Feature

William Friedkin (1935–2023) • More than a two-hit wonder

An overview of the career of the late William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, The French Connection, Sorcerer, and Cruising.

William Friedkin, who died this week at the age of 87, topped the box office charts in 1973 with The Exorcist and had come close two years earlier with The French Connection (1971). Such early acclaim — he’d only moved from documentaries into narrative cinema in 1967 — can be a hard act to follow (ask Orson Welles or Quentin Tarantino), as when a filmmaker becomes so associated with their major triumphs the rest of their work can be overshadowed.

That is certainly the case with Friedkin. He has always been a biggish name on the back of that pair of films, and always had a coterie of fans — not least because the thriving state of horror today can, to a significant extent, be traced back to The Exorcist, a horror film that proved the genre could be intelligent. People who don’t know a single other Friedkin movie still know that one. He will always be “the guy who directed The Exorcist.”

Yet he was never an immediately recognisable auteur. Others afflicted at much the same time by the same lack of an obvious signature, despite their estimable…