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"The French Connection" is routinely included, along with " Bullitt ," " Diva " and " Raiders of the Lost Ark ," on the short list of movies with the greatest chase scenes of all time. What is not always remembered is what a good movie it is apart from the chase scene. It featured a great early Gene Hackman performance that won an Academy Award, and it also won Oscars for best picture, direction, screenplay and editing.

The movie is all surface, movement, violence and suspense. Only one of the characters really emerges into three dimensions: Popeye Doyle Gene Hackman, a New York narc who is vicious, obsessed and a little mad. The other characters don't emerge because there's no time for them to emerge. Things are happening too fast.

The story line hardly matters. It involves a $32 million shipment of high-grade heroin smuggled from Marseilles to New York hidden in a Lincoln Continental. A complicated deal is set up between the French people, an American money man and the Mafia. Doyle, a tough cop with a shaky reputation who busts a lot of street junkies, needs a big win to keep his career together. He stumbles on the heroin deal and pursues it with a single-minded ferocity that is frankly amoral. He isn't after the smugglers because they're breaking the law; he's after them because his job consumes him.

Director William Friedkin constructed "The French Connection" so surely that it left audiences stunned. And I don't mean that as a reviewer's cliché: It is literally true. In a sense, the whole movie is a chase. It opens with a shot of a French detective keeping the Continental under surveillance, and from then on the smugglers and the law officers are endlessly circling and sniffing each other. It's just that the chase speeds up sometimes, as in the celebrated car-train sequence.

In "Bullitt," two cars and two drivers were matched against each other at fairly equal odds. In Friedkin's chase, the cop has to weave through city traffic at 70 m.p.h. to keep up with a train that has a clear track: The odds are off-balance. And when the train's motorman dies and the train is without a driver, the chase gets even spookier: A man is matched against a machine that cannot understand risk or fear. This makes the chase psychologically more scary, in addition to everything it has going for it visually.

The movie was shot during a cold and gray New York winter, and it has a doomed, gritty look. The landscape is a waste land, and the characters are hardly alive. They move out of habit and compulsion, long after ordinary human feelings have lost the power to move them. Doyle himself is a bad cop, by ordinary standards; he harasses and brutalizes people, he is a racist, he endangers innocent people during the chase scene (which is a high-speed ego trip). But he survives. He wins, too, but that hardly matters. "The French Connection" is as amoral as its hero, as violent, as obsessed and as frightening.

The key to the chase is that it occurs in an ordinary time and place. No rules are suspended; Popeye's car is racing down streets where ordinary traffic and pedestrians can be found, and his desperation is such that we believe, at times, he is capable of running down bystanders just to win the contest. I had an opportunity at the Hawaii Film Festival in 1992 to analyze the sequence a shot at a time, using a stop-action laserdisc approach, at a seminar honoring the work of the cinematographer, Owen Roizman . He recalled the way the whole chase was painstakingly story-boarded and then broken down into shots that were possible and safe, even though actual locations were being employed. Lenses were chosen to play with distance, so that the car sometimes seemed closer to hazards than it was. But essentially, the chase looked real because its many different parts were real: A car threads through city streets, chasing an elevated train.

The other key element in the film, of course, is Hackman. He was already well known in 1971, after performances in such films as " Bonnie and Clyde ," " Downhill Racer " and " I Never Sang for My Father ." But it's probably "The French Connection" that launched his long career as a leading character sta r-- a man with the unique ability to make almost any dialogue plausible. As Popeye Doyle, he generated an almost frightening single-mindedness, a cold determination to win at all costs, which elevated the stakes in the story from a simple police cat-and-mouse chase into the acting-out of Popeye's pathology. The chase scene has, in a way, been a mixed blessing, distracting from the film's other qualities.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The French Connection (1971)

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The French Connection Reviews

Gritty, downbeat and, in Hackman’s “Popeye” Doyle, fronted by one of the most unlikely heroes that cinema had seen, this was one of the great films of Hollywood’s most creatively uncompromising period.

Full Review | Jan 27, 2024

The French Connection gives us suspense mixed with violence, and the cocktail is so volatile that you don't really care if the film is nothing more than two hours of fun in the dark.

Full Review | Oct 3, 2023

Filled with heart pounding sequences, The French Connection satisfies as a gritty crime drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 13, 2023

Embedded in the style and themes of classic film noir, The French Connection is a grim and relentless detective thriller that is celebrated as one of the most authentic films about police work (and features the greatest car chase in film history).

