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    Nine Provocative William Friedkin Movies to Stream

    The director specialized in grimy thrillers and social dramas that occasionally courted controversy.An iconoclast even among his New Hollywood peers coming up in the 1970s, the director William Friedkin built a reputation for grimy, high-impact thrillers and social dramas that sought to get a rise out of audiences and frequently drew the controversy they courted.Friedkin, who died Monday at 87, found early success in Hollywood with the one-two punch of “The French Connection” in 1971 and “The Exorcist” in 1973, but his fortunes shifted in the years that followed, which led to a career of unpredictable and often attention-grabbing swerves. One of his best ’80s films, the sleek thriller “To Live and Die in L.A.,” is currently unavailable to stream, but adventurous home viewers will find plenty of scorching work to command their attention.Here are nine films that illustrate Friedkin’s combination of stylistic bravado and willingness to engage on the battlegrounds of race, religion, sexuality and systemic corruption.1970‘The Boys in the Band’Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV and Vudu.Though Friedkin’s relationship with the queer community would turn fraught a decade later with “Cruising,” this adaptation of Mart Crowley’s 1968 Off Broadway play was, at the time, the rare American film to focus entirely (and sympathetically) on the lives of gay men. Friedkin was so impressed by the stage production that all the original cast members were brought into the movie, which takes place mostly in the Upper East Side apartment where a fitfully employed writer (Kenneth Nelson) is holding a birthday party and has invited a motley group of friends. The boozy affair that follows zings with filthy one-liners, but tensions rise as the night carries on and the inner lives of these alienated, often closeted men start to surface.1971‘The French Connection’Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV and Vudu.Friedkin won his only Oscar, for best director, for this ferociously entertaining policier, which remains one of the great New York movies, a seedy snapshot of the city as it once existed — at least through the jaundiced perspective of a detective who has his share of blind spots. With a style that’s simultaneously propulsive and documentarylike in its evocation of place, Friedkin details a heroin smuggling operation that’s making its way to New York from Marseilles via ocean liner. Standing in the way is Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), a bigot and an alcoholic who’s willing to go to astonishing lengths to solve the case, including a car chase under an elevated train that Friedkin turned into a classic of its kind.1973‘The Exorcist’Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.Any conversation about the scariest movies ever made usually starts with a mention of Friedkin’s demon possession thriller, but the film’s effectiveness involves more than Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” and the terrifying contortions of a young girl’s body and spirit. “The Exorcist” gains an equal amount of power from the unyielding love a mother (Ellen Burstyn) has for her 12-year-old daughter (Linda Blair) as a demon wrests the girl away from her. Once the Roman Catholic Church gets involved, “The Exorcist” builds to harrowing and often frantic sessions between a priest (a superb Max von Sydow) and the ancient evil he’s desperate to whisk away.1977‘Sorcerer’Rent it on Amazon and Apple TV.After huge back-to-back hits with “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” Friedkin adapted the same French novel that Henri-Georges Clouzot had turned into “The Wages of Fear,” a suspense classic about desperate workers driving truckloads of nitroglycerin through a mountain pass. After a troubled and expensive production, “Sorcerer” was a box office failure — coming out the same summer as “Star Wars” didn’t help — but it’s now regarded as one of Friedkin’s best, playing to his strengths in location shooting and intense physical action. Roy Scheider leads an international cast as one of four outlaws who accept $10,000 and legal citizenship for the job of driving nitroglycerin on hazardous South American roads to an oil well 200 miles away.1980‘Cruising’Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Friedkin had a habit of courting controversy, but nothing on the level of “Cruising,” a crime thriller that gay rights activists protested vociferously during and after production for a portrait of West Village nightlife they felt stigmatized their community. With that caveat in mind, it’s still one for the time capsule, a sleazy yet compelling story about a serial killer who targets gay men in New York’s leather scene and a detective (Al Pacino) who goes deep undercover to solve the case. It’s an understatement to say that Friedkin does not approach the material with the sensitivity his doubters might have wished for, but the locations have an almost tactile griminess to them, and Pacino’s performance roils with inner torment.1994‘Blue Chips’Stream it on Amazon Prime and Paramount+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Working from a script by Ron Shelton, who’d made the superb sports comedies “Bull Durham” and “White Men Can’t Jump,” Friedkin tackled the seedy underbelly of college athletics with typical verve, including dramatized basketball action that’s on par with the real thing. Channeling the