By Brandon Nolta
Crime flicks are a standard genre in America. You can generally figure out the outlines of most crime films before the title cards stop rolling, and it’s a tried-and-true formula. However, there are always a few guys who convince studios to give them money, equipment and actors and then go out and make something different. William Friedkin is one of those guys, and he must have confused the hell out of the suits at MGM when he handed in TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., one of the more underappreciated works of his career. This 1985 crime thriller starts out as a standard crime thriller with a revenge component, but it sure ain’t the same film by the time it ends.
Richard Chance (William L. Petersen, much thinner and meaner than he is now on CSI) and Jim Hart (Michael Greene) are Secret Service agents based out of the Los Angeles office. As the movie opens, they’re on protection detail, but they spend most of their time chasing counterfeiters. They’ve been partners and friends for seven years, but Hart’s approaching retirement, and he wants to take down one last bad guy before he goes: master counterfeiter Rick Masters (an astonishingly young Willem Dafoe). With three days left before he retires, Hart chases down a lead on his own, over his partner’s objections, and gets a face full of shotgun for his troubles. Chance vows to catch Masters and make him pay for his crimes, pulling his new partner, straight-laced John Vukovich (John Pankow), into the pursuit with him.
Up to this point, the film is your usual thriller gig, if filmed a little more stylishly than usual. Other than the Wang Chung soundtrack, you’ve probably seen this kind of thing before. However, as the pursuit of Masters begins in earnest, Friedkin and Petersen pull the rug out from under the audience. Chance is not a heroic type at all: he’s banging one of his informants (Darlanne Fluegel) and keeping his thumb on her by threatening to revoke her parole, he decides to run his own off-the-books sting to catch Masters, and when he can’t get his boss to pay for it, he finances it by ripping off a courier who’s part of a diamond smuggling operation. Oh, and the courier gets killed in the process (though not by Chance or Vukovich), which isn’t so bad until it comes out he was actually an undercover G-man. Oops.
Along the way, Chance terrorizes his new partner and nearly gets them both killed in an astonishing chase scene where they end up driving the wrong way on one of L.A.’s many freeways (a sequence that was filmed last so the filmmakers could complete the movie even if the actors got killed in the process). On the dark side of the fence, Masters is a nutjob, but he’s a smart, methodical nutjob, and he’s not entirely unsympathetic; Dafoe hadn’t yet patented the bug-eyed intensity he’s now renowned for, and this is one of his more subdued portrayals. Petersen matches him, twitch for twitch; it’s easy to forget after seven seasons as the brilliant, non-cuddly but strangely avuncular Gil Grissom, but Petersen is a live wire, and he inhabits this role solidly. Pankow doesn’t measure up as well as he should, but he does OK in a thankless role.
When TO LIVE AND DIE came out, it was met with mixed critical reviews and poor business. Much of this is due to the challenging storyline and Petersen’s deeply flawed anti-hero, but the biggest throw for the audience was that, against virtually all storytelling conventions (BIG SPOILER ALERT), Petersen’s character—the supposed protagonist—dies roughly fifteen minutes before the movie ends, leaving the climax up to Pankow and Dafoe. That came out of left field even for this reviewer, and I knew it was coming. Must have been a hell of a shock to those few who saw in the theaters, but it fits right in with the rest of this morally murky, resolutely iconoclastic film. It’s not a perfect film by any means, but it’s well worth seeking out, even if the soundtrack’s almost all Wang Chung.