October has suddenly become the month ofWilliam Friedkin, the legendary director who died in August at age 87.

Not only is his best-known film, “The Exorcist,” getting a national50th anniversary theatrical release, including nearly 20 theaters in the Bay Area on Sunday, Oct. 1, and Wednesday, Oct. 4, but his final film,“The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,”will debut on Paramount+ with Showtime on Friday, Oct. 6, just weeks after its world premiere at theVenice Film Festival.

In addition, his most underrated movie, “Sorcerer” (1977), plays at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission theateron Oct. 8-9.

It’s also been a big year for Friedkin’s work on home video, with distributor Kino Lorber issuing the director’s 1997 remake of “12 Angry Men,” the film that most informs “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” as an extra with the 1957 original; and a beautiful 4k restoration of the kinetic 1985 neo noir “To Live and Die in L.A.” Warner Bros. also released a new 4K restoration of “The Exorcist” on home video — the same digital transfer that will screen in theaters — earlier in September.

With “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” Friedkin helped redefine American cinema in the 1970s, as didFrancis Ford Coppola,Martin Scorsese,Steven Spielberg, Hal Ashby,Robert AltmanandTerrence Malick, among others. But what makes him distinctive, even among that meta crowd, is that he is at heart a documentarian, his original calling.

Friedkin had an obsession with details and process, which seeps into his films and makes them richer and deeper than they might otherwise have been.

采取“驱魔人”。尽管它在喘气heon of horror films, it is for long stretches not a horror film at all. It is a documentary-like character study of a conflicted priest (Jason Miller), as well as a single mother (Ellen Burstyn) who happens to be a movie star trying to raise a young daughter (Linda Blair). (Burstyn, age 90, returns to the franchise for the first time since the original in “The Exorcist: Believer,” directed by David Gordon Green, due out Friday, Oct. 6).

Based on a supposedly true story that happened in 1949, Friedkin filmed it as much as possible at the actual locations, most notably at Georgetown University, and even cast real priests in the film. By the time it gets to the exorcism, viewers know all about the Catholic church’s rules of what constitutes a spiritual invasion and the protocol for determining if an exorcism is necessary.

That clinical exactitude is present in “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” which is based on a 1953 play by Herman Wouk, about the trial of a Navy lieutenant (Jake Lacy) who assumed command of his ship because he believed his captain, Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland), was insane.

Unlike “The Caine Mutiny,” Wouk’s 1952 novel that was made as a film with Humphrey Bogart as Capt. Queeg, which also shows the events leading up to the court-martial, Wouk’s play and Friedkin’s film are set entirely in the courtroom.

Navy protocols and medical diagnoses are discussed and detailed, and the film is a fascinating dissection of moral ambiguity. It is also an example ofFriedkin’s calling card: the driven male determined to achieve his goal no matter the cost.

In this case, it’s Jason Clarke as the lieutenant’s defense counsel. If you thought Clarke was intense as the prosecutor during the security clearance hearing scenes in“Oppenheimer,”he’s even more tightly wound here.

Friedkin’s original driven man, of course, was Gene Hackman’s police detective Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection.” There are four such men, led by Roy Scheider, in “Sorcerer,” a wild movie about four crooks hiding out in a backwater South American town who accept a very risky but potentially lucrative job transporting highly explosive nitroglycerin hundreds of miles over rough terrain to a construction site.

And there are two more in “To Live and Die in L.A.”: William L. Petersen’s risk-taking Treasury agent and his target, counterfeiterWillem Dafoe. It’s a fast-moving, action-packed movie, but Friedkin still has time to indulge in a documentary-like sequence detailing the counterfeiting process.

It’s possible that Friedkin is so drawn to driven men because in his heyday he himself was one. Born and raised in Chicago, he got his start in local television and became obsessed with making a documentary about a Death Row inmate. With months to go before the execution date, Friedkin came to believe that the inmate was innocent of murder.

“The People vs. Paul Crump” — Friedkin’s first film — made its world premiere at theSan Francisco International Film Festivalin 1962 and won the event’s top prize. It attracted so much publicity that Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner commuted Crump’s sentence to life in prison, and he was eventually paroled in 1993.

Years later, Friedkin was haunted by the idea that Crump might have been guilty. Did he help free a murderer?

As Friedkin wrote in his 2013 memoir, “The Friedkin Connection”: “In 1962, I had to believe he was not. … A more troubling question for me is whether I would have made the film if I knew then he was guilty.

“I was looking for a subject to film; he was looking for a get-out-of-jail card. I don’t dwell on the question because that would mean we both gamed the system. Paul got his freedom, I got my career.”

Sounds just like a William Friedkin movie.

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com