Sean Burns
Presumably having something to do with the delusional inflation of America’s cowboy mythology under the Reagan regime, the 1980s saw a resurgence of lone wolf mavericks at the movies. Video store discount racks were overrun with tales of rebellious cops who lived on the edge and played by their own rules. It was around this time that director William Friedkin was in desperate need of a hit. The double whammy of Cruising and Deal of the Century had done nothing to dispel the stink of his 1977 mega-bomb Sorcerer, a viciously dark-hearted and preposterously expensive remake of The Wages of Fear that had the misfortune of opening just after Star Wars, arriving a month or two on the wrong side of the biggest vibe shift in American moviegoing history.
To Live and Die In L.A. was designed as a return to the director’s glory days of The French Connection: a hard-hitting police procedural with abrasive, workaday cops pitted against a sophisticated, elusive villain and a barn-burner of a mid-movie car chase. (The film’s poster even read: “The director of The French Connection is back on the street again.”) For additional insurance, the film was lacquered with a sleek, MTV aesthetic modeled after the smash hit TV show Miami Vice, with a pulsating synth soundtrack by chart-toppers Wang Chung. The stage was set for everybody to have fun tonight. But the thing about William Friedkin was that he could never stop being William Friedkin, and in trying to top The French Connection he made a movie even more morally murky and unpleasant.
However hard To Live and Die in L.A. tries to look and sound like another gleaming, shitty ‘80s movie, it’s got the rotting, miserable soul of a 1970s masterpiece. Friedkin tries to play along with popular genre tropes but he knows all too well that rebellious mavericks who live on the edge and play by their own rules only end up getting themselves and other innocent people killed. Our cocksure, swaggering anti-hero, Secret Service agent Richard Chance – named after John Wayne in Rio Bravo – is played by William Petersen as a tornado of dickhead machismo. Fresh from Chicago’s intensely physical Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Petersen can’t sit down in a chair without spinning it around and straddling it. He’s always standing with his legs planted far apart, as if his balls were too big to bring them any closer. He’s amazing. He’s unbearable.
Chance is obsessed with taking down Rick Masters, an effete counterfeiting legend played by Willem Dafoe, straight from Streets of Fire and having a field day with Freidkin’s penchant for sexual ambiguity. (In an early scene, Masters’ girlfriend enters the room obviously played by a man in drag. Dafoe locks lips with her and a cut to the reverse angle finds him kissing actress Debra Feuer in the same costume. Just a little subliminal, Cruising-esque goose to keep the audience on the back foot.) Masters killed Chance’s partner – three days before his retirement, we’re embracing every cliché in the book here – and an idealistic rookie agent (John Pankow) gets caught up in the rogue cop’s quest for revenge.
The reason Masters has gone untouched for so long is that he demands too much money up front from his customers. No law enforcement department would ever approve the outlandish sum required for a hand-to-hand buy, so Chance decides they should just go steal it from another bad guy. This plan is even stupider than it sounds, working entirely from suspicious sounding information Chance gets from a female informant he sexually exploits. She’s played by Darlanne Fluegel, a leggy blonde who showed up in a lot of ‘80s genre movies and had the saddest eyes I’d ever seen as a kid. She looked like a beautiful, broken doll. It goes without saying that Chance doesn’t notice her haunted stare. He probably thinks she enjoys sleeping with him.
Among the pitiless pleasures of To Live and Die In L.A. is an illicit thrill in Friedkin’s dispassionate regard for the myriad stupid fuckups committed by pretty much everyone in the picture wearing a badge. While other ‘80s action movies lionized our boys in blue, here they’re bumbling, violent jerkoffs, falling asleep during stakeouts and accidently shooting fellow officers in the back. I’m hard-pressed to think of one thing that the “good guys” do right in this film, while Dafoe’s grinning, devilish mastermind (dig that last name again) has always got their number.
It’s a bruiser of a movie, with a nerve-shredding car chase headed the wrong way down the L.A. freeway that very possibly surpasses Fredkin’s legendary French Connection pursuit. One of my favorite touches is the absence of any traditional comic banter between the cops during the chase. Instead, Pankow just flails around the backseat, moaning in abject terror. The future sitcom staple’s laughable unsuitability as an action hero is used very smartly here by Friedkin. Other canny casting choices include an early incarnation of John Turturro’s ‘80s weasel persona, a suave Dean Stockwell as an insinuating defense attorney, and filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. as Chance’s wryly exasperated boss. (Yes, that’s Fraiser’s Jane Leeves as Dafoe’s girlfriend’s girlfriend, in another of the film’s leering, peek-a-boo titillations from a time when bisexuality was considered tres outré.)
To Live and Die in L.A. was shot by the great German cinematographer Robby Müller, between his similarly down-market visions of Los Angeles in Repo Man and Barfly. The movie’s slick, music video affectations can’t conceal the scuzziness of these locations, set far from the Hollywood sign amid refineries, overpasses and vacant industrial spaces. All the sunsets and neon feel like a battered woman’s smudged makeup over a black eye, while the cold, synthetic thrums of Wang Chung’s score are missing the warm, soaring saxophones that ruled cop movie music of the era. Friedkin’s film has aged so much better than other ‘80s policers because it captures the hard, amoral emptiness of the age.
There’s something that happens near the end if this film that I wouldn’t dream of giving away, maybe the most audacious “did they really just fucking do that?” plot turn of any movie released that decade. But what sticks with me most is what comes after the story has come to a close. Friedkin favored final scenes that were haunting and unresolved, reminding us that the characters have been stained in their souls by these experiences, as have we by witnessing them. By the end of To Live and Die in L.A., Chance’s toxicity is practically a contagion. We shiver at the words, “You’re working for me now.”
“To Live and Die in L.A.” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
