Father (which earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination), but Hackman was hardly the handsome leading man type. Nor was he remotely like the tough-guy cop he was meant to embody. Detectives Egan and Grosso were hired as consultants on the movie, and they also appear in the film playing cops. Hackman was politically left-wing, and he considered both the real-life Egan and his fictional counterpart, Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle, to be racist brutes who didn't follow the laws they were sworn to uphold. Hackman didn’t feel comfortable starring in a film that celebrated the exploits of such men. And Friedkin, who adored working with Egan and Grosso and even considered having the actual subjects of the book play themselves in the movie, butted heads with the conflicted Hackman throughout the production. Friedkin also failed to get his choice for the main French heroin smuggler, Alain Charnier. Friedkin told D'Antoni he wanted the Spanish actor he'd been impressed by in Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour, but he never bothered to find out the actor's name. The casting director assumed he meant Fernando Rey, a Spanish star who had appeared in many Buñuel pictures, though not Belle de Jour. The offer went out to Rey (who didn't speak French), and he accepted. When he showed up right before production started, Friedkin was expecting the actor Francisco Rabal. "That's not the guy from Belle de Jour!" he yelled, but it was too late to recast.

In the end, Hackman and Rey were perfect in their roles, as was Roy Scheider—an actor Friedkin loved and went on to work with him again in his excellent film Sorcerer. Hackman threw himself into the role of "Popeye" Doyle, emphasizing the aspects of a man he personally found objectionable while at the same time discovering sympathy for the character in every situation. The scene in which the criminals eat a fancy French meal in a cozy restaurant while the cops freeze their asses off standing in the rain drinking bad coffee sums up much of the film's ethos—crime pays—and enables Hackman to embody his character's rage fully. Hackman was also an actor's actor. He gleaned so much amazing character business from his ride-a-longs with Egan and Grosso, which he could incorporate into his performance, and the character became a unique amalgam of many distinct influences and choices.

While "Popeye" Doyle was certainly viewed as heroic by many audiences, for most in the 1970s and today, the portrayal is far more honest than exemplary. Roy Scheider tells a story about seeing the film in New York at a predominantly black theater, and the crowd practically cheering when Hackman's "Popeye" tells his "Cloudy" to "never trust a nigger." It was shocking in those days for a cop to be presented as a racist in a Hollywood picture, even though that was clearly the experience of most of the folks in that movie theater. In 2023, when the film was streaming on the Criterion Channel, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime, that particular line of dialogue, and a few more around it, was inexplicably chopped out. This excision was presumably made because "the N-word," when used by a white character in a movie, is offensive to modern sensibilities. But the absurdity of this unartful jump-cut deletion underscores the idiocy of whitewashing works of art from an earlier era so they play more palatably for contemporary viewers. It suggests that everything else "Popeye" does in this movie is acceptable—the abuses of power, the reckless endangerment, the murder!!!! I can't imagine this type of cut would be made to the streaming version of the same year's Shaft since only the "villains" and the Black cops in that picture use "the N-word." But here, the protagonist says it, which some contemporary viewers simply cannot abide.

The style of the photography was just as groundbreaking as the depiction of the protagonists and anti-heroes. Friedkin was inspired by Costa-Gavras's film Z, a political thriller the Greek-French director had shot in a documentary style. Brooklyn-raised Owen Roizman had only one film and a few commercials under his belt and was thrilled at the idea of shooting a feature film on the streets of New York with light-weight, handheld cameras, often using only the available light in a given location to capture the images. The look of The French Connection is radically different from any of the other industry-changing films that preceded it. More raw than Easy Rider and less artfully composed than The Graduate, the film plays as if the camera operator doesn't know what the characters are going to do next.

In keeping with the spirit of the auteur theory, which unfortunately also took hold in the 1970s and has been with us ever since, Friedkin succumbed to the unforgivable trend of directors going back and altering their films decades later with modern digital tools. Loving the "look" of desaturated movies, which were in vogue during the Aughts (and, Lord help us, still are), he altered the gritty documentary look of the movie for its initial Blu-ray release. Of course, being a great auteur, he didn't bother to consult with Roizman, who was enraged when he saw the results of the director's digital tinkering. Fortunately, Roizman was still very much alive and vocal about the disrespect Friedkin had shown to both his former colleague and this historical touchstone of cinema. After some harsh words from both men, they made peace and collaborated on the subsequent Blu-ray remastering, which retained the picture's groundbreaking docu-realism aesthetic. But suppose Roizman hadn't been alive in 2009? How many viewings of The French Connection going forward from that point would be the bleached-out monochromatic shadow of itself that the director thought "looked cool" during one brief session of video transfer? (Another reason I say, Fuck the auteur theory and all it has wrought!)

Of course, the most acclaimed and notorious aspect of The French Connection is its car chase, in which "Popeye" Doyle pursues a hitman on foot, loses him on the subway, then commandeers a civilian's car to chase down the elevated train. The scene was famously shot in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, under the D train line, where Hackman and stunt drivers sped through these narrow streets at high speeds to create the sequence. For a few shots, the camera was slightly undercranked and mounted close to street level to accentuate the feeling of speed. But most of the sequence had to be filmed with the car actually going 70 to 90 miles an hour because the stretch of road was so long that the only way to shoot it was with actual traffic and pedestrians in the shots, and their movements would have looked artificial if the cameras were undercranked. The sequence was filmed over five weeks during non-rush hour daylight hours. Everything was wild and unpredictable about the process. Stunt drivers who were supposed to barely miss hitting the speeding car in several shots ended up banging into it. It's amazing no one was seriously injured during this shoot. The French Connection car chase is one of those moments in filmmaking that could only occur during this brief window in time (at least in the U.S.). Lightweight cameras were not used in Hollywood feature filmmaking before this point, and just a few years later, the enforcement of laws and safety protocols would forbid such a reckless undertaking.

That extended chase culminates in "Popeye" shooting the bad guy in the back, a climax that most police officers objected to, as did an outspoken John Wayne and many other leading actors who played old-school heroes. They, and many critics, saw Doyle's ultimate solution to this pursuit as anti-heroic and downright criminal, which it is. But Friedkin felt it was exactly what Eddie Egan would do in the same situation (and since Egan was on set for the shoot, he didn't seem to object). Hackman felt justified in presenting the action as appropriately anti-heroic. Indeed, "Popeye" Doyle helped to usher in an era of protagonists that audiences were meant to root for even though their deeds, motivations, and justifications were hardly model behavior. (The year 1971 also saw the release of Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, The Panic in Needle Park. Klute, The Hospital, Get Carter, The Beguiled, Play Misty For Me, Carnal Knowledge and Straw Dogs. D'Antoni leaned into the controversial climax and made it the center of the publicity campaign, with the film's most objectionable image serving as the poster art! The success of that poster in selling the film is another reason this movie should be the one that truly marked how something major had changed in cinema in the 1970s.



1973: THE EXORCIST ★★★★★

The Exorcist is unquestionably director William Friedkin’s best film. It is also one of the greatest horror pictures, and I think belongs on any list of the 100 (or even the 50) greatest movies ever made. Regardless of whether one is religious or agnostic, or if you even believe in the concept of "evil" or not, this picture taps into primal, subconscious fears that nearly all humans have. It's also one hell of a ripping good yarn.

