The French Connection (1971)

I don’t think I had caught up with this one since it was new, although I recall I was so smitten then I saw it a few times. It was the big car chase that kept me coming back, a total thrill at the time. The whole thing holds up pretty well, particularly if ‘70s action, car chases, and/or Gene Hackman are your thing. The Road Warrior spoiled me for car chase scenes ever since, but the epic one featured here, racing to keep up with a subway train on elevated tracks overhead, is at least as good as anything you might find on Rockford Files reruns (RIP Stuart Margolin btw, who played the extremely annoying Angel Martin and died last month). Hackman, of course, is always excellent, one of the best we’ve got, going all the way back to Bonnie and Clyde and at least through Unforgiven and maybe The Royal Tenenbaums. He’s a dirty cop here, and one thing that has changed for me since 1971 is that it doesn’t seem as heroic—his busts and investigations routinely go over the line and I have considerably less sympathy for him now. The narrative is somewhat hard to follow because of director William Friedkin’s frenzied and fractured style, which in many ways rivals the work of his peer Nicolas Roeg. It’s hard to follow, but basically all you need to know is there’s a big drug deal going down—a large shipment of heroin coming in from Marseille (which makes it the French connection, see). Popeye Doyle (Hackman) is on the case, working off his various insane hunches, which unfortunately for everyone often (not always) prove out. Owen Roizman’s camera is as restless and energizing as the New York streets he is shooting on. The edits are crackling sharp. The French Connection is gritty, it’s hard-school knocks, and it’s still reasonably entertaining. Also of note is a soundtrack by Don Ellis, which is edgy yet unobtrusive, fitting itself well into all the noise of this picture. The Three Degrees get a cameo performing in a club too and it is terrific. I didn’t remember it from seeing this when it was new, but now it seems almost worth the price of admission alone.

The Exorcist (1973)

USA, 122 minutes
Director: William Friedkin
Writer: William Peter Blatty
Photography: Owen Roizman
Music: Jack Nitzsche, Mike Oldfield
Editors: Norman Gay, Evan A. Lottman
Cast: Linda Blair, Ellen Burstyn, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow, Lee J. Cobb, Kitty Winn, Jack MacGowran, Rudolf Schundler, Vasiliki Maliaros

I intended to have momentous or at least interesting things to say about horror movies approximately here, but often the scary pictures I've looked at in the past year have left me cold, and rarely frightened me. Maybe I should have looked in more unexpected places, such as the driving safety films we were shown in high school—they might still be scary, or certainly as gruesome as ever, I would think. The two movies that most gave me pause to revisit, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (both of which still retain the power to disturb), explicitly have nothing to do with the supernatural—like those driving safety films, come to think of it. But the supernatural has everything to do with The Exorcist, a movie that scarred me when I saw it on its original release (twice, foolishly, unbelieving of its power on me after the first time).

This reminds me of a story I used to like to tell, about a church youth retreat when I was in high school. As I recall, it was an overnight canoe trip. On the night over, a group of five or so of us stayed up late gabbing at a campfire. At some point we started swapping ghost stories and such. At some point we decided it would be fun to have a séance. We had a medium among us and people who knew the mumbo jumbo. We held hands and looked nervously around while someone recited the mumbo jumbo. We decided that our means of communication—admittedly ambivalent, but the best we could do in the circumstances—would be to make an ember glow that we pulled from the fire and stuck upright in the sand. Once for no, twice for yes. Being idiots we summoned the spirit of Adolf Hitler (to her credit, the medium did not approve). Things like this take some tinkering but finally we were pretty sure we had a spirit on the line and that it was our man. I asked if he really thought he could take over the world. The ember made a little popping noise and burst into flame.

The Exorcist (1973)

#7: The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)

It might be fair to say that Stockholm syndrome has something to do with this pick. The Exorcist is usually the first place I go in my mind when thinking about best/favorite horror pictures. It wasn't the first in which I had the experience of surviving something and feeling notably alive after a very bad scare. In terms of the movies, that would probably be The Wizard of Oz, and later on Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie, Suspiria, the various Cronenbergs, The Evil Dead, even A Nightmare on Elm Street. But The Exorcist is the most scared that any movie ever made me. Maybe that's something about my age when I saw it, in my late teens.

I'm not sure I made it all the way around to the catharsis part with The Exorcist either, certainly not after the first time I saw it. That was the week of its release, which means I might have seen the original with the subliminals. It was in a big old barn of a theater in downtown Minneapolis on a weeknight, packed full, with people sitting up front laughing at it like hyenas, and the rest of us behind them reduced to gelatin—at least my friend and I were. I made it out of that theater half traumatized. People were talking in comments here the other day about stunners. The Exorcist ranks among mine. I'm not any more afraid of crashing to my death in an airplane than I am of evil and Satanic forces stealing my soul (or body)—which is to say, maybe a little, I love Fearless and Rosemary's Baby too. But not so much that it keeps me up at night. Except this movie kept me up nights.