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.

Keeping Four Wheels on the Road at High Speed

By Steve Evans

I love learning new bits of film history. I live for it. Better than birthdays and Christmas. So I was reading about the short career of James Dean, which got me to thinking about the guy’s death 63 years ago, which led to the discovery that on his fatal drive in that Porsche Spyder he was the lead car in a caravan of friends heading to a race track. About two minutes behind him was Dean’s racecar-driving mentor, an occasional actor named Bill Hickman, who arrived at the crash scene in time for Dean to expel his final breath of air in Hickman’s face. By his own account, Hickman was so haunted he didn’t sleep for five days.

I didn't know that story until today, but I instantly recognized the name Hickman. His destiny was to become a legendary movie stunt driver. Steve McQueen chased him all over San Francisco in Bullitt (1968). Hickman did the high-speed driving for Gene Hackman in The French Connection ('71) and outran Roy Scheider in The Seven-Ups ('73), a little-seen thriller with an incredible car chase as its centerpiece. Hickman drove real cars down real roads, barreling along at speeds well in excess of 100 mph. No computer enhancements or image manipulation. One slip of the steering wheel and he coulda ended up like his pal Dean. Some of us like living on the edge. Hickman took it over the edge and came back to show us the real deal.

Hickman died of cancer in 1986. He was 65. French Connection director William Friedkin called him the greatest driver in the history of cinema. That’s Hickman in the photo below, at right, with Dean lighting a cigarette at left. I'm not sure about the guy hunched over the fateful Porsche. Could be Sal Mineo, Dean's co-star in Rebel Without a Cause. Mineo was murdered in a botched robbery in 1976, but that's another Hollywood story for another day.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2018 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.