Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 8 August

The French Connection is streaming on Disney+

William Friedkin passed away yes­ter­day at the age of 87.

Best known for The Exorcist and The French Connection (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director) his career actu­ally went back to the early 60s as a doc­u­ment­ari­an and his last film, a remake of the The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial star­ring Kiefer Sutherland, won’t be seen until it premi­eres in Venice later this year.

I remem­ber see­ing a late night screen­ing of Killer Joe at the Paramount dur­ing the 2012 film fest­iv­al and being blown away at how adven­tur­ous it was.

There are plenty of Friedkin high­lights but very few avail­able from Aotearoa stream­ing ser­vices. The Exorcist, Cruising, Killer Joe, Bug, Jade and The Boys in the Band are rent­als from Apple but To Live and Die in LA and Sorcerer (his remake of The Wages of Fear) are cur­rently unavail­able online.

Only The French Connection is avail­able on a stream­er – Disney+ of all places. It’s only of the least Disney-type films I can ima­gine. But then there is a lot of the old Fox con­tent lurk­ing below the sur­face on Disney+ if you man­age to steer your­self away from the big brand names at the top of the page.

The French Connection has had a troubled his­tory on home video. The first Blu-ray edi­tion in 2009 was ulti­mately dis­owned by Friedkin des­pite it hav­ing his sig­na­ture on the box.

And some ver­sions of the film that are online have had an unfor­tu­nate edit in an early scene between “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and his part­ner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) where Doyle uses an offens­ive racial epi­thet. The word is bey­ond the pale nowadays but tells you a lot about the char­ac­ter – he isn’t just a big­ot, he hates every­one. One of those ‘asshole who is right in the end’ char­ac­ters, except in The French Connection he isn’t. Right, that is.

I’ve just had a rewatch and the ver­sion that is play­ing on Disney+ – per­haps sur­pris­ingly – hasn’t been butchered.

Disney being Disney, I shouldn’t be sur­prised at the recom­mend­a­tion offered at the con­clu­sion of The French Connection. “If you liked that, you’ll love this,” indeed.