To Live and Die in LA

 The logic of big business popular movies is the logic of advertising and publicity.  If something is successful, then, there must be enhancements, improvements to make it even bigger and better than before. William Friedkin seems trapped in this logic with respect to his film To Live and Die in LA (1985).  Friedkin's assignment, it seems, is to remake The French Connection in Los Angeles and amplify the effects in the former film until the audience is deafened and beat into submission.  Fundamentally, the picture is rooted in 40's and 50's noir, a humble B-picture genre.  Both The French Connection and To Live and Die in LA are variants on the tough, rogue cop picture, films like Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground and just about anything with Sterling Hayden (Crime Wave, The Naked Alibi and others down to Captain McCluskey in The Godfather.)  For better or worse, Friedkin aspires to something like art and kicks everything into high gear.  Characters can't walk down a corridor without the camera breathlessly rushing forward on a collision course with the figure; a simply colloquy at a desk, turns into a swooping 280 degree camera movement and, when someone enters a studio or a multi-room robber's roost, the camera zooms alongside, recording the entire space as if Friedkin had forgotten that he could cut to elide the space between opening the door and the cop's destination -- I guess Friedkin wants to show-off both the proficiency of his director of photography, the great Robbie Mueller, as well as the kinky and lush detail designed by his set decorator.  (Clearly, Friedkin wanted Mueller to replicate the extraordinary twilight effects and night photography in Wenders film noir The American Friend -- many sequences are shot at dawn or sunset, the magic hour and fast motion photography of the sun setting or rising makes the palms tremulous with a sort of wild hysteria -- Mueller loves the palm trees and fast forwards them so they writhe in the red light like souls in Hell.  I attribute to films like To Live and Die in LA, the annoyingly ADHD-style mise-en-scene in many of the films directed by Ridley Scott and his brother, pictures in which the camera is never still, but constantly flitting back and forth, hither and yon...

Friedkin begins the movie with a montage redolent of 40's (or, even, 30's) Hollywood productions showing bad guys corrupting the currency with counterfeit bills.  Some Secret Service guys are on the track of the villains.  One of the cops, a case-hardened veteran, is three days from retirement.  His young partner Rick Chance salutes him for his courage and commitment.  Needless to say, the older guy has tracked the counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe as Masters) to a remote gulch in the Mojave Desert where the villain is printing cash.  In this isolated venue, the senior cop, who is inexplicably working on  his own, is murdered.  Chance vows revenge and is willing to bend the rules to get his man.  The film tracks the talented, if evil, Masters as he frolics with bisexual models and kisses his boyfriend and periodically terrorizes and thrashes various folk whom he encounters.  Chance has a female informant to whom he is casually vicious -- he's also sleeping with her between bouts of bullying. For some reason, this girl, who seems a glamorous type of trailer trash (she works in a topless place as a cashier), is privy to all sorts of top-secret underworld gossip. Chance and his new partner, a straight-arrow named Jon Vulkevich, go undercover and negotiate with Masters.  The mastermind demands $50,000 upfront for some vast amount of counterfeit currency.  Chance can't get the department to advance the funds and, so, acting on a tip from his girlfriend and informant, the two cops stage a robbery of another con who is carrying $50,000 down from San Francisco.  They ambush the con, called in the film "a Chinaman", and shake him down.  The Chinaman gets killed by a sniper and all hell breaks loose as a small army of armed men and souped-up vehicles pursues Chance and his hapless partner.  This sets up the film's prinicipal set piece, a spectacular car chase which begins in a railroad yard full of moving locomotives, progresses through a fruit market where dozens of trucks are making deliveries in an extended alley about 15 feet long; the boys evade the obstacles in their way, drop down onto the empty bed of the LA river channel where they engage in a demolition derby chase for another few miles before evading their pursuers by driving the wrong way against rush hour traffic.  (Friedkin is clearly attempting to outdo himself with respect to the famous car chase in The French Connection, vehicles carooming between pillars of an elevated train.)  There are a few unproductive subplots involving another thug who pretends to turn informant but, then, escapes -- this is a very greasy-looking John Turturro -- and some complications ensue with respect to a crooked lawyer who has pocketed a big chunk of counterfeit dough.  There are raids, counter-raids, some sex scenes with beautiful depraved women, and, ultimately, a fiery climax.  The straight-arrow partner, Vukelvich, has been thoroughly corrupted and, in the last scene, he's calling on his partner's sleazy informant girlfriend to bully her before forcing sex upon the woman.  It's all unsavory and picturesque.  Friedkin films LA as a port city and most of the action takes place near the harbor or among the infernal refineries of City of Industry.  There's no trace of Hollywood in this picture, except that the molls are all registered with the studios and looking for work in the film business.  Friedkin makes LA look like one of the lower circles of Dante's Inferno.  And the picture has a throbbing sound track by the duo Wang Chung, including some songs that were once famous in the 80's.  

Nothing much changes in this genre; the bad guy has a drop-dead gorgeous moll who runs around in the 1985 equivalent of the lingerie these dames wore in the forties and fifties.  Because we are more sexually adventurous today, the bad guy and his girlfriend are bisexual -- in 1985, bisexuality was deemed to be the height of post-modern decadence.  (Today, a film like this would feature glamorous transsexuals.) The rogue cop casually beats everyone up and cheats with respect to evidence and, indeed, ends up engineering a robbery (involving the Chinaman) against fellow law enforcement -- this explains the army of cops who chase them after the poor undercover Asian is gunned down.  Friedkin's players are fantastically attractive -- the young Willem Dafoe is pretty as a Cosmopolitan model.  (In recent films he looks like his haggard face has been set on fire and the blaze put out with a rake -- but, in this movie, Dafoe is more beautiful than the leading lady.) The only person even more gorgeous than Dafoe is William Petersen, the rogue cop.  He's so preternaturally gorgeous that Friedkin saves a luminous close-up of him for the very end of the credits -- stick around to see it.