Full Review | Jun 8, 2023

[The film] is neither a documentary nor a grim slice of life but simply entertainment -- violent and bloody, yes, but still the kind of action and suspense stuff that kept the pulp fiction magazine alive for years and still intrigues most of us.

Full Review | May 16, 2023

The stunts are done with terrifying conviction. And Gene Hackman, savage exasperated gestures and the mad ill-assembled features of a puppet carved from packing-case wood, gives a performance of devoted, inexorable vindictiveness.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2022

It's not what I want not because it fails but because of what it is. It is, I think, what we once feared mass entertainment might become: jolts for jocks.

Full Review | Jul 29, 2022

If you want a dog-eared guide book, stuffed with authentic detail, to the work of the New York narcotics squad, this is your film. It certainly is mine. Every element coalesces into a hard bunch of excitement you can't imagine belter done.

Full Review | Feb 10, 2022

Written by Ernest Tidyman and directed by William Friedkin, It has exactly the kind of ruthless professionalism and headlong pace one ands in the American cinema at its best.

Too much ado about drugs.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 17, 2022

The French Connection helps bring about a new era in filmmaking--much thanks to Friedkin and company--and cinema would never be the same.

Full Review | Oct 8, 2021

Director William Friedkin has carefully contrived the intense action of this film to jolt you, to assault your nervous system. He is undeniably successful.

Full Review | Apr 15, 2021

Friedkin has a gripping story to tell and wastes little time with diversionary devices.

No matter how hard I try to control my enthusiasm, I cannot help thinking that The French Connection is the most exciting, most stylish -- in fact, the best piece of cops-and-robbers cinema since the silents.

Apart from telling a pretty exciting story with great mechanical skill, Friedkin examines the cop and his prey with a sceptic's eye.

Quite efficient but pretty unremarkable.

One of the most exciting and breathtaking chase films ever made.

Director William Friedkin, whose previous efforts were The The Night Raided Minsky's and The Boys in the Band proves expert at keeping the customers on the edge of their seats by automating comedic moments with moments of violence.

Go to The French Connection for edge of the seat entertainment, but don't expect any moral to rationalize your fun. It's a rip-roaring, bloody bash of a movie and it needs no messagizing to justify its existence.

Connection tells a straight story, has some respect for its viewer's intelligence, and maintains dramatic situations that build with increasing tension from one scene to another.

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The french connection, common sense media reviewers.

Classic cop film with frequent profanity, violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Though it's certainly a classic film, there really

The protagonists are antiheroes, police detectives

A man is shot in the face at close range. Dead bod

A police detective finds his partner in his apartm

Frequent profanity. A police detective tells his p

Characters drink and smoke cigarettes. A bag of he

Parents need to know that The French Connection is a 1971 movie that is filled with frequent profanity (including "f--k"), violence, and questionable behavior. The two lead characters, NYPD detectives, are in more of an antihero vein: racists, drinkers, smokers, and womanizers who engage in law-enforcement…

Positive Messages

Though it's certainly a classic film, there really are no positive messages to take away from it.

Positive Role Models

The protagonists are antiheroes, police detectives who, while fighting crime, also harbor racist tendencies, drink, smoke, and womanize.

Violence & Scariness

A man is shot in the face at close range. Dead bodies covered in blood are inside a car in the aftermath of an accident. Gunfights. Knife fights. A police officer is killed in a subway.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A police detective finds his partner in his apartment handcuffed to his bed after sex. A woman's naked buttocks are shown.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent profanity. A police detective tells his partner, "Never trust a ["N" word]." Variations of "f--k." "S--t."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink and smoke cigarettes. A bag of heroin is given a "heroin-purity test."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The French Connection is a 1971 movie that is filled with frequent profanity (including "f--k"), violence, and questionable behavior. The two lead characters, NYPD detectives, are in more of an antihero vein: racists, drinkers, smokers, and womanizers who engage in law-enforcement practices that don't seem entirely by the book. One of the detectives tells the other "Never trust a ["N" word]." In two instances of violence, a character is shot in the face at close range, and two bodies are in a car covered in blood in the aftermath of an accident. There are drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. A police detective finds his partner in his apartment handcuffed to his bed after sex. A woman's naked buttocks are shown. Overall, though, it's undeniably one of the all-time great films and one that set the standard for cop movies for decades to come. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (5)

Based on 3 parent reviews

What's the Story?

