FOOTAGE FETISHES: “TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.”

Cut to the Chase
His partner and best friend murdered, Chance goes on the warpath to bring down Masters. With a green Vukovich in tow, he meets with Masters’ sleazy attorney Bob Grimes (Dean Stockwell) to arrange an undercover currency transaction. Masters agrees to the buy, but the front money is too much for the Secret Service to pony up. Unwilling to let Masters get away, Chance convinces Vukovich to join him in robbing a guy Debra has told him about, who will be coming into L.A. with fifty thousand dollars to buy stolen diamonds.
As is the manner of all film noir-ish pictures, this is when everything goes to hell. Chance and Vukovich nab the guy, not realizing there are several other interested parties waiting for him as well. The deal goes south and the man ends up dead. Suddenly, the two rogue agents are on the run, and what follows is one of the most memorable car chases ever shot.
Even by 1985, the car chase was as stale a cliché in the crime genre as ever. It seemed like every police movie or TV show from the late ‘70s and ‘80s was required by the MPAA to have one. A select few have always stood out, however: “Bullitt” (1968); “The French Connection” (1971 – Friedkin again); Midnight Run (1988). “To Live and Die in L.A.” certainly deserves mention with these. The chase winds around L.A.’s warehouse district, through the aqueduct (is there ever a car chase in Los Angeles that doesn’t find its way to the aqueduct?), and finally ends up going the wrong way down a freeway. I know it’s easy these days to use newfangled editing techniques to make it look like a car’s about to smack headlong into an 18-wheeler, but during this sequence there are literally hundreds of cars coming at the agents, and elevated shots show the carnage along the highway for miles. I don’t know how Friedkin did it – until a DVD with his commentary comes out we’re just going to have to speculate – but the results are impressive even today.
Everybody Wang Chung Tonight
Lest we forget, “To Live and Die in L.A” was made in that most infamous of decades, the 80′s. Thankfully, Friedkin manages to sidestep the dated setting and visuals that plague other action/crime movies from that same period. In fact, aside from the obnoxious lime green and pink opening titles (which I suspect Herr Direktor had little to do with) and some of the vehicles, it manages to hold up quite well.
Provided you can overlook the size of Vukovich’s portable cassette recorder, that is. I swear, I thought he was talking into a toaster at first.
Of course, no amount of frenetic car chases or ultra-violence can distract you from the realization that, good gravy, that really *is* Wang Chung I’m hearing. Few bands are more identifiable with their particular era than the Wangs, and at times the songs are outright jarring. They have better luck with the orchestral parts of the score, but when the singing starts all bets are off. Of course, they also find a way to slip “Dance Hall Days” into the obligatory strip club scene, but in all honesty I’ve never heard that particular tune at my favorite gentlemen’s establishment. I suppose I should be thankful the producers didn’t pick Bananarama. Or Ebn-Ozn.
Unlike most 80′s movies of this ilk however, “To Live and Die in L.A.” never devolves into cloying humor or feeble sentimentality. Its sensibilities are more in tune with crime films of a decade earlier like “Dog Day Afternoon” than with contemporaries like 48 Hrs. or Lethal Weapon. The violence is sudden and quite graphic, startling the audience with its abruptness. It’s also refreshing that the good guys don’t necessarily walk away at the end. Bad people get away with bad things, fringe characters tend to slip away unnoticed, and the ending doesn’t exactly tie everything up in a nice pink bow.
This isn’t the Los Angeles of “Beverly Hills Cop.” The characters operate in the industrial sectors and near the docks around Long Beach, they don’t just happen to find themselves cruising down Rodeo Drive or making a buy at the Beverly Wilshire. The movie would satisfy almost all the requirements for film noir, right down to the protagonist with questionable morals, except for that damn southern California sunshine.
Which brings us back to Chance as anti-hero; it’s obvious during the car chase that he is enjoying himself a little too much. Even after he and Vukovich discover the diamond bagman was FBI and the men chasing them were his fellow agents, Chance is unwilling to come clean. Masters is too close, and now that he has the money he’s not going to let anything get in the way of his revenge. His obsession with bringing Masters down starts a chain of events that will leave bodies and ruined lives in his wake. Hart’s death may have nudged Chance over the line, but he’d obviously been dancing along it for years.
The movie offers some simpler pleasures as well. Try not to laugh at the incredibly awful mime/theater/ballet troupe that Masters hangs around with (keep your eyes open for “Frasier’s” Jane Leeves as the sexually ambivalent dancer Serena). And be sure to wince in grim appreciation of Masters’ aim when he shoots a double-crossing accomplice in the Bad Place.
Remake My Day
Someone once said that today’s action stars are a pale imitation of those who came before (it may have been Blake Wiers, who also said, “If Steve McQueen isn’t the rebel archetype that James Dean is, it’s because McQueen was a better driver”). Clone Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis a hundred times and you still won’t have the stone coolness of McQueen, Newman and Redford, or Clint Eastwood circa “High Plains Drifter.” Petersen has swagger as Chance, but swagger is too easy to mimic. More difficult would be reproducing the depth Petersen brought to the character, and off the top of my head I’m having a hard time coming up with someone who could pull it off. Let’s just say Colin Farrell and leave it at that.
You need a sinister pretty boy to play Rick Masters or…you need a woman. The female characters in “To Live and Die in L.A.” are either hard-luck cases with no self-esteem (Debra) or they’re lesbian-leaning ice queens (Masters’ girlfriend Darlanne). I say, get off the pot and make Masters a woman. Personally, I see Julianne Moore. Dennis Farina would be good as Hart, Chance’s doomed partner, mostly because he and Michael Greene have similar cool moustaches. John Pankow didn’t bring anything special to the role of Vukovich, so we’d get someone similarly nondescript, like Joshua Jackson.

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Writer Pete Vonder Haar takes us down memory lane for an in depth look at films we may have forgotten about. Some of these films will bring back fond memories, while others may force you to cancel your cable service in fear of coming across a late night screening of them.

Posted on October 24, 2002 in Features by Pete Vonder Haar

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