TCM Has a William Friedkin Tribute on Thursday Night (Tonight!)

By David in TN and Nicholas Stix
wednesday, september 13, 2023 at 7:45:00 p.m. EDT

TCM has a William Friedkin tribute on Thursday Night. Friedkin died last month just short of his 88th birthday.

The French Connection (1971), Friedkin's most famous film, with Gene Hackman and Roy Schieder, is shown at 8 p.m. ET. To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) with William Petersen and William Dafoe follows at 10 p.m.

The latter has a Secret Service agent (Petersen) going against counterfeiters led by Dafoe. The story has the Secret Service agents as ruthless as the counterfeiters.

N.S.: I first saw the The French Connection when it was released, in a theater, at the age of 13. I loved it, and immediately became the world’s biggest Gene Hackman fan. And unlike so many of my youthful opinions, that one never changed, nor did my opinion of the picture.

The picture was about the “French Connection” heroin case, in detectives Eddie Egan (“Popeye”) and Sonny Grosso (“Cloudy”) solved the biggest heroin case in nycpd history (something like 120 kilos of uncut heroin). Unfortunately, most of the bad guys got away, and cops stole all of the heroin from the police department’s property lockup.

The picture unleashed a force of nature named Gene Hackman, who had been up for Best Supporting Actor twice (for Bonnie and Clyde and I Never Sang for My Father), but had never been a star. Hackman played a very real cop named Eddie Egan.

Additional “characters” were the hand-held camera of Owen Roizman, whose first DP credit this was, and the streets of New York. Many of the scenes, including the famous car/subway chase, were shot without permission from the city, which never would have given it.

(Many of the cops involved in the real chase in 1962, unofficially directed traffic during the filmed chase scene. Friedkin was in the back seat of Hackman’s car, filming, because all of the cameramen had wives and children. Hackman did some of the driving, but the craziest stunts were done by a world-class stunt driver Bill Hickman. Hackman, Hickman, what difference does it make?)

Most of those people on the street were not extras, they were New Yorkers.

An exception was in the scene in the drug-dealer bar. The black drug dealers were all played by cop extras.

The French Connection is on my list of the 100 Greatest Pictures.

My memories of the picture, which I have seen five or six times, came in handy one time, when a racist hispanic thug was trying to murder me on a nearly deserted subway platform (in Chambers Street Station, I believe), circa 1992, near Wall Street. He kept following behind me, round and round, like Groucho and Margaret Dumont Duck Soup (1933), only with no humor on his mind. There was another station available (Park Place, which seems to have since been eliminated) by foot, that was connected by a pedestrian tunnel, but he would have simply followed me into the tunnel, and attacked me there.

At this point, a middle-aged, black, West Indian Wall Streeter in a conservative, dark-green suit was waiting on my side of the platform. I told him the hispanic thug was trying to kill me, asked if I could wait by him, and amazingly, he said “Yes”!

After waiting for a few seemingly endless minutes, a train came through on the opposite side of the platform. Although it was going the wrong way, I had to escape my would-be killer. And so I waited until the last possible moment, and quickly entered the train, just as the doors were closing, like Frog I in the movie. The next stop was a combination station (City Hall and other names). I got off and explained to the two cops in the station by the token clerk and turnstiles what I’d experienced. (I was going to have to leave the station, and walk to a different one, to get my train.) They took notes, and told me to tell the cops at the next station that they had given me permission to get on without paying.

As for Hackman, about 50 years later, after seeing Unforgiven (1992) for the fifth time, but this time with my chief of research, I noted that Hackman was “the secret star.” My CoR responded, “Hackman. It’s always Hackman.”

When “the bum” died in 2004, yours truly wrote a lengthy obituary, which was published by several different Webzines, and cited at length by the late Stefan Kanfer in his Brando biography, along with obituaries by Richard Schickel and Terry Teachout.

“Similarly, at intellectualconservative.com, Nicholas Stix compared Marlon to another performer with a different track record.

