You Love to See It: To Live and Die in L.A.

The car chase in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. is so instantly engrossing, so visually inventive and muscular in its pacing, that since seeing it I’ve struggled to engage with other chase scenes. Asshole secret service agent Richard Chance’s 1985 Impala careens down the concrete embankment of the L.A. river culvert like a comet roaring from heaven, its tail a plume of boiling dust and grit. You can feel the sweat, sour and slick, between flesh, cotton, and leather upholstery. William Petersen’s expression is at once vacant and tightly focused as he forcibly represses his despair over a botched robbery in order to escape pursuit and murder by FBI agents he didn’t know were tailing his mark.

No two shots in the chase bear much similarity to one another. The complex architecture of the L.A. river’s viaducts receding in overlapping panoramas into the distance. The seething steel river of the city’s infamous traffic which, like a capricious god, decides the chase’s outcome in the end. The gunmen pursuing Chance and his distraught parter Vukovich, who spends much of the sequence groaning in the Impala’s back seat, tormented by intrusive images of their half-assed scheme’s friendly fire victim, are just as thoughtfully framed and blocked. A gunman sprints out onto an overpass to snap off two quick shots at Chance’s car. He whiffs both, and by the time a truck whizzes past he’s already out of frame, his sense of momentum absorbed by the hurtling vehicle.

The sheer hell Chance and his pursuers put their cars through is something special in its own right. Crashing through guardrails, thundering over railroad tracks, tires rippling with the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of rubber on wood and steel. The long, boat-like lines of the cars slew through clouds of dust and slide screaming over rough concrete. The periodic cuts into Chance’s car are anything but pro forma, ranging from a shot framing Vukovich’s eye through a hole in the Impala’s rear windscreen to a close-up of Chance’s reflection in the rearview, his face bathed in velvet shadow cut by clean, bright bands of light. The pace is breakneck, but every shot feels breathtakingly complete and rich. It’s a beautiful thing reaching terminal velocity, like watching an MLB pitcher throw a Fabergé egg at ninety miles an hour.