William Peter Blatty's best-selling novel was inspired by an actual exorcism performed on a young boy by a Jesuit priest who taught at St. Louis University in 1949. In writing his fictional account, the author explored several deeply held but little-examined psychological hang-ups and preoccupations in America's collective unconscious. Blatty adapted his own novel and produced this movie, wielding extraordinary power over the Warner Brothers executives who'd optioned his book. He insisted on hiring Friedkin, who had just won the Best Director Oscar for The French Connection.

Stories of Friedkin's manipulative direction of his actors during this production range from yanking Ellen Burstyn around for days in a painful harness, causing a lasting back injury, to firing a gun loaded with blanks at an unsuspecting Jason Miller to illicit a shocked reaction, to slapping Father William O'Malley across the face right before cameras rolled so that the priest would look appropriately upset while performing last rites. Speculating about how many of the infamous behind-the-scenes tales from this production are true and how much has been exaggerated or invented over the decades is one of the many fascinating aspects of this movie and many other pictures from its era. But there can be no doubt that the shoot for The Exorcist was particularly rough. The schedule ballooned from 105 days to well over 200. Several crew member deaths occurred during the filming, though not on set, and many cast members sustained injuries that were a direct result of the production. At one point, most of the set burned down under mysterious circumstances. And Friedkin went to all kinds of lengths to capture something unique on film—such as shooting scenes in freezing-cold refrigerated sets so the actors' breath would be visible.

When it was released, The Exorcist became one of the first "blockbusters." Word of mouth caused audience lines to stretch outside the limited number of theaters showing the film. People waiting snaked around several city blocks in New York during the frigid rainy December day it opened. The film came out around the time of peak Watergate coverage. The picture's reception became almost as big a news story as Nixon's crimes, the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision earlier that year, and the celebrated "Battle of the Sexes" tennis matches between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King that took place just a month prior.

A kind of mass hysteria resulted from this film. The reports of extreme adverse physical reactions viewers had to watching the movie are even more fabled than the production stories. Tales of audience members fainting or vomiting in the theater aisles were rampant and expanded to news coverage about how seeing this movie could cause heart attacks and miscarriages. Stories circulated about theaters providing "Exorcist barf bags” with each ticket, but I'm pretty sure these are apocryphal. The already controversial picture became a scandalous phenomena, and soon there were calls from leading Catholic groups for its destruction. Charges were filed against the MPAA ratings board for giving the film an R instead of an X. (In Boston, a court told theaters they could not admit any minors, even if accompanied by a parent or guardian, despite the R-rating.) Of course, watching it now, it's difficult to imagine the act of viewing this (or any) movie causing such severe reactions. Yet, of all the horror films I've ever seen, I would argue The Exorcist remains the least dated and still the most effective in terms of the way it gets under your skin. It's a slow, quiet film that grounds itself solidly in reality before stirring up anything supernatural. And some of the most unsettling moments have nothing to do with demonic possession; they are situations any of us might experience or remember from childhood.

One element that makes The Exorcist so effective is its cast. Ellen Burstyn lobbied hard for the role of Chris MacNeil, an actress making a film about student activism who is living on location at Georgetown University with her 12-year-old daughter Regan. Burstyn had made a splash in her early films Alex in Wonderland, The Last Picture Show, and The King of Marvin Gardens. Warner studio head Ted Ashley vigorously opposed casting Burstyn, but, fortunately, Friedkin and Blatty ignored him. The studio wanted Jack Nicholson or Paul Newman to play the young priest Father Karras, who becomes convinced that a demon possesses little Regan. Stacy Keach was cast as Karras, but in a radical act of last-minute shuffling, Friedkin replaced Keach, his contracted lead, with the playwright Jason Miller, whom the director had met with to discuss the themes of lapsed Catholicism in Miller's hit play That Championship Season (1972). Miller had not read The Exorcist, but after Friedkin loaned him a copy of the novel, Miller called the director and shared all the ways the character of Karras resonated with him. The Catholic-educated Miller had studied to be a Jesuit priest for three years until he experienced a crisis of faith, just like Karras. Even though Miller had never been in a film, Friedkin insisted on-screen testing him and then having the studio buy out Keach's contract so they could cast someone the director believed could live the part rather than just act it.

Casting the key role of the little girl who gets possessed was the trickiest job. Many directors, including Mike Nichols, had turned down the project because they didn't believe there was a 12-year-old kid capable of playing this demanding part, and finding an older actress who could convincingly play twelve would be near impossible. It wasn't until Linda Blair's mother, Elinore, brought her 12-year-old daughter to Friedkin's office that anyone, including the director, fully believed there was someone out there who could pull this off. Blair, who at the time had done a little modeling but no acting, could not only play the role credibly but was also a well-grounded kid who could avoid succumbing to the potential psychological stress the part might entail.

In his autobiography (and at many Q&As I've seen with the raconteur director), Friedkin recounts the story of first meeting Linda Blair. To see if she could handle the intense subject matter, he asked Blair if she knew what The Exorcist was about. She told him she had read the book and that it was "about a little girl who gets possessed by the devil and does a whole bunch of bad things." When Friedkin asked her what sort of bad things, she replied, "She pushes a man out of her bedroom window, and she hits her mother across the face, and she masturbates with a crucifix." Friedkin asked Blair if she knew what masturbation was, and she said, "It's like jerking off, isn't it?" He asked, "Have you ever done that?" and she said, "Sure, haven't you?" Thus, we have one of the most famous and infamous casting stories of the 1970s. It would be difficult to argue that appearing in The Exorcist didn't have lasting negative effects on Blair, whose post-Exorcist career was mostly limited to TV movies, exploitation pictures, and celebrity gossip about her various love affairs and drug busts. However, the actress and longtime vegan activist is still going strong and has nothing but positive things to say about her involvement in this film.

The other acting legend who lent his powerful screen persona to The Exorcist was the late great Max von Sydow. Friedkin immediately thought of von Sydow when Blatty showed Friedkin a photograph of Gerald Lankester Harding, his inspiration for the elderly Father Merrin who assists Father Karras in performing the exorcism on Regan. Though von Sydow was only 44, audiences both familiar and unfamiliar with the Swedish star believed he was 77 from the minute he appeared on screen. This is due to both von Sydow's talent and the brilliant work of special effects make-up pioneer Dick Smith. Reportedly, von Sydow wore more complex make-up to play the elderly priest than Blair wore in Regan's most possessed state. Von Sydow has few lines, but his power and presence elevate the movie to an entirely new level of credibility and intensity once he arrives. On his first day on set, von Sydow shot the scene of Father Merrin's arrival, where the elderly priest steps out of a cab and walks to the gate in front of Chris and Regan's house. Max von Sydow, shown from behind and silhouetted in the foggy glow of a streetlamp, staring up at Regan's bedroom window, became the film's key art and is one of the most celebrated and recognizable movie images of all time. Long before I ever saw this picture, I knew this image.

