To Live and Die in L.A., dir William Freidkin, 1985.

In the 1970s, William Friedkin hit the big time with the multiple-Oscar-winning The French Connection, and the follow-up box-office smash The Exorcist. Given that his next three movies were flops, it would be easy to dismiss his 1985 cops-and-robbers movie To Live and Die in L.A. as an unsubtle attempt to revive his faltering career by returning to the genre which had given him his first big hit, especially as both To Live and Die in L.A. and The French Connection are based on memoirs by law enforcement officers and are about renegade, unlikeable cops pursuing cultured villains, both are shot in grungy urban locations, and both feature long, elaborate, car chases. But if even with an ill-judged prologue, in which we see hotshot Secret Service agent Richard Chance (a muscular debut by William Petersen) foil the assassination of the U.S. President by a suicide bomber, the I-hate-the-1980s synth score by Wang Chung, and the pretentious club scene of the kind that was obligatory in 1980s thrillers, To Live and Die in LA adds up to a lot more than a mere copy of its Oscar-winning predecessor.

Petersen's Secret Service agent sets off on a personal vendetta after his veteran partner ('I'm too old for this shit.') is shot and killed while investigating counterfeiter Eric Masters (Wilhelm Dafoe). Chance, who likes to bungee-jump off suspension bridges for kicks, is a reckless, rule-breaking cowboy who keeps his female informant and sometime bed-partner in line with threats of jail, and drives his new straight-laced partner, played with wonderfully repressed nervous tension by John Pankow, to a near breakdown; Masters is a sophisticate whose ice-cool intelligence allows him to pull off the murder one of his associates on premises that Chance and his partner are surveilling. The slightly cliched duel of wits between Chase and Masters is enlivened by the relentless drive of the pared narrative and Friedkin's insistence on near-documentary verisimilitude. There's a masterful montage near the beginning of the movie that shows how Masters makes his fake money; John Turturro is on the money as a nicely nasty second-string villain; the movie's vision of Los Angeles, blowsily photographed by Wim Wender's associate Robby Muller, eschews the usual tourist sights for parched backstreets, dusty industrial landscapes and the docks of Long Beach; a long, visceral car chase after Chance's scheme to rip off a gangster courier for the funds he needs to sting Masters goes badly wrong; there's a shocking twist when Chase and his partner finally confronts Masters, and a downbeat ending that echoes the lesson of all great noirs -- you can't mess around with corruption and come out clean.

It was still possible for a mainstream thriller to flirt with ambiguity in the 1980s; these days, To Live and Die in LA would have been saddled with the awful alternate ending the studio insisted Friedkin shoot, and which is included as part of a generous suite of extras in the Region 1 'Special Edition' from MGM. As well as that alternate ending, there's a deleted scene, a good retrospective documentary divided into three featurettes, a full-length audio commentary by Friedkin, and a photo gallery. File somewhere between iconic and interesting failure.

First appeared in Crime Time 38.

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