Chicago native William Friedkin was one of the elder statesmen of the New Hollywood movement that swept through the 70s. As one of the first of the bunch to win a Best Director Oscar, he was carrying the torch for a new way of making films while guys like Coppola, De Palma, Spielberg, and Scorsese were only getting their first taste of a studio budget. Friedkin also doesn't really fit in with those guys in the same way he doesn't fit in with guys like Altman or Mike Nichols, who operated more on the lighter end of the New Hollywood spectrum.
Friedkin is kind of an island unto himself, part of the movement's beginnings and certainly a casualty of its ending, but never really operating in the same vein as those guys. This also has a lot to do with the fact that he wasn't an "auteur" in the classic sense. He didn't write most of the scripts he directed, with the exception of a four film runfrom 1980-1990 that saw him at least co-write and direct Cruising, To Live and Die in L.A., Rampage, and The Guardian. This helped reinforce his outsider status in the 70s, and curiously Rampage is the only film he ever made where he served as sole writer, director, and producer.
The thing that inextricably ties him to the movement is Friedkin's 1977 film Sorcerer, one of the textbook examples of the excesses and hubris that brought New Hollywood crashing to the ground. It was a casualty of timing, releasingfour weeks after Star Wars openedand right around the time it was becoming a phenomenon. It was also a big-budget remake of a French film most audiences had never seen and featured a cast in which Roy Scheider is the most recognizable face. Needless to say, Friedkin's rise was swift, his fall equally swift, and his attempt to climb back continues to this day.
Along the way, however, he's shown himself a master of the craft of filmmaking and always, at the very least, given us something interesting to watch. Like the cut and dry style he brought to his films, so too does he use sex and nudity in a rathermatter of fact way. It's a natural extension of the films he's making, be they steeped in the world of sex or street cops. There's often a realness to his nude scenes, with a turn toward the disturbingly real in the latter part of his career. Sex and nudity are a part of life, and so they're a part of William Friedkin's films.
The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968)
Following 1967's Good Times, a starring vehicle for Sonny and Cher, Friedkin cranked out an intimate adaptation of Harold Pinter's play The Birthday Party, before taking the plunge into the studio system with 1968's The Night They Raided Minsky's. You may have the seen the film referenced on the marquee of the Vogue Theater in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, and have probably heard the title even before that, but this is a movie that far too few people have seen or remember seeing.
Featuring a star-studded cast including Jason Robards, Elliott Gould, Britt Ekland, and the cowardly lion himself, Bert Lahr, the film chronicles both the journey of a wide-eyedAmish girl (Ekland) hoping to make it in New York City as a dancer, as well as the revenge plot of the owner of the titular burlesque house against a crusading religious zealot intent on driving them out of business. The film builds toward the eponymous raid, with Britt Ekland going topless on stage five minutes before the film ends, sending in the cops to arrest everyone in the joint! The only sad footnote here is that Britt didn't do the actual nudity, she left that to a body double...
****
The French Connection (1971)
Everything changes for Friedkin after the smash box office, critical, and awards season success of 1971's The French Connection. Friedkin ran into trouble early on with the film, namely in the casting of the lead role of Popeye Doyle, but even after every major actor passed, he landed the perfect man for the job, Gene Hackman. The film would gross over $50 million against a budget of $1.8 million, and go on to win five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor, with Friedkin also beating Stanley Kubrick, Norman Jewison, Peter Bogdanovich, and former winner John Schelsinger to win Best Director honors.
Even with all of the weight of those expectations, the film still feels every bit as vital, intense, and fresh as it did in 1971. Certain, rather obvious lines haven't aged well, and most of the film's advertising materials spoil the climax, but The French Connectionremains the standard bearer for cop movies. If it feels at all cliche, it's because every bit of juice has been sucked from this film's marrow and spread through the last 50 years of police procedurals. Friedkin took a big chance on the quasi-documentary feel, putting you inside the cop cars, running alongside them as they pursue a perp, and it all paid off by creating a standard visual look and feel for hard-boiled detective movies.