The Exorcist was the first horror movie to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar—one of ten Academy Award nominations it received, including Best Actress for Burstyn, Best Supporting Actor for Miller, Best Supporting Actress for Blair, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Production Design. Blatty won Best Adapted Screenplay, and Robert Knudson and Chris Newman won Best Sound Mixing for their inventive and chilling mix. The Exorcist also set a box office record for the top-grossing R-rated horror film that stood for almost half a century—until the 2017 adaptation of Stephen King's It (a movie I've almost completely forgotten already).



1977: SORCERER ★★★+

Freidkin followed up his mega hits The French Connection and The Exorcist with this second film adaptation of Georges Arnaud's 1950 French novel Le Salaire de la peur—the first version being Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 film The Wages of Fear. The movie was initially conceived as a small film Friedkin wanted to make while he was developing something bigger. But it took on more epic proportions as it went into production, with its budget swelling from $15 million to $24 million, requiring two studios to put up the money and take the risk. And the loss, as it turned out, because Sorcerer was a major box office bomb.

The hyperbolic filmmaker has often claimed that Star Wars, which was released the month before and dominated the box office, killed this picture. I have a hard time believing that this international thriller, with its lengthy first act (some of it subtitled), only one American star, and the absurdly misleading single-word title, was going to be a major hit. But Sorcerer became an obsession with the director as he shot it—driving his cast and crew crazy and pissing off many of the communities where he filmed. As an overseas jungle shoot, the project was almost as troubled as Apocalypse Now, which Francis Ford Coppola began filming right as Friedkin was scouting Latin American locations for Sorcerer. As Friedkin's shooting schedule stretched on (not as severely as Coppola's but still significantly), the director of Sorcerer came to believe his little "in-between pictures picture" was going to be his masterpiece, the film he'd be remembered for, far more than The French Connection or The Exorcist. He was wrong. His career never fully recovered, though he went on to make many more terrific pictures.

But box-office failure doesn't equate to a bad movie. On the contrary, Sorcerer is one hell of a thrilling film. Roy Scheider plays one of four "criminal types" from different countries who meet up in a South American village and take a job driving trucks through the jungle. The trucks are laden with stockpiles of aged, ill-kept, and unstable dynamite, visibly sweating nitroglycerin. The film is so intense and suspenseful that you sit in your seat and dig your fingers into the arms of your chair. When you watch it with an audience in a theater, you invariably hear audible gasps and shouts of "holy shit" and "Jesus Fucking Christ" at multiple points. Clouzot's The Wages of Fear also engenders stressful feelings but not for such a sustained period. The 12-minute set piece in which the trucks must cross an old wooden bridge is the movie's high point. And it better be, as it took months to shoot and cost something like $3 million alone. Other problems proliferated. The film went through five production managers. Friedkin fired cinematographer Dick Bush halfway through the production. And the entire team of teamsters quit, a serious problem for a movie that's 90 percent about trucks. Of course, this film isn't really about trucks; it's about desperate, dangerous men pushing themselves to their physical limits, Fitzcarraldo style. All this action is set to the hypnotic electronic music of Tangerine Dream. (Sorcerer was the first Hollywood picture to use the German experimental band for a score. It would not be the last).

Perhaps Star Wars, Jaws, and Close Encounters had indeed changed the public's appetite for the kind of dark, gritty tales about men being terrible to each other that the 1970s are so celebrated for. But it wasn't just the public. Most critics savaged or dismissed this film upon its release on the grounds that it was excessive and shapeless. Fortunately, Sorcerer has been widely reappraised in almost every decade since its release. It is now regarded as, while not Friedkin's masterpiece, his greatest under-appreciated picture.



1978: THE BRINK'S JOB ★★★+

From Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) through Zola (2020), the grand tradition of making broad movie comedies based on true stories carries on. But films of this ilk can be a tough sell. We constantly wonder how much dramatic (and comedic) license the filmmakers took with the truth of the actual events. Movies like Lawrence Kasdan's I Love You to Death (1990) and the John Requa/Glenn Ficarra picture I Love You Phillip Morris (2009) feel like they were only made because the true stories used as source material were so unbelievable they seem more like movies, and the marketing of these films also traded on this "truth is stranger than fiction" theme. The Brink's Job is about as effective a comedy about an unbelievable real-life event as I've seen. Blending the vibe of '70s crime thrillers with the vibe of '70s buddy-comedies, Friedkin's picture plays like a cross between The Friends of Eddie Coyle and The In-Laws.

Based on the high-profile Brink's robbery of 1950 in Boston and Noel Behn's nonfiction book about it, Big Stick-Up at Brinks, the film chronicles how a group of unlikely small-time crooks committed the robbery of the century (at least until the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner art heist, which occurred in the same city!). Led by Tony Pino, a petty thief fresh out of prison, and Joe McGinnis, a known fence behind many lucrative capers, this gang that couldn't shoot or talk straight robbed the main office of the Brink's building in the North End of Boston. They got away with more than $2.7 million in cash, checks, and government securities. It was, at the time, the largest robbery in the history of the United States and remained unsolved for nearly six years.

Unless you count Good Times, this is Friedkin's first comedy. The director grounds the laugh-out-loud humor in gritty, street-level reality typical of his work. The cast is also solid, though a little uneven in terms of tone. Peter Falk plays Pino to Peter Boyle's McGinnis, with the rest of the gang filled out by the always-welcome Allen Garfield and Paul Sorvino. Their bickering banter is funny but doesn't get as many laughs as Warren Oates scores on his own, playing the unstable explosives expert Specs O'Keefe. Gena Rowlands plays Pino's wife, reuniting with Falk just a few years after they co-starred in her husband John Cassavetes' masterpiece, A Woman Under the Influence.

Some of the most comical moments come early in the picture, like when the gang attempts to rob a candy factory. But by the time of the Brinks caper, when Falk lays out his plan of attack to his gang, we are by then so invested in the major heist that the humor almost takes us by surprise. He looks down on the supposedly impregnable fortress and explains to his partners that the famed security there is, in reality, negligible. The film has many moments of high tension, as all heist pictures must have, but it doesn't maintain the consistent energy it should. Several sequences, including the truncated ending, feel a bit all over the place. This underseen picture is perhaps only fully appreciated by those of us who live in Boston. The 1950s period detail created on location in the late '70s is thrilling for those familiar with the historic city. All these factors make The Brink's Job a satisfying and unusual little movie.



1980: CRUISING ★★★ 

Many of Friedkin’s most controversial pictures have been assessed and reassessed over the decades, but none more so than this grizzly serial-killer thriller set in the New York City leather bar scene of the late 1970s. I have several older gay male friends who actively protested the making of this picture because of the way they felt it represented a tiny subculture of homosexual life as one of the only ways gays were depicted in cinema. I also have many younger gay male friends who love this movie and view it as a thrilling document of gay kink life, as important a milestone in cinema history as Friedkin's film of Mart Crowley's groundbreaking The Boys in the Band. As a straight guy who came of age in the mid-1980s, I've always viewed it far more as a cops and robbers movie set in a fascinating milieu.

