Want to Live? Then Die in L.A.

By Steve Evans

Summer blockbuster season is upon us and I am mostly unimpressed with the cinematic slate. I’ll go see Scorsese’s latest and Tarantino’s, too, but that’s about it. Summer is a time for action films, and for my money, the more violent the better. Many terrific action films have been made over the last half century and you’d best believe I’ve seen ‘em all. The Bond films hold up and, well, Die Hard (1988) is still the gold standard for Christmas movies featuring terrorists and machine guns and exploding helicopters. Yippie-kai-yay, etc.

But now and again I revisit the work of William Friedkin when I want a textbook refresher on how to shoot an action film. His early success, Best Picture winner The French Connection (1971), made a star out of Gene Hackman and delivers what remains one of the great chase sequences in all cinema. I watched it again the other night. Brilliant flick, infused with the influences of the French New Wave. Friedkin’s horror-film follow-up, The Exorcist (1973), never did anything for me except trigger a fit of the giggles. Why that flick scared anyone remains a mystery to this day: “Your mother sucks cocks in hell!” “Oh? Here’s a puke bucket, you little harlot.” Friedkin faltered after that for nearly a decade with several misfires. Then he turned 50, got serious, and directed another masterpiece.

I’m talking about his 1985 thriller To Live and Die in L.A., about a brooding counterfeiter and the secret service agent determined to take him down. This is a damn-near perfect action picture, with credible, well-developed characters performed by a sterling cast that includes Willem Dafoe, William Peterson and John Turturrro in an early role. The action set pieces are many and memorable. There are beautiful babes – the kind you trust and the kind you sleep next to with one eye open. The band Wang Chung delivered their best-ever work for the soundtrack. Almost everyone in the film has a nasty attitude. And what is an action flick without balls-to-the-wall violence? Here the brutality is potent, bloody, abundant and unapologetic. This may be the most nihilistic action movie ever made, outside of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, which Friedkin himself remade in 1977 as Sorcerer.

Oh. You want a chase sequence in downtown L.A.? Friedkin outdid his own previously best effort in The French Connection. Ask yourself what it would be like to fly down a freeway at 80 mph. Going the wrong way. With cars coming head-on. To Live and Die in L.A. answers that question.

This film exudes effortless style. It’s an outrageously slick piece of entertainment with enough throbbing testosterone to make Big Arnold Schwarzenegger cry like a sissy with skinned knees.

I first saw the picture in a theater 34 years ago. Back then, it blew my mind at the possibilities of action cinema. Leaving the theater, I recall breaking several land speed records driving home, such was my lingering excitement. I am still waiting for someone to surpass the pure adrenaline this film delivers.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2019 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.