The film also seems to lack a proper conclusion, which is one of the most radical decisions made by Friedkin and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman. Sometimes the bad guy gets away, no matter how hard you try and no matter how airtight the case might seem, sometimes they get away, and that's why The French Connection became a phenomenon. Word to the wise, even if you desperately want closure, skip the warmed over 1975 sequel as it's inferior in every way to the original.
As for nudity, there's one fleeting nude scene courtesy of the appropriately named Maureen Mooneyas a girl Popeye picks up one night and gets startled when his partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) arrives the next morning to collect Doyle. We see her bare buns as she flees the scene...
****
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)
Following The French Connection, Friedkin directed an even bigger cultural phenomenon with The Exorcist, before going truly overboard on the aforementioned 1977 flick Sorcerer.From there, heleaned heavily on sensationalismwithCruising, a film plagued with controversy from minute one, and it's sandwiched between twowildly unevenstudio comedies, The Brink's Job andDeal of the Century with Chevy Chase and Sigourney Weaver. His career seemedto be heading in the wrong directionwhen he assembled his eleventh feature film, a return to form titled To Live and Die in L.A. in 1985.
Friedkin co-wrote the film's screenplay with the book's author Gerald Petievich, and gave future CSI star William Petersen his first leading role on screen—he was mostly known for his work with Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. The film was a modest hit in its day, though the age of VHS made it nigh impossible to distinguish the difference between this film and Year of the Dragon and The Year of Living Dangerously. Those all might as well have been the same movie. This caught on with film buffs reevaluating Friedkin's canon,however, and it's not surprising that this is singled out as being one of his best.
The mostly unknown Darlanne Fluegel is terrific as Ruth, a woman with a dark pasttorn between Petersen and Cousin Ira from Mad About You. She also shows some terrific TA in her two sex scenes with Petersen...
There's also a young Jane Leeves from Frasier, spread eagle on Willem Dafoe's couch, though she doesn't show any skin...
Debra Feuer does, however, when she shares some scenes with Dafoe, though neither lady ultimately shows as much as Dafoe does...
Fair warning, there's as much male nudity in the film as there is female. More maybe. Hey kids, if you ever wanted to see what Cousin Ira from Mad About You's ass looked like, this is the only game in town and our sister site Mr. Man has got you covered.
Michael Mann would more or less perfect this kind of movie the following year with Manhunter—starring William Petersen no less—but this was a big step forward for gritty cop-centric action thrillers. It's a milieu Friedkin helped established, but one that had clearly grown beyond him, moving him into the dark recesses of the late 80s and most of the 1990s.
****
Jade (1995)
Coming off the modestly successful and otherwise relatively good movie Blue Chips in 1994, Friedkin decided—like Hollywood was wont to do in those days—that he wanted to be in the David Caruso business. Caruso's star had more or less faded when the first season of NYPD Blue brought it back to life. Caruso then thought he was too good for television and wanted to get back to starring in movies. 1995 saw him fail at this endeavor, first in Barbet Schroeder's decent but forgettable Kiss of Death, opposite an expectedly unhinged Nicolas Cage—in the same year he won an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas.
Caruso's second consecutive flop as a leading man is this equally forgettable but substantially more dour Jade, an erotic thriller that forgot to include the eroticism.Writer Joe Eszterhas—whose Showgirls also made it to screens a month earlier—claims that Friedkin re-wrote so much of the script that he wanted his name taken off of it, and Friedkin has been open abouthis view that the film contains some of his best work, but I just don't see it. It's a tonal mess and no offense to stars Caruso, Chazz Palminteri, and Linda Fiorentino, but Friedkin thought he could get Warren Beatty, Kenneth Branagh, and Julia Roberts in those roles. I'd say he got the stars the material deserved.
That's not a knock on Fiorentino, who does the best she can with a role that—sorry Friedkin and Eszterhas—Julia Roberts never would have played.Unlike her incredible performance the year before in The Last Seduction, she's just let down by the script here. Her only proper nude scene is while talking on the phone naked...
The rest of her nudes involve a series of photographs that look poorly photoshopped...
Angie Everhart rocks the photoshopped nude look better, though I think it's poor Richard Crenna who was photoshopped into this one...