The distinctive setting is what makes Cruising memorable. As a detective mystery, it's pretty incoherent. Al Pacino plays Detective Steve Burns, a New York cop who fits the profile of a streak of homosexuals who have been getting murdered. His captain (Paul Sorvino) has him go undercover in the city's leather bars to see if he can track down a killer who is targeting gay men. His girlfriend (Karen Allen) immediately notices a change in Steve once he takes on this assignment. The movie is filled with effectively disturbing images, but its plot meanders. Part of the problem may have been Pacino's discomfort playing the role of a man who engages in homosexual activity. He and Friedkin butted heads throughout the making of the picture. Pacino's unwillingness to "go full method," as he usually did in those days, may actually be what makes his performance here so unusual and memorable. But Pacino’s unease or his holding back was likely also a factor that contributed to the picture's lack of narrative clarity.

As a time capsule, Cruising is really something special. The location photography in actual New York leather bars with their real-life patrons working as extras gives the film a level of authenticity. Even by the standard of great "fun city cinema" classics, Cruising is a unique document of an area (and a world) that no longer exists. I once saw this film on a double bill with The Boys in the Band at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Friedkin gave one of his most entertaining Q&As. He felt this movie represented his heart and soul as much as any other film he made. His behind-the-scenes stories about the making of this picture, which was loosely based on a series of actual murders of gay men picked up in leather bars, led to him accidentally obtaining a jailhouse confession from the guy who may have really committed these crimes (someone he met while making The Exorcist). One thing I've loved about Friedkin is that he was just as good a verbal raconteur as a cinematic storyteller, and he could often compensate for deficiencies in a movie's fictional narrative with backstage tales about its real-life making.



1983: DEAL OF THE CENTURY ★

With The Brink's Job, Friedkin proved he could handle comedy. That film's unique blend of gritty realism and comical shenanigans made for a most entertaining picture—a rare "true-life caper farce." But Friedkin's next comical outing was far less successful. Deal of the Century was probably meant to be a satirical black comedy about arms dealers and drone warfare, but an '80s version of Doctor Strangelove, this ain't. Chevy Chase stars as a slick but small-time arms dealer who stumbles into representing a major American weapons manufacturer in a contract to sell high-tech military unmanned aerial vehicles to a goofy and "not all there" South American dictator (William Marquez). Gregory Hines plays Chase's associate, a former pilot who finds religion and wants out of the dirty business, kind of. Sigourney Weaver plays the widow of Wallace Shawn (what a coupling!). Shawn's suicide instigates the narrative, which was probably designed as a takedown of Reagan-era weapons fetishization. (Ronny and H.W. Bush are both named checked). However, what we end up with is a sub-par Chevy Chase vehicle in which all his costars are wasted in nothing roles.

The script is by Paul Brickman, whose excellent directorial debut, Risky Business, came out a few years prior to this movie. But several uncredited script doctors, including Bob Garland and Bob Towne, did rewrites. You know a production is in trouble when high-paid pros like Robert Towne get brought in at the last minute, so it’s likely this film started out as one thing and multiple forces tried to turn it into something else. It begins in the vein of Neil Simon's Seems Like Old Times and ends up like the derided Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy vehicle, Best Defense. What role Friedkin had in trying to establish the tone of the film is unclear. He doesn't devote even a single sentence in his autobiography to this movie. Chase may have been the cause of the film’s schizophrenic tone, though it's unclear to me how much creative power off-camera he actually had in his early years. This film was made between two of Chase's greatest pictures, National Lampoon's Vacation and Fletch, and, though his character is unlikable here, Chase has a lot of funny bits that showcase his trademark physical comedy. He gets shot in the foot early on in the movie and has to hobble around, and then, just as it's healing, Weaver shoots him in the cast. They both seem more concerned about all the blood spurting out of the hole and ruining the carpet than about his double injury, which leads to a pretty decent slapstick sequence. But even this amusing moment doesn't justify Weaver's presence in this dud of a movie. I wonder what earlier version of the script she read that convinced her to sign on.



1985: TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. ★★★★

Friedkin's mid-'80s masterwork was based on a 1984 crime novel by former Secret Service Agent Gerald Petievich. William Petersen and John Pankow play federal agents on the trail of a slick visual artist who became a counterfeiter when he realized his art wasn't quite good enough to get the legitimate big bucks. Willem Dafoe (in the role that made him a star) plays the "bad guy" in this movie where most of the good guys are far worse than the bad guys could ever be. As with his The French Connection, Friedkin seems to love the renegade spirit of these cocksure cowboys with badges who take the law into their own hands and constantly put themselves and many innocent bystanders in harm's way in the name of "getting their man." But, even more than French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A. explores the consequences of this type of reckless, underhanded police work and its inability to solve a case, serve justice, or protect the public good. The narrative and themes make this film a fascinating outlier in a decade rife with loose-cannon cop movie heroes. The picture shows the ultimate result of the men's "above the law" attitude as well as how it gets perpetuated despite the dire outcomes.

Friedkin blends his gritty, sleazy 1970s style with the slick, colorful, moneyed aesthetics of the 1980s. The vibrant cinematography by Robby Müller, the greatest visual stylist of that decade, and the twangy pop soundtrack by the English new wave duo Wang Chung make the film fit comfortably next to contemporary films like Brian De Palma's Body Double and Michael Mann's Manhunter—or, more specifically, Mann's decade-defining TV show Miami Vice. But this film is simultaneously more effective and less satisfying (in the best possible way) than any of those productions.

The tight narrative structure provides room for lots of excellent supporting characters played by incredible up-and-coming talents like John Turturro and Steve James. Hollywood veterans Dean Stockwell and Robert Downey Sr., who were both just then stepping into new phases of their careers, round out the strong ensemble. Friedkin's eye for casting is impressive. He knew he wanted unknowns for his leads, even more unknown than Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider were in The French Connection. He put Petersen into the lead role based on seeing his distinctive, non-Brando-impersonation performance as Stanley Kowalski in a Canadian stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Pankow was Petersen's suggestion. They did no screen tests or any other auditions before they were cast. The leading female characters are played with real depth by TV actress Debra Feuer and former model Darlanne Fluegel. Both women capture qualities of desperation and craftiness in their limited screen time. They are the only sympathetic characters in a picture that both celebrates and exposes "toxic masculinity" before such a term existed.

The script resulted as much from Friedkin writing stories that Gerald Petievich told him as from the author's 1984 novel, To Live and Die in L.A. Friedkin would often come up with original ideas for scenes and then ask Petievich to write them as they would play out in reality, resulting in their shared credit on the screenplay adaptation. What initially inspired the director to option Petievich's book was the description of how federal agents could go from the glamorous, high-stakes duty of protecting the president of the United States one week to chasing down small-time counterfeiters the next. But it almost feels like Friedkin forgot to include that aspect in his screenplay and only added it as a kind of prologue after Wang Chung contributed a terrific title song. (The group had been instructed by the director not to write a song with the words "To Live and Die in LA" in it but disregarded this instruction, much to Friedkin's ultimate delight.) The film's unusual opening makes a fine bookend with its unexpected ending. This ending was shocking in its day, and you still can't quite believe it happens even with multiple viewings. Yet, it feels even more revolutionary now. Like all of Friedkin's best work, the film has only improved with age.



