To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

William Friedkin's 1985 neo-noir arrives from a lean $6 million budget and a former Secret Service agent's manuscript, and it carries the fingerprints of neither committee nor cause. The cast is a wall of white men in bad ties, with Steve James granted a supporting slot that exists because the plot required a body, not a statement. Debra Feuer and Darlanne Fluegel occupy the two female roles on offer, one a girlfriend who sells out the villain, the other an informant kept compliant through sexual extortion. The film observes this arrangement without comment, and it has no interest in commenting.

No same-sex currents surface anywhere in the narrative. No racial consciousness animates the proceedings, even when an Asian-American undercover agent wanders into the crossfire and dies for the convenience of the plot. There is no environmental sermon, no class warfare, no celebration of the body in its many forms, no diagnosis of the neurodivergent mind. The film is too busy watching a man drive the wrong way down a freeway while his passenger screams.

What remains is a picture that trusts its audience to draw conclusions. It shows obsession, corruption, and the slow moral collapse of John Vukovich, and it never stops to explain what we should feel about any of it. No narrator arrives to instruct us on the sins of the carceral state or the counterfeit economy. Friedkin points the camera and lets the ugliness breathe. This is either a relic of a less self-conscious era or a quiet rebuke to our own. Either way, it earns its standing as a document of genre craft, and it leaves the classification ledger nearly blank. Nearly. A few faint marks remain, and we record them without enthusiasm.