It's nice seeing Everhart fully nude in her Stallone-banging prime, but she has to be dead in order for us to see it, which is the real shame of this film...
****
Bug (2006)
In the eleven years between this and Jade, Friedkin directed two mid-grade thrillers starring Tommy Lee Jones—Rules of Engagement and The Hunted—before getting hooked on the work of playwright Tracy Letts. Always keeping a toe dipped in the world of Chicago theatre, Friedkin saw a production of Letts' play Bug in 2004 and fell in love with the playwright's whole aesthetic. The two worked together to bring the play to the screen with the same skin-crawling immediacy inherent in its roots as a theatre piece.
In Bug, Ashley Judd plays Agnes, a waitress at a gay bar who meets a discharged soldier named Peter (Michael Shannon). Peter tells Agnes that he was subjected to government experimentation and testing when he was in themilitary, earning her sympathy and softening her resolve enough to sleep with him. After having sex, however, Peter freaks out and tells Agnes that the government has infected them with bugs. He claims that they're crawling all over him, though the audience cannot see any actual bugs—if they're even there at all. This questioning, of course, then plunges Agnes into a state resembling madness.
The eroticism missing from Jade is curiously found here in this decidedly unsexy story. Thefiremissing from thatfilmfinds its way here 38 minutes in when Judd and Shannon have sex for the first time, and Friedkin uses a series of close-ups and dissolves that give the scene plenty of heat. I sped it up this GIF so it's not quite so long, but you can check out the full scene at the bottom of the article...
Judd reportedly used a body double for those scenes, but it's all her in the film's final scenes, as madness consumes her and Shannon and they strip completely nude...
****
Killer Joe (2011)
Friedkin and Letts got together one last time for an adaptation of an even darker work by the playwright. This searing and pitch black show ingrained itself in the memory of any audience who saw it, and Friedkin tried to once more trap that lightning with his camera. The title character, played her by Matthew McConaughey, is a private detective who moonlights as a contract killer, roped into the world of a two-bit trailer park drug dealer Chris (Emile Hirsch) who gets in over his head in debt and hatches a plan to make some quick money. He wants to hire Joe to kill Chris' mother, collect the life insurance, and then pay Joe and everyone else back.
Needless to say, nothing goes according to the plan, and matters are only made worse by Chris involving his father (Thomas Haden Church), stepmother (Gina Gershon), and sister (Juno Temple) in the plan. Joe takes a liking to sister Dottie right away, and when Chris can't offer money up front, he offers to take Dottie as collateral, and the two begin a sexual relationship almost immediately.Chris then has a change of heart about the whole plan, but Joe informs him that he's already killed the mother and thing spiral out of control.
The film was slapped with an NC-17 due to the explicit sexual content and one particularly disturbing scene we'll get to in a moment. Juno Temple gets completely nude, first in a hallucination Chris has when he comes to his father's trailer for the first time...
Then we get a look at her bush when McConaughey begins aggressively coaxing her into sex...
Gina Gershon makes one hell of an entrance into the film, showing off a close-up shot of her hairy (fake) bush as she greets her stepson's return...
Her final scene, however, is disturbing in nearly every way, and straight out of Letts' play. Joe has her get on her knees and he holds a fried chicken drumstick from his fully clothed crotch and tells her to fellate it. It's disturbing and unsettling in all the right ways, and Gershon plays the scene with heartbreaking authenticity...
William Friedkin remained a vital part of the filmmaking community until his death in 2023, directing a documentary in 2017 about the real life priest on whom The Exorcist was based. He's also given us an undeniably great filmography with some bumps along the way, to be sure. But when he was really cooking on films like The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer, To Live and Die in L.A., and even Killer Joe, his work is second to none. Even his less successful stuff like Cruising, Blue Chips, and Bug is still interesting and worth exploring. Friedkin may have pushed his actors beyond their limits sometimes, but the results speak for themselves.
William Friedkin Directed Films/Shows with Nudity Not Covered in This Column
—Tales from the Crypt: Episode“On a Deadman’s Chest”(1992)
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