1986: C.A.T. SQUAD ★★


It is astounding to think that after the critical success of To Live and Die in L.A., Friedkin downshifted significantly into this made-for-network-television movie. C.A.T. Squad (also known as Stalking Danger) feels like a pilot for a Miami Vice-style TV show about an elite black ops unit. The expository voiceover at the beginning sounds almost exactly like the intro to every A-Team episode. Perhaps this project was meant as a possible pilot, as Friedkin and most of the team behind this movie produced a second C.A.T. Squad sequel, C.A.T. Squad: Python Wolf, two years later (which I have not seen). In this first story, the titular Counter Assault Tactical Squad must investigate a terrorist plot to sabotage a NATO defense project.

Joseph Cortese, a handsome but not especially impressive actor who starred in Gordon Willis' Windows, Frank Perry's Monsignor, and the only movie to star the young Clint Howard, Evilspeak, heads up the cast and The Squad. Cortese plays the ruthless Richard "Doc" Burkholder. Steve James's Bud Raines is the Tubbs to Burkholder's Crockett. Rounding out the team are Jack Youngblood as explosives expert John "Roadmaster" Sommers, Patricia Charbonneau as forensics expert Nikki Blake, and rookie recruit Leon Trepper, played by Bradley Whitford in his first major role. When terrorists start killing scientists who are working on NATO's laser defense program, Barry Corbin, as "The Director," sends the Squad out to stop the killers.

Friedkin set up the project at NBC as a way to work again with Gerald Petievich, the former Secret Service Special Agent who inspired To Live and Die in LA. But the difference in production values between the film they made together and this TV collaboration of the same year is staggering—at least as viewed from today's perspective, when the differences between film and TV are so much less distinct. Still, Friedkin, who started out in live TV in the 1960s, shoots this program perfectly well. Cinematographer Robert Yeoman, the second unit Director of Photography on To Live and Die in L.A., doesn't exactly give us the glossy visuals of that film—or of Miami Vice for that matter—but as Network TV productions go, this movie is well lit with fairly inventive compositions. Friedkin's usual editor, the great Bud Smith (The Exorcist, Sorcerer, Cruising, and others) puts everything together nicely. The understated music by legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Days of Heaven, The Thing) further lends the proceedings an air of respectability. Despite the stature and experience of the team, watching a director of Friedkin's stature working with such an obviously low budget in the 1.33:1 Standard Definition TV aspect ratio, with cheesy 1980s CYRON titles and fade-outs for commercial breaks, feels a bit depressing.



1987: RAMPAGE ★★+

One of the things that makes William Friedkin such a fascinating filmmaker is that he uses his films to explore his constantly changing or evolving personal views around contemporary moral issues. Illustrating this point, Friedkin's first movie, The People vs. Paul Crump (1962), was a documentary about an innocent death row inmate, and this project saved the life of its subject and served as an indictment of the death penalty. Then, twenty-five years later, Friedkin would write and direct the legal thriller Rampage, which seems to make the opposite case. Based on William P. Wood's novel, inspired by "The Vampire of Sacramento" case of 1979, Friedkin's fictional thriller/courtroom drama explores the cracks and imperfections of the American legal system from a decidedly pro-death penalty perspective.

Michael Biehn stars as Anthony Fraser, a liberal-minded district attorney who decides to seek the death penalty for Charlie Reece (Alex McArthur). Reece is a serial killer who commits several brutal mutilation-killings and drinks the blood of his victims due to his paranoid delusions. Fraser's lawyers argue that their client is not guilty by reason of insanity. The film does not give the audience any doubt as to the guilt of the man on trial. The suspense comes from whether he'll be sentenced to death or receive a sentence that could make him eligible for parole down the line. The insanity plea is presented as an academic concept and a dangerous device that could enable a serial killer to be set loose. The movie's moral point of view feels a little disingenuous because so few death penalty cases are this cut and dry. But Friedkin's point is that sometimes there is no doubt in these cases, and the innocent until proven guilty baseline of our justice system can be perverted by dubious scientific expert testimony.

Coming on the heels of the morally complex and visually sumptuous To Live and Die in LA, this movie feels like a full 180-degree turn for Friedkin in many ways. The scenes outside the courtroom are photographed like a low-rent TV procedural. The cinematographer here is again Robert Yeoman, whose first major job was Friedkin's television movie C.A.T. Squad. Yeoman would go on to shoot Drugstore Cowboy, Permanent Midnight, and most of Wes Anderson's pictures, but we don't catch any glimpse of his future potential in this cheap-looking movie. Once we get into the court, the movie becomes kind of fascinating. Never feeling like a stage play or a Law and Order episode, the intellectual, legal, and psychological concepts bandied about are riveting. Perhaps more than any other movie, Rampage reminds us that Friedkin could be as bold and probing a screenwriter as he was a director, and that so many of the films he chooses are the result of his desire to unwrap and understand an issue, a profession, or a disorder that intrigues him.



1990: THE GUARDIAN ★


After an uneven decade of critical box-office disappointments, William Friedkin shamelessly and unsuccessfully attempts to recapture the past glory of his masterpiece, The Exorcist, with this silly supernatural slush. Carey Lowell and Dwier Brown star as Molly and Allan Sheridan, a yuppy couple who leave their two children in the care of a new nanny, played by Jenny Seagrove. The seemingly lovely caretaker turns out to be a kind of evil dryad witch. Fans of Sam Rami, Hong Kong horror, and "bonkers" cinema may find much to love about The Guardian, but I just found it inept and insipid.



1994: JAILBREAKERS ★


At the first of many low points in William Friedkin's career, the director returned to the TV movie format with this installment of the cable channel Showtime's Rebel Highway series. Created and produced by Lou Arkoff (the son of storied exploitation Samuel Z. Arkoff) and the talented film producer and screenwriter Debra Hill, Rebel Highway was a 10-week series of "drive-in classics." These little films were marketed as "1950-style B-movies made with a '90s edge." Hill (producer of Halloween, The Fog, The Dead Zone, Clue, Adventures in Babysitting, and The Fisher King) was an A-list producer and is probably the reason the project attracted such marquee talent. The directors of these episodes include Robert Rodriguez, Uli Edel, John Milius, Joe Dante, John McNaughton, Allan Arkush, Mary Lambert, Ralph Bakshi, and Jonathan Kaplan. Some of the movies feature stars the caliber of Salma Hayek, David Arquette, Anne Heche, Jon Polito, Ione Skye, Renée Zellweger, Howie Mandel, Jared Leto, and Alicia Silverstone.

Friedkin's episode stars Shannen Doherty, Antonio Sabato Jr., Adrien Brody, Vince Edwards, Adrienne Barbeau, Dana Barron, and Charles Napier. It features a generic teleplay penned by Hill and Gigi Vorgan (best known as an actress with small roles in Jaws 2, Red Heat, and The 'Burbs). The director and star got off on the wrong foot when Doherty didn't show up for the first day of shooting. By this time, the popular TV star of Beverly Hills, 90210 had developed a reputation as a "Hollywood bad girl," and stories of her feuds and physical altercations with her co-stars dominated the tabloids. Friedkin apparently wanted to replace Doherty after day one, but I don't think the legendary director had that kind of power at this point, and the shoot went on with her in the lead. Doherty gives a perfectly fine performance, as does young Adrien Brody in a supporting role, but the low-rent-James-Dean male lead, played by Antonio Sabato Jr., is not impressive. None of the craft the director brought to his prior low-budget TV outing, C.A.T. Squad, is present here. Jailbreakers is perhaps the only Friedkin project that feels "phoned in."

