The New Hollywood movement opened up doors for bleaker storytelling in American cinema.
Specifically, it allowed, in the wake of the Hays Code dissolving, for authority figures like cops to finally be depicted as out-and-out baddies on film.
The darker complexities of reality, where authority figures often become evildoers, could be brought to life on the silver screen.
Filmmaker William Friedkin leaned into these possibilities and then some with his 1971 feature The French Connection, while subsequent 1970s directorial efforts like The Exorcist and Sorcerer would dabble in material that would’ve been unthinkable to witness in American cinema just a decade earlier.
Friedkin’s love for capturing the grimy underbelly of humanity endured well into the 1980s when he helmed the 1985 feature To Live and Die in L.A.
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