Two tough NYC police detectives, "Popeye" Doyle ( Gene Hackman ) and Buddy Russo ( Roy Scheider ) stumble upon a gigantic heroin-smuggling ring that connects the New York mafia to Marseilles, France. They discover who the "French Connection" is -- a suave gentleman named Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) who manages to elude Doyle and Russo's pursuit. But when one of Charnier's hit men tries to murder Doyle, Doyle goes above and beyond traditional law-enforcement techniques, determined to stop Charnier and shut down his heroin operation.

Is It Any Good?

Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider are unforgettable as cop partners using pretty much any means necessary to stop a large shipment of heroin from coming into New York City from France. The action is unrelenting, and the car chase scene alone is a masterpiece in filmmaking. The French Connection set the standard for cop-themed dramas for decades to come, and it's easy to see why. The dialogue, action, and story combine to create a dark, gritty, and cynical masterwork from director William Friedkin, as perfect an example as any of the dark brilliance of so many great 1970s-era urban-themed films.

Based on a true story, and the winner of multiple Oscars, THE FRENCH CONNECTION is undeniably a classic that has transcended its gritty 1971 release to remain not only a great film but also a highly influential one. By graying the lines between "good guys" and "bad guys," one can see the influence of The French Connection on contemporary classic cop dramas such as The Wire .

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the concept of the antihero. What does that mean, and how do these lead characters embody this idea?

At the end of the film, the filmmakers seem to be making a comment on the criminal justice system. What is that comment, and do you agree or disagree with the message?

Does the violence in the film seem necessary to convey a sense of realism, or does it seem gratuitous?

Movie Details

• In theaters : October 9, 1971
• On DVD or streaming : June 3, 2022
• Cast : Gene Hackman , Roy Scheider , Fernando Rey
• Director : William Friedkin
• Inclusion Information : Latino actors
• Studio : Twentieth Century Fox
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Adventures
• Run time : 104 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• Award : Academy Award
• Last updated : March 27, 2024

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The French Connection

By Robert B. Frederick

Robert B. Frederick

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So many changes have been made in Robin Moore’s taut, factual reprise of one of the biggest narcotics hauls in New York police history that only the skeleton remains, but producer Philip D’Antoni and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman have added enough fictional flesh to provide director William Friedkin and his overall topnotch cast with plenty of material, and they make the most of it.

While, ideally, the story calls for the oldtime Louis De Rochemont documentary handling, the flashy treatment it gets, a la D’Antoni’s “Bullitt,” may be more attractive to today’s less critically demanding market. And, inasmuch as many of the criminal elements originally involved in the caper got little or no punishment for their actions, legal clearances were probably too involved to permit greater authenticity. Nevertheless, there are a few fillips in the film that appear gratuitous and less important to the plot than the space given them, such as the heavy stress on narcotics roundups in Harlem with two white detectives terrorizing numerous black addicts just to convey the impression that a shortage of available dope existed. There is also a meaningless killing (albeit, accidentally) of a quarrelsome F.B.I. agent by one of the detectives.

Popular on Variety

Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider are very believable as two hard-nosed narcotics officers who, by accident, stumble onto what turned out to be the biggest narcotics haul to date (until the recent Jaguar cache). As suave and cool as the two cops are overworked, tired and mean, Fernando Rey makes an auspicious debut in a major American film as the French mastermind of the almost-perfect plan.

Friedkin, who’s proven himself in both comedy and comedy-drama, includes a great elevated train-automobile chase sequence that becomes almost too tense to be enjoyable, especially for New Yorkers who are familiar with such activities.

Shot entirely in and around New York, with the exception of a couple of brief expositional location scenes in Marseilles and one in Washington, Owen Ruizman’s fluid color camera explores most of Manhattan and much of Brooklyn without prettifying the backgrounds. Actual locales have been changed frequently–the nightclub (the Copacabana in the book) is a fictional one with a Supremes-like trio, The Three Degrees, doing a turn; the Westbury Hotel gets a lot of prominence when it was the Victoria in fact. Jerry Greenberg has edited things down to a very taut 104 minutes.

In lesser roles but making excellent impressions, Tony LoBianco is an over-ambitious young Mafiaite (the film never uses the term); Harold Gary is the Jewish criminal who finances the caper; Marcel (“Z”) Bozzuffi is great as Rey’s kill-happy assistant; Frederic De Pasquale is Devereaux, the French tv personality conned into shipping the dope-laden car around which the story turns. All the bit parts are highly professional.

There’s a big market for a good fast film such as “French Connection,” but the high level of violence and frequently-used obscene language have earned it an R rating, which will limit its success unless there’s an attempt to do certain amount of cleaning. Unfortunately, this seems next to impossible.

1971: Best Picture, Director, Actor (Gene Hackman), