My Thoughts On The Underrated 1985 Film To Live And Die In La

Where To Begin This Film Was Highly Stylish And Cool And William Dafoe Was Great In An Early Role So Where The Other Two Actors Playing The Cops They Were Quite Cool Too. The Director Of People Was William Friedkin The Director Of The 1973 Film The Exorcist This Was Quite The Departure From That But He Did An Amazing Job. This Film From Start To Finish Was Entertaining And Action Packed And Very Gritty For A Film Set In And About Los Angeles This Film Was Way Better Than The 1986 Action Film Cobra Starting Sylvester Stallone. Mainly Because This Film Was Quite Gritty And Real For An Action Film Unlike Cobra Which Just Felt Cheesy Compared To This Film. But All In A Great Film With One Hell Of A Plot Twist At The End.

Hey, welcome and thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Small formatting tip, though: better to not capitalize each word. Makes it very hard to read.

I quite agree with you! Great thriller from a great director, with a fantastic cast. I particularly love the chase scene, going the wrong way down the L.A. freeway! I love how William Petersen's character Richard Chance is someone you assume to be a hero, but he turns out to be just as volatile and dangerous as the villain Eric Masters, played by Willem Dafoe. When he tells John Pankow, "I'm gonna bag Masters and I don't give a s*** how I do it!" you feel like that's what a heroic movie cop is supposed to say. But he really, truly doesn't care, and that's what makes him so dangerous.

So many capital letters, so few periods.

Was that sent via Western Union?

Fixed!

Does anybody want to add anything further to the discussion?

I might want to add to Massimo's observations that To Live and Die in L.A. was in fact not such a great departure for William Friedkin. Granted, Friedkin's best-known film may be The Exorcist which is a horror film, but before that he directed 1971's Academy Award-winning thriller The French Connection, set in New York City. And, Massimo, if you want gritty and real, urban action thrillers don't come any leaner or meaner than this.

And while I do agree with Massimo's criticism of Cobra as being relatively cheesy compared with the grit of Friedkin's best work, that's definitely a film I've got a soft spot for. And to be honest, in this day of random school shootings, paranoid conspiracy theorizing and armed militia groups, the nefarious deeds of the Night Slasher and his band of heavily-armed murdering marauders definitely feel chillingly relevant to today's world.

Admittedly, though, it's not really flattering to the world we live in when certain movies can be said to feel relevant today! This definitely applies to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Robert Altman's Nashville. Those are two other (much better) movies about which it can be said that "You could make a movie like that today and it would still feel just as relevant." But while that's certainly high praise for those movies - as well as being the truth - it says something rather scary about the world today!

I have liked To Live and Die in L.A. since I saw it theatrically in 1985. I was fifteen.

My Dad had been taking me to R-rated movies since I was ten so it wasn't that big a deal for me to see Friedkin's latest, but it was actually the first R-rated movie I got into without one of my parents accompanying me. A buddy and I got dropped off down at the mall and decided to walk across the street to the movie theater to see what was playing. I remember this to be like a weeknight, a Wednesday evening or something, so it was very slow, hardly anyone around. We were fifteen and looked very much like twelve, so no way we could pass for seventeen. But we went for it anyway. The guy at the ticket counter was probably only nineteen himself and couldn't care less if we saw an R-rated flick or not. But to us it felt like we really got away with something when he sold us those tickets.



I probably hadn't seen The French Connection at fifteen. I had definitely seen police thrillers of the same era like Blue Thunder, Tightrope, and Sharky's Machine theatrically as well as Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hrs. and Fletch and on cable had seen things like Blow Out and Thief. And I watched plenty of TV like "Hill Street Blues" and "The Rockford Files", and on and on. Beyond the R-rating I could definitely tell that To Live and Die in L.A. was a more "adult" take on the genre, no comedy, and not just because there was some sex and nudity (though that was certainly welcome to a fiffteen-year-old). Even at that age I could tell this was not simply an anti-hero at work but rather a look at obsession and a very dark character moving through an even darker world. I had seen Willem Dafoe before in Streets of Fire, but he was so odd and cool and seductive and unique and dangerous as Robin Masters the artist/counterfeiter. It was the first time I saw John Turturro in anything, a memorable turn. Years later when John Pankow and Jane Leeves show up as sitcom regulars (on "Mad About You" and "Fraiser", respectively) I knew damn well who they were.




The car chase that is really the centerpiece of the film is everything it is chalked up to be and more. Friedkin had set the bar extremely high with the chase under the elevated train in The French Connection but he was up to the challenge. It has such a great emotional component to it, Vukovich freaking out in the back seat while the thrill-seeking Chance calmly swerves around each obstacle, with more and more cars and guns pursuing them, culminating with going the wrong way on the freeway. Brilliantly designed and raises the stakes perfectly.

The ending is appropriately weird and bloody and dark as night with our main protagonist taking one in the face before the final confrontation can even take place. So good. Of course there are some very 1980s elements, but To Live and Die in L.A. holds up extremely well, nearly forty years later. For me I like it more than Michael Mann's Manhunter, also starring William Petersen, released the following year, though both are top rate.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

Watched this over the weekend, as I was unsure if I had seen it or not. Turns out I had not! Liked it quite a bit, even if, as Holden mentioned, it has some fairly dated 80s business here and there, such as the blood effects. Regardless, Cool little 80s crime flick with a rad car chase and music by Wang Chung.

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It's a great movie. Yet one more example that Friedkin was no two-trick pony (he at least had four or five tricks up his sleeve)

Indeed. Although this trick was much more like that one trick, but really that other trick.