‘In the field of acting, Gene Hackman may not be Brando’s equal in raw talent, and certainly hasn’t had the sort of scripts sent to him that Brando did. Hackman, the plain-looking, balding, quintessential late-bloomer, who as an acting student flunked out of the Pasadena Playhouse, where he was considered the worst student in its history, got his first role after his thirtieth birthday. And yet, Hackman has had the more brilliant career, fully exploiting his gifts, and making the most of every role he has played.’ It was ‘as if the young Brando had made a deal with the Devil to quickly attain greatness, but Lucifer had now exacted his price, which required that Brando disgrace himself, and become a porcine parody of his formerly handsome self.’”

Stefan Kanfer. Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando, (N.Y.: Knopf, November 4, 2008).

During 1971, there was a debate—an actual one, with two sides, unlike today, where the msm and the antiversity use the term “debate” to describe a monologue, in which one side is completely silenced—as to whether The French Connection or Peter Bogdanovich and Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show should win the major Oscars. The result was a split, in which Connection won five (Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor and Editing); Fiddler on the Roof won three (Best Cinematography, Sound, and background music); and Picture won two (Best Supporting Actor and Actress).

(About a year ago, I tried watching Fiddler on the Roof on TCM, but notwithstanding its lovely production quality and the pretty actresses playing Tevye’s wife and many daughters, I found it execrable, and turned it off after 20-30 minutes.

Since producer-director Norman Jewison had cast the Israeli actor Topol in place of the only acceptable Tevye, Zero, I concluded that the movie’s backstory had to be much more interesting than what transpired on the screen. Instead of the real backstory, I got a ludicrously incredible cover story from an alleged expert on Jewish matters named Judy Bolton-Fasman in a magazine which provided the official story on such matters.

The expert claimed that Jewison hadn’t wanted Tevye to have a “Brooklyn” sound. And yet, the sound which the world knew as that of Tevye was the sound of Zero Mostel. No Zero, no Tonys. No Zero, no record for Broadway longevity (which the show held for several years). No zero, no movie.

Note too that while Zero was a Communist who had been blacklisted, Jewison chose another Communist who had been blacklisted, Arnold Perl, to write the screen adaptation. The “expert” ignored this matter, as well.

Finally, the “expert” quoted Jewison talking about lessons he’d learned from his “Jewish friends,” but let him act as if he were a complete gentile. If your name is “Jewison,” it means that your forebears not too long ago, were Jews, for cryin’ out loud!

Oh, and no Zero, no box office success for Fiddler!

Since reading the “expert” I have concluded that Jewison must have been a communist, but the surely fascinating conflict between him and Mostel remains unrecounted.)

Queering the Movies

Someone had posted a claim, somewhere on imdb.com, that there was a “debate” in 1971-1972, over whether Sunday, Bloody Sunday (about a homosexual/heterosexual love triangle) or The French Connection should have won the Oscar for Best Picture. As far as I can tell, that “debate” never occurred, and the “story” about is yet another case of queering history.

As great a movie decade as the 1970s were, with one great actor after another—Nicholson, Pacino, Hoffman—Hackman was still the best.

William Friedkin hit another grand slam in 1973, with The Exorcist (which I have yet to see), but later developed an obsession with re-making Henri-Georges Clouzot, Georges Arnaud, and Jérôme Géronimi’s 1953 French thriller, The Wages of Fear, which became his great White whale. Friedkin’s re-make went way over budget, behind schedule, and bombed. It was released in 1977. His career never recovered.

In 2011, he made Killer Joe with Tracy Letts, “A totally twisted deep-fried texas redneck trailer park murder story.” So, he had roles for Whites, provided they played the scum of the Earth.

He died on August 7th, just 22 days short of what would have been his 88th birthday. He came back for one last picture, a remake of Edward Dmytryk’s 1954 masterpiece, The Caine Mutiny, which is slated for release on October 6th. Based on its casting, Friedkin’s re-make, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, sounds like an affirmative action disaster. But it will qualify for all of the academy award categories.