chair-whipping tempestuousness of Bobby Knight — who appears as an opposing coach in a cameo — Nick Nolte stars as a legendary college coach who’s starting to miss out on “blue chip” recruits. After his first losing season, he risks his reputation and his conscience by deploying school boosters to offer benefits to top prospects, including a rim-rattling center played by future Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal.2003‘The Hunted’Stream it on Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.In what would turn out to be his last major studio production, Friedkin executed this drum-tight, underrated action thriller in the “Rambo” mode about a disillusioned warrior on a killing spree and the former mentor tasked with bringing him to justice. Benicio Del Toro stars as a highly trained Delta Force soldier so traumatized by the genocide of civilians in Kosovo that he takes to the American wilderness and starts gunning down hunters. Echoing his performance in “The Fugitive,” Tommy Lee Jones is the F.B.I. “deep-woods tracker” who tries to retrieve him, with the advantage (and disadvantage) of having taught him everything he knows.2007‘Bug’Stream it on Pluto TV. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.In the first of two straight collaborations with the playwright Tracy Letts, Friedkin doesn’t hide the stage roots of a drama that takes place mostly within a rundown Oklahoma motel room, but the feverishness of the camera and sound work, along with the two lead performances, have a strong cinematic intensity. “Bug” is also a vital early showcase for Michael Shannon, who projects enough charisma as a drifter to win over a waitress (Ashley Judd) with relationship problems, but soon reveals a frightening volatility. The supposed discovery of an aphid in the motel bed sends these two lonely people into a paranoid frenzy that Friedkin transforms into an alternate reality.2011‘Killer Joe’Stream it on Pluto TV. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Deploying his relaxed, mellifluous Southern drawl to sinister purposes, Matthew McConaughey channels Robert Mitchum in Letts’s bracing redneck noir about a trailer-park murder scheme in West Texas that goes sideways. In a plot that owes a little something to “Double Indemnity,” Emile Hirsch plays a wayward 22-year-old who enlists his father (Thomas Haden Church) in a plan to kill his mother and split her $50,000 life insurance policy, but when they hire a cop/contract killer (McConaughey) to do the job, he requires Hirsch’s virginal sister (Juno Temple) to serve as human collateral on future payment. A sequence involving a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken may be the least appetizing product placement in history. More

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    What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films

    A new edit of ‘The French Connection’ removes a racial slur. But nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture.The remarkable thing about the censored scene is how ordinary it feels if you’ve watched a police procedural made before, say, 2010. It’s in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection,” from 1971. Two narcotics cops — Jimmy (Popeye) Doyle, played by Gene Hackman, and Buddy (Cloudy) Russo, played by Roy Scheider — are at the precinct, following an undercover operation during which a drug dealer ended up slashing Russo with a knife. The injury has left Russo struggling to put on his coat. “Need a little help there?” Doyle chuckles, then adds an ethnic jab: “You dumb guinea.” Russo: “How the hell did I know he had a knife?” Here Doyle points a slur at the Black dealer: “Never trust a nigger.” Russo: “He could have been white.” Doyle: “Never trust anyone.” Then he invites Russo out for a drink, and they trade masturbation jokes as they head through the door.But perhaps you should forget I mentioned any of this, because you’re now a lot less likely to see it in the film. In June, viewers of the Criterion Channel’s streaming version noticed that much of the scene had been edited out, without announcement or comment; people viewing via Apple TV and Amazon found the same. It was reported that the version available on Disney+ in Britain and Canada remains unedited, suggesting that whoever authorized the cut imagined the moment to be unfit for American audiences in particular. (Disney owns the rights to the film, having acquired Fox, its original distributor, in 2019.) The domestic market now sees a slapdash sequence that has Russo entering the room, clutching his forearm, followed by a jerky jump to the door, where Doyle waits. The disparaging exchange is, of course, omitted. What remains is a glitch, a bit of hesitation, the suggestion of something amiss. “Never trust anyone,” indeed.Bad jump cuts create bumps in logic; they’re disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play.The conversation that has surrounded this edit — a belated alteration to the winner of an Academy Award for best picture — is just the latest of many such controversies. In 2011, one publisher prepared an edition of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” that replaced instances of that same racial slur with “slave.” In February, Roald Dahl’s British publisher, Puffin Books, and the Roald Dahl Story Company confirmed that new editions of the author’s works, published in 2022, had been tweaked to substitute language that might offend contemporary readers, including descriptors like “fat” and “ugly.” (After a