Venice Film Festival

• With the audacity of relative youth on their side, they wanted to bring down the old system and remake Hollywood.
• Released in 1971, the film galvanised audiences, changed the landscape of Hollywood genre realism, and took home five Oscars – including Best Picture.
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Enduring artistic fascination

• Friedkin plays the thriller like something lifted from the French New Wave, say Jean-Pierre Melville’s glorious Le Cercle Rouge of 1970.
• The French Connection was followed by perhaps the most notorious film of the Hollywood 1970s: The Exorcist (1973).
• But there many works from the last 40 years of enduring artistic fascination: the synth-oozing To Live and Die in LA (1985), which sets the template for Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004); Jade, Friedkin’s 1995 attempt to outdo Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992), a perverse pleasure precisely for its manic unevenness; and 2011’s stylised, hyper-violent domestic drama, Killer Joe.
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My personal top five

• I want to close this reflection with my William Friedkin top five, which I’ll be revisiting across the next week: 5.
• Sorcerer (1977) Many commentators on Friedkin’s career regard The Sorcerer as Friedkin’s last great auteur film.
• Cruising (1980) Has Cruising – a film about a serial killer within New York’s homosexual subcultural community - been cancelled?
• The Exorcist (1973) Simply put, the milestone that brought one of the most distinctive artistic visions to a classical possession genre story.
• The film oozes a place and time unlike any other film shot in New York in the 1970s.