William Friedkin took lots of heat last year for redoing the visuals on “The French Connection” Blu-ray.
Too bad he didn’t upgrade the music on “To Live and Die in L.A.
Ready to Wang Chung tonight? Me neither. Be warned that the one-hit wonders from the post-new wave era are all over the soundtrack with a Music By credit. Friedkin’s excellent taste in music (“The Exorcist,” “Sorcerer”) went MIA on this 1985 project.
Aside from the Wang doodling, the crime thriller ages well, in part because it created a gritty L.A. that fused the bleak side of downtown with the Long Beach port and nearby San Pedro. We’re a long way from Hollywood and big hair.
Like “The French Connection,” it’s an actor’s movie: William Petersen, Willem Dafoe, John Turturro and Dean Stockwell, with solid support from Darlanne Fluegel and Debra Feuer. The first three were relative unknowns when Friedkin hired them, bypassing established actors as he did on “French Connection.” He compares Turturro with Peter Lorre.
The Blu-ray reprises the special edition DVD of 2003 and even includes it, with the standard def disc carrying the extras: a feature-length commentary by director Friedkin, an alternate ending mandated by the studio (awful) and a quite good (but dated) making-of docu. The trailer is the only extra on the HD disc.
The Blu-ray’s lossless audio (DTS-HD 5.1 MA) keeps the motors running on all six speakers, with significantly more punch and presence than on the SD. While the HD images post some improvements over the DVD — chiefly a much-needed upgrade in detail — don’t expect too much. The movie is still soft, grainy and a bit washed out, with occasional speckling. (Friedkin calls the print “the best that ever existed” for the film.) The menus look better but similar. Owners of the DVD might want to hold out for a new HD edition.
Friedkin talks in the commentary and documentary about his efforts to create a “counterfeit world,” in which the actions and emotions are as deceptive as the money. The real feds investigated the production for its “totally authentic” counterfeiting process. “They just tried to browbeat me,” says the director, who sent them packing.
The lengthy car chase sequence — in which Friedkin vowed to top the stunts in “French Connection” — remains astonishing, complete with the wrong-way driving sequence that freaks out L.A. freeway veterans. “We had to do something different,” the director says. The making-of breaks down how they pulled it off.
The movie follows a Secret Service agent (Petersen) as he obsessively hunts a hip and deadly counterfeiter (Dafoe). The agent loses one partner to the criminal, and the new one (John Pankow) fears he’s next. The Petersen-Dafoe dynamic rules the movie, with the usual melding of good and evil.
“To Live and Die” also is remembered these days for the red-hot sex scene with Petersen and Darlanne Fluegel, the male nudity presumably raising eyebrows back then.
While not as strong as “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” this one ranks among Friedkin’s best and most exciting works. Twenty-five years on, there’s plenty of life left in “To Live and Die in L.A.”
The best crime-genre movies on Blu-ray that I’ve seen in recent months:
Gomorrah
Snatch
Public Enemies
Also: “La Femme Nikita” and “The Professional”: Death with a French accent.
Glenn Abel writes the blogs DVD Spin Doctor and Download Movies 101. He is the DVD/Blu-ray columnist for Moving Pictures magazine.
‘To Live and Die in L.A.’ on Blu-ray
The red-hot sex scene was with William Petersen and Darlanne Fluegel not Debra Feuer
The movie was Edited by Scott Smith, not Glenn Erickson
(thanks, fixed)
It’s your blog and your opinion, but not everyone is so adverse to the music of Wang Chung, which actually had five Top 40 hits in the US (so the band was hardly a one hit wonder). This is an 80’s movie and Wang Chung was a pretty representative 80’s band, so I’ll bet most fans of the movie like the soundtrack.