To Live
And Die In L.A.
Directed by William Friedkin

Not as bad as William Friedkin's worst movies, To Live and Die in L.A. is a reasonably entertaining 1985 crime thriller about a secret service agent - William Peterson's first big movie role - who will break any rule necessary to catch the counterfeiter that murdered his partner. Peterson stars with Willem Dafoe, and both look shockingly young, like those cartoon programs that show what the characters were like as kids. The film has garnered a cult reputation, almost from its inception, basically because it has a reasonably lively pace and the hero operates under realistically murky ethics, but further critical admiration is mostly undeserved. Friedkin made several really great movies in the Sixties and Seventies, and then started making really bad ones. Even on a cursory viewing, let alone repeat viewings, there are flaws in the character logic, inane stereotypes, badly planned action scenes and other stupidities lurking throughout the film. As much as you want to like the movie, there is some point-from the beginning when a Middle Eastern assassin jumps off a building with bombs tied around him because, what?, he wants to kill some pigeons?, to Peterson's character driving the wrong way through freeway traffic where, in shot after shot, he could clearly and easily slip over the divider into the right way, to the end where Dafoe just sort of kills himself because none of the heroes have been able to do it-where the production undercuts whatever good graces it has generated. Like the money Dafoe's character is trying to pass, the film seems great until you start examining it closely.

MGM Home Entertainment has released To Live and Die in L.A. as a Special Edition (1004604, $20), in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The image has a mildly aged appearance, with slightly soft lines and hues, though it generally appears to have been transferred with care. There is one sequence bathed in red that is quite blurry. Most of the time, however, you're just aware that the movie has been around for a while, but not distracted by its condition. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital presentation of the movie's original stereo mix is excellent, with crisp tones and distinctive separations, enhancing the DVD's entertainment significantly. The 116-minute program has an alternate French audio track in standard stereo, a Spanish track in mono, optional English, French and Spanish subtitles, two trailers, a fair collection of black-and-white publicity photos, a 9-minute segment with an introduction about an awful alternate ending that Friedkin wisely avoided being pressured into using, and a 4-minute segment with an introduction about a deleted scene involving a secondary character.

There is also a comprehensive 30-minute retrospective documentary, which, when combined with Friedkin's commentary track, provides a fairly clear picture of how the film was conceived and executed. Neither feature, however, does much to contradict the film's mistakes. Why is the opening sequence so innocuous? Because Friedkin added it as an afterthought, when he realized he hadn't shown what else Secret Service agents do for a living. What in the world are all those gunmen doing at the L.A. River basin and how did they know the heroes would be driving in that direction? No reason at all, Friedkin just thought it would be a great idea to have them there, giving the movie a "Kafkaesque" tone. And so on. Friedkin does take the time during his talk to discuss some nuts-and-bolts filmmaking techniques, the sort of thing that you can trust is good advice regardless of how he ends up applying it. But when Friedkin announces at the very beginning of his talk that he is going to do his commentary about the film, "Without referencing the film itself," and then proceeds to speak about scenes, actors, shots and details within shots as they appear on the screen, it just kind of sums up the baffling failure of his later career-the rational part of his mind and the creative part do not appear to be communicating with one another.

The Review Vault
The Best of 2003

- by Douglas Pratt

 

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