backlash, Puffin said it would keep the original versions for sale, too.) Then, of course, there are the right-wing campaigns to excise passages from instructional texts or simply remove books from public schools and libraries.This particular change to “The French Connection” came unexplained and unannounced, so we can only guess at the precise reasoning behind it. But we can imagine why the language was there in the first place. “The French Connection” was adapted from a nonfiction book about two real detectives, both of whom appear in the film, and the scene clearly wants to situate the viewer within a certain gritty milieu: a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor. We see a bit of banter between two policemen working in what was then called the “inner city,” dialogue underlining their “good cop, bad cop” dynamic; in certain ways, it’s not so different from the set pieces you would find in Blaxploitation films of the era. Doyle’s eagerness to get to the bar hints at the long-running “alcoholic cop” trope, and his homoerotic jokes are offset by his womanizing — another ongoing genre cliché. His racist barbs give a sense of his misdirected frustration. Doyle is presented as flawed, reckless, obsessive, vulgar, “rough around the edges” — but, of course, we’re ultimately meant to find him charming and heroic. He is one in a long line of characters that would stretch forward into shows like “The Shield” and “The Wire”: figures built on the idea that “good cop, bad cop” can describe not just an interrogation style or a buddy-film formula but also a single officer.Attempting to edit out just one of a character’s flaws inevitably produces a sense of inconsistent standards. We get that true heroes shouldn’t be using racial epithets. But they’re probably supposed to avoid a lot of the other things Popeye Doyle does too — like racing (and crashing) a car through a residential neighborhood or shooting a suspect in the back. This selective editing feels like a project for risk-averse stakeholders, so anxious about a film’s legacy and lasting economic value that they end up diminishing the work itself. The point of the edit isn’t to turn Doyle into a noble guy, just one whose movie modern viewers can watch without any jolts of discomfort or offense. If Gene Hackman is American cinema’s great avatar of paranoia — a star in three of this country’s most prophetic and indelible surveillance thrillers, “The French Connection,” “The Conversation” and “Enemy of the State” — then his turn here might anticipate the intensity with which entities from police departments to megacorporations will try to mitigate risks like that. This is a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor.Artful jump cuts can illuminate all kinds of interesting associations between images. Bad ones just create bumps in logic; they’re disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play. The one newly smuggled into “The French Connection” reveals, to use a period term, the hand of the Man, even if it’s unclear from which direction it’s reaching. (Is it Disney, treating adult audiences like the children it’s used to serving? Did Friedkin, who once modified the color of the film, approve the change?) Censors, like overzealous cops, can be too aggressive, or too simplistic, in their attempts to neutralize perceived threats. Whoever made the cut in the precinct scene, sparing the hero from saying unpleasant things, did nothing to remove other ethnic insults, from references to Italian Americans to the cops’ code names for their French targets: “Frog One” and “Frog Two.” It also becomes hilarious, in this sanitized context, to watch the film’s frequent nonlinguistic violence: A guy is shot in the face; a train conductor is blasted in the chest; a sniper misses Doyle and clips a woman pushing a stroller.Surveillance, as the movie teaches us, is a game of dogged attention; focus too much on one thing and you miss a world of detail encircling it. Nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture, the full context; we become, instead, obsessed with obscure metrics, legalistic violations of current sensibilities. And actively changing those works — continually remolding them into a shape that suits today’s market — eventually compromises the entire archival record of our culture; we’re left only with evidence of the present, not a document of the past. This is, in a way, the same spirit that leads obdurate politicians to try and purge reams of uncomfortable American history from textbooks, leaving students learning — and living — in a state of confusion, with something always out of order, always unexplained. You can, of course, find the unedited precinct scene on YouTube. (Just as you can find altered scenes from other films, from “Fantasia” to “Star Wars.”) It’s just packaged inside an interview with Hackman about his approach to portraying Doyle, whom he disliked. “The character was a bigot and antisemitic and whatever else you want to call him,” the actor says. “That’s who he was. It was difficult for me to say the N-word; I protested somewhat, but there was a part of me that also said, ‘That’s who the guy is.’ I mean, you like him or not, that’s who he was. You couldn’t really whitewash him.” Turns out you can.Opening illustration: Source photographs from 20th Century Fox, via Getty ImagesNiela Orr is a story editor for the magazine. Her recent work includes a profile of the actress Keke Palmer, an essay about the end of “Atlanta” and a feature on the metamusical “A Strange Loop.” More