Many consider the 1990s to be a kind of golden era for movies because of the rise of the indie film market and the number of iconic and groundbreaking features made during that decade. But I see it as much as an era of floundering franchises, sub-par Oscar bait, and a time when great directors like Friedkin and great writer-producers like Hill thought making son-of-Arkoff content for cable TV was a good idea. Jailbreakers plays like a PG-rated version of Red Shoe Diaries, and it's about as authentically 1950s as a Beanie Baby with an AOL account.



1994: BLUE CHIPS ★★★


Friedkin’s more successful 1994 outing saw the iconic ʼ70s maverick director team up with popular ʼ80s sports movie master Ron Shelton (The Best of Times, Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump). The combination yielded a unique, if not entirely satisfying, tale of money, race, power, and the corrupt practices of college basketball programs. 

Nick Nolte gives his usual gruff, committed, guttural performance as an above-board coach of a losing team who finally succumbs to the shady practices of an uber-wealthy alumni booster, played by a wonderfully slimy J. T. Walsh. But the real star of the film is Shaquille O'Neal, playing the biggest of the three "blue-chip" basketball prospects who can make or break a team and, therefore, are often paid under the table by college recruitment programs seeking a championship and the big money that comes with it. Before Michael Jordan crossed over to movies, Shaq proved that style and grace on the court could translate to charisma on the big screen.

The picture has a lot going for it. It's filled with cameos by the likes of Larry Bird, Kevin Garnett, Bob Cousy, and Bobby Knight, and they lend the movie credibility. Its commentary on the intersections between race and wealth is subtle yet sharp without ever being self-congratulatory. But the movie lacks energy, which is never a good thing in a Sports picture. Nolte's monologues at press conferences are good, yet they lack the feeling of verisimilitude. One wonders if writer/producer Shelton opted not to direct this picture because he felt he hadn't fully nailed the screenplay and hoped fellow basketball freak Friedkin could give it game. While not a slam-dunk, it's well worth checking out.



1995: JADE ★


William Friedkin officially lost all credibility in mainstream Hollywood (at least for a while) when he made this stylishly inert thriller from Joe Eszterhas's unerotic erotic thriller screenplay. This cinematic landmark did serious damage to the careers of director Friedkin, screenwriter Eszterhas, producer Robert Evans, and stars David Caruso and Linda Fiorentino. Caruso's arrogant gamble to leave a highly rated TV series in order to star in movies blew up in his face; Fiorentino's career got squelched just as it was taking off; and the fabled Evans' crumbling status never recovered.

Eszterhas (Flashdance, Basic Instinct, Showgirls) was, at this point, the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood. Evan's career, on the other hand, was at the bottom of a downward slope after the two teamed up to make the failed erotic thriller Sliver. Eszterhas convinced Evans to try again with this script he had penned in the '80s and sold it to a studio that went belly up. After many years, he'd regained the rights. Evans, who had fallen from being the legendary head of Paramount Pictures in the 1970s to treading water as an independent producer with a deal at that studio, jumped at the chance. Sherry Lansing had just taken over as head of Paramount and was eager to work with Evans. Lansing suggested they hire her husband, Friedkin, who hadn't directed a financially successful movie in twenty years. That didn't bother Evans, but Eszterhas was skeptical. He referred to Friedkin then as "Billy Friedkin Lansing" because of the feeling then around Hollywood that the only reason the "washed up" director could get work was that he was married to the high-powered studio exec. But Lansing assured him that Friedkin still had it goin' on, and that he loved the script and would not change a word.

Both assertions turned out not to be the case. Friedkin rewrote much of this movie about a powerful lawyer, his psychologist wife, and a young assistant district attorney, all of whom went to college together and remained friends, and all of whom become embroiled in the murder of a wealthy San Francisco businessman. The "sexy thriller" stars NYPD Blue star Caruso, who made news by leaving that highly-rated show four episodes into its second season after winning a Golden Globe and failing to obtain the raise he wanted. He felt he'd do better as a movie star, but flops like this one proved him wrong. To this day, despite regaining his footing in another popular TV show, CSI Miami, Caruso is most known as a good actor whose ego wrote checks his talent couldn't cash. Fiorentino is the main reason this film is still watched at all. She launched her career in the '80s with Vision Quest, Gotcha!, and After Hours, then broke out with her acclaimed performance in another ʼ90s erotic thriller, John Dahl and Steve Barancik's The Last Seduction (1994).

By the time of Jade's release, the decade-long trend of Hollywood erotic thrillers striving for more and more plot twists and amping up the deviance of their characters' sexual proclivities had caused the genre to slip into self-parody and poor box office. Despite being a fan of everyone involved, I didn't bother going to see this film when it was released. But its lasting reputation for being unintentionally hilarious, impossible to follow from a narrative perspective, and profoundly unsexy, heightened my curiosity. In the brief mention of this film in Friedkin's autobiography, he claims it features some of his very best work, including a car chase that tops the ones in The French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A. None of these claims is even remotely accurate, except for the one about the film being profoundly unsexy.



1997: 12 ANGRY MEN ★★★


After the colossal failure of the unerotic thriller Jade, William Friedkin entered a new chapter of his career in which he focused on directing operas for the stage and making small films from theatrical material. The first of these theatrical adaptations was this all-star television remake of one of the most iconic live-TV movies of all time, Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men.

Rose handled the adaptation, as he had initially adapted his 50-minute 1954 CBS Studio One teleplay into the Oscar-nominated film 12 Angry Men (1957). That acclaimed picture launched the feature film career of Sidney Lumet and is widely considered one of the greatest movies of all time. This time, Rose makes subtle adjustments to the script to bring it into the '90s without too many distracting changes. The most significant alteration is his making Juror #10, the role played by Ed Begley in the Lumet version and Edward Arnold in the original Studio One production, into a former member of the Nation of Islam who is essentially a black supremacist. Mykelti Williamson of Forest Gump fame handles the role exceptionally well.

The entire ensemble is strong, with some of the smaller roles played better in this version than in any other. Courtney B. Vance as the indecisive Forman, Dorian Harewood as Juror #5, a man who grew up in a city slum, and Armin Mueller-Stahl as the eloquent stockbroker Juror #4, each discover layers of depth in their roles that even their illustrious predecessors didn't. But the principal roles can't hold a candle to performances in the previous versions. The film's weakest link is Tony Danza, playing what is deceptively the most difficult role to pull off: the impatient, rude, wise-cracking Juror #7, who just wants the whole thing to be over with. Making this seemingly everyman character credible requires a level of skill Danza simply does not possess. And Jack Warden's performance in the Lumet film would be impossible to top.

