Director · Producer · 1935–2023

William Friedkin

2: briefs
13:00: average
26 min: in total

On film.briefs2

Sorcerer

William Friedkin · 1977

William Friedkin’s 1977 Sorcerer adapts Georges Arnaud’s novel as a stark, tactile thriller about four fugitives transporting volatile nitroglycerin across a jungle road. Shot in the Dominican Republic with documentary rigour, it trades psychological exposition for procedural realism — trucks, terrain, and time as the true protagonists. Though a box-office failure on release, it has since been reappraised as a masterwork of sustained tension and formal discipline.

13:00

The French Connection

William Friedkin · 1971

The French Connection follows two New York narcotics detectives, modelled on real officers Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, as they trail a heroin shipment tied to an actual 1962 seizure. Made for $1.8 million after seven actors turned down the lead, it won five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor for Gene Hackman, and its documentary-style handheld camera and an unscripted-feeling car chase set a template for the decade of American crime films that followed it.