In the role of the primary antagonist, the hot-tempered owner of a courier business, the legendary George C. Scott lands somewhere between Franchot Tone in the TV film and Lee J. Cobb in the feature. The big, gruff, blustery Scott is ideal casting for this difficult role. He even feels like he comes from the era in which the original script was written. Scott's great, but he can't sell every emotional moment of the character the way Cobb did. As for the heroic Juror #8, no one could ever fill the shoes of Henry Fonda. Rarely has there been the type of alignment between a character and an actor's screen persona as there was with Fonda's performance in the '57 film, which he also produced. Fonda, as the lead, made the Lumet film the definitive version of the material for all time, but that doesn't mean people should not continue to stage this incredible work, and Jack Lemmon is an interesting choice for the lead role. Lemmon doesn't have the widest range as an actor, but he does an admirable job embodying a part owned by Fonda—whereas one has a hard time imagining Fonda being able to play any of Lemmon's iconic roles.

Friedkin's rather pedestrian direction is odd for such a visual filmmaker. He shoots this TV movie much more in the style of the original live television production than the cinematic rendering of the Lumet film (which was shot by Dziga Vertov's little brother Boris Kaufman). And as solid as this all-star ensemble is, the actors don't feel like they're all in the same production. It is as if they rehearsed their roles on their own rather than as an ensemble. But the script is so damn good, and the presence of each of these actors is so powerful, this TV film is nonetheless riveting.



2000: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT ★★+

Samuel L. Jackson stars as a U.S. Marine colonel facing a court-martial after ordering his men to fire on peaceful Yemeni demonstrators who were surrounding the American embassy during the emergency extraction of a cowardly ambassador. Tommy Lee Jones plays the Colonel's former commander in Vietnam, now a JAG officer nearing retirement who steps up to defend his friend. Friedkin's shooting of the firefight in Yemen is first-rate, and the caliber of acting and staging in the court-martial sequences is also impressive. But the picture is laughably and disgracefully nationalistic. It encourages viewers to root for Jackson's painfully guilty character to get off because of the dangerous notion that brave soldiers in combat should not be prosecuted for criminal actions, including the mass slaughter of civilians, simply because they are soldiers defending our hard-won freedoms from the tyranny of those who would destroy our great God-fearing nation.

The original story comes courtesy of the American politician and novelist James Webb. This work was the first stab at screenwriting by the former Marine Corps officer, Senator from Virginia, Secretary of the Navy, Counsel for the United States House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, and presidential candidate. The script bounced around for many years, developed by producer Scott Rudin with star Sylvester Stallone, before winding up with Richard D. Zanuck, the legendary producer of Jaws, The Verdict, and Driving Miss Daisy. Zanuck brought on Friedkin, but the director clashed bitterly with Webb over rewrites. Zanuck hired Stephen Gaghan just a year before the then-unproduced screenwriter would win the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Traffic. Webb hated the direction the film was taking and used his connections to thwart cooperation from the U.S. Department of Defense, though his efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.

And why wouldn't the Department of Defense want to participate in this love letter to Western military power? The picture excuses fundamental wrongs and mocks the very idea of what constitutes criminal actions undertaken during wartime, as if even considering such factors would cause an army to fail in its objectives. The much-revised screenplay is full of contrivances and ultimately fails to explore the fundamental issues of moral ambiguity it is ostensibly about. Still, from a pure craft standpoint, this picture is well-directed, well-acted, entertaining, and engaging. Propaganda works because it satisfies urges and beliefs many of us harbor and want to be reassured about. Friedkin, always fascinated by the power wielded by authority figures that flaunt the law, clearly relished the ideas in this picture, devoting several pages to this project in his autobiography. But he made this movie's central point far more eloquently two decades later with his final film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.



2003: THE HUNTED ★★★

Friedkin's last major studio action movie started as a spec script by David & Peter Griffiths and Art Monterastelli. It's a cat-and-mouse picture about two stone-cold killers, one a pacifist, the other a disturbed military man. Tommy Lee Jones stars as L.T. Bonham, a former civilian instructor of military survival and combat training who lives a secluded life deep in the woods of British Columbia. The FBI asks him to help them apprehend Aaron Hallam, one of his former students. Benicio del Toro plays Hallam, an ex-Delta Force operator who has "gone rogue" after suffering PTSD related to his time in Kosovo.

The movie is another example of Friedkin's desire to make films based on actual people he's met who fascinated him. In this case, the picture was in part inspired by Tom Brown Jr., a wilderness survival expert who was once asked to track down a former pupil under similar circumstances as depicted in the film. Brown, who served as technical adviser for the film, wrote about this incident in his 1994 book Case Files of the Tracker: True Stories from America's Greatest Outdoors. But this original screenplay is apparently not based on that book, and many involved with the production believed Brown was a fantasist who made up many of the legends about himself.

While hardly the most unique premise nor the most inventively shot thriller, The Hunted delivers what it promises. And this surprisingly quiet thriller explores far more nuance than Friedkin and Jones's prior collaboration. The two men got on well, with Friedkin in his later years frequently citing Jones as one of the best actors he ever worked with. The much-loved and respected star was enjoying a career renaissance ever since winning his well-deserved Oscar for The Fugitive in 1993. Too many of the roles he played since winning the Oscar were sub-par variations on his cocky and competent character from that film, so any opportunity to watch the great actor play a soft-spoken, skilled professional is always welcome. But The Hunted wasn’t the box office success everyone hoped for, failing to make back its $55 million budget.

2007: BUG ★★★+


Friedkin's floundering film career came roaring back to life in the aughts when he met up with playwright Tracy Letts. An actor and writer in Chicago's legendary Steppenwolf Theater, Letts was one of many who came up in the city and that theater company's grand tradition of distinctive, visceral, rough-and-tumble narratives. His many highly acclaimed works include Killer Joe, Man from Nebraska, August: Osage County, Superior Donuts, Linda Vista, and The Minutes. Letts's second produced play, Bug, starred Michael Shannon as a possibly AWOL Gulf War veteran named Peter, who gets involved with lonely cocktail waitress Agnes. They seal themselves up in a seedy motel room, growing increasingly paranoid about multiple conspiracy theories.

Friedkin, who was coming off two decades of box-office failures, wisely turned to what had first brought him success: the skillful adaption of works created for the stage. Bug explores the irrational fears of human beings, which is also what The Birthday Party is largely about. Friedkin's unique eye for presenting drama set largely in a single confined space and his ability to create powerful shots that never upstage the performances of his actors made him an ideal director for this material. Friedkin insisted on using Shannon, who was not yet a movie star despite twenty years as a successful actor on stage, on TV, and in movies. In fact, his unusual looks and intensity made producers dubious that he could ever be a movie star (how wrong they were!), but Friedkin insisted. The concession was to cast a star in the lead female role, which went to Ashley Judd, who had become an indie darling in Ruby in Paradise (1993) and gone on to a successful career with roles in Heat (1995), Kiss the Girls (1997), and Where the Heart Is (2000) among others. But nothing she'd done before repaired audiences for this Brauva performance. More than holding her own with Shannon, the two explore the play's themes of paranoia and mental illness in ways that take hold and never let go. The picture is not an easy watch but gripping and unforgettable.

2011: KILLER JOE ★★+


The second collaboration between Friedkin and playwright/screenwriter Tracy Letts provided Mathew McConaughey with the best entry of his “McConaissance”—the series of acclaimed dark roles the former romcom pretty boy actor made between 2011 and 2014 that redefined his stardom and range. McConaughey plays the titular slick Texas lawman who is a contract killer on the side. The NC-17-rated picture goes out of its way to be over-the-top in terms of its violent and sexual content, but where it really oversteps is in its depiction of how stupid all the characters (except Joe) are. I can never get all that interested in a movie where everyone is stupid, even if they are occasionally funny, and this picture fits this unfortunate pattern. Plus, much of the fighting is disappointingly staged for a Friedkin movie (fake punches and the like). The sexual relationship between Joe and the young, "slightly touched" daughter of the family (played by Juno Temple) is the most unsettling relationship in the picture. Their inexplicable bond is never developed beyond the shock value of their first encounter. The film’s entire third act is comprised of one grand extended scene. What surrounds this memorable material neither sets it up, opens it up, or contextualizes it well enough to justify itself. I do appreciate Friedkin’s attempt to do something different from his usual strict adherence to a theatrical play's stage-bound qualities, especially since this is his second adaptation of a Tracy Letts play. But there just isn’t enough here, apart from one great, long scene of Southern-fried-Gothic exuberance with a disappointing finish.



2023: THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL ★★★+


For his final film, Friedkin adapted Herman Wouk's play about the military court-martial of a US Navy officer who took over command of his ship from an unstable captain. It's a fitting finale work for the great cinema survivor since Friedkin first achieved acclaim by adapting works created for the stage. At 87 years old and not in the best of health during the production, it was almost certain that this would be Friedkin's last picture. The final work of a great artist doesn't always turn out well, but this update of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is one of the director's finest adaptations of a stage play—more cinematic than his 12 Angry Men, more perfectly contained than his Killer Joe, and more authentically realized than his The Birthday Party.

The play is based on Wouk's own Pulitzer Prize-winning 1951 novel, The Caine Mutiny, and was originally directed for the Broadway stage in 1954 by none other than Charles Laughton. The book and play had been adapted for the screen several times before. The most well-known and best-loved screen version is the 1954 film directed by Edward Dmytryk, produced by Stanley Kramer, and starring Humphrey Bogart as the disturbed Captain Queeg—a performance that earned Boggie his third and final Academy Award nomination for subverting his heroic screen persona. That film follows the full narrative of the book, beginning with junior officer Willis Keith's assignment to the Navy destroyer minesweeper USS Caine, following the various ways her paranoid captain mismanages the ship, and the way that Officer Steve Maryk relieves Queeg of command during the height of a dangerous typhoon. When the ship safely returns to port, Maryk and Keith face a court-martial for mutiny. Queeg is relentlessly cross-examined at the hearing by Lieutenant Barney Greenwald, the Naval Aviator and attorney reluctantly assigned to be Maryk's defense counsel.

Wouk's stage adaptation focuses only on the court-martial climax of his book. So, like officers who must decide the outcome, the audience knows only what the witnesses report about the events aboard the Caine. It's a powerful drama that provides many juicy roles that actors can sink their teeth into, especially the role of Captain Queeg. Franklyn J. Schaffner directed a live television version of the play in 1955 in which Lloyd Nolan reprised his stage role as Queeg. In 1988, Robert Altman directed another made-for-TV version with an all-star cast that included Jeff Daniels as Steve Maryk, Brad Davis as Queeg, and Eric Bogosian as Barney Greenwald.

All prior screen versions of the play and novel have kept the World War II setting. But Friedkin's teleplay updates the setting to the Persian Gulf and alters the details of the Caine’s mission to one that reflects a contemporary timeline. I was shocked at how well the modernization worked. This is a quintessential World War II story, where the stakes feel properly proportioned to a world at war. Resetting witness testimony from incidents of critical minesweeping maneuvers during the invasion of Kwajalein to more routine present-day maneuvers in the Strait of Hormuz would seem to downgrade the importance of the trial. Similarly to how, when Steven Speilberg remade the 1943 romantic drama A Guy Named Joe in 1989 as Always, the changing of the main character from a bomber pilot to an aerial firefighter made the whole story feel less significant.

That is not the case here. Friedkin's screenplay and direction don't lean too hard into analogies between the dangers of one unstable, paranoid, past-his-prime ship captain and the current crop of world leaders, especially American ones, but the parallels are there. And because Wouk's extraordinary final scene turns the tables on its characters and the audience, the ending of this film comes off as an indictment, not just of old captains who are too worn-out and young officers who are too green to merit our trust, but of all levels of the system and society. There is confidence in this no-frills production, which is photographed straightforwardly on a set that practically feels like a big empty room. In his TV version of 12 Angry Men, Friedkin used handheld cameras that seemed randomly aimed at the imposing cast, the way a novice director would shoot if they only had three days to make the movie. This picture is photographed and designed with precision, accentuating the material's stage-bound qualities, the limitations of TV production, and the fact that the frail director was in a weakened condition, using these factors all to great advantage.

The cast assembled for this project is unexpected but excellent. We might think Kiefer Sutherland far too young to play Captain Queeg. He is, in fact, three years older than Boggie was when he played the role, but an actor's actual age is never a good way to assess their appropriateness for a part. Sutherland's take on the martinet captain is understated, apart from a facial deformity; his Queeg's mouth is partly paralyzed, making him seem shifty but sympathetic. We don't want to judge him negatively because of his odd physical condition. Yet, we can't help viewing him positively because he probably got this malady in the line of duty. Jake Lacy, an actor most known for TV work ranging from The Office to Girls to The White Lotus, plays Lieutenant Maryk as a man who feels one hundred percent in the right, the way only a Millennial can. Yet he also conveys the tangible sensation he's in over his depth, and he needs to trust a process he's rightly dubious about. As lead judge Captain Blakely, Lance Reddick brings a controlled air of dignity to the proceedings in a way few actors have ever been able to do. Reddick was famous for this type of soft-spoken authority figure ever since he played Lieutenant Cedric Daniels in perhaps the greatest TV drama ever made, the HBO series The Wire. (Reddick died from heart disease before this picture was released).

The real star of this production is Jason Clarke as the defense attorney, Lieutenant Greenwald. Clarke has been a “that guy” actor for years, doing excellent but relatively unsung work in pictures like Zero Dark Thirty and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. He was compelling playing Ted Kennedy in the little-seen (and not very good) Chappaquiddick. He can also be appreciated this year in another legal context as the lead attorney in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s backroom security hearing in Oppenheimer. But this is his best performance to date. Clarke plays every facet of this conflicted character, whereas most actors in this role overplay one aspect of his personality over another or make shifts that feel too extreme. In his hands (and in Friedkin's), the final monologue lands with such stinging and lasting power that we keep replaying it in our minds throughout the end credits and long after the movie ends. The potency of this ending is fitting as the final statement from a maverick director who was never afraid to explore in his work the many ways his views on most issues of the day had changed, evolved, or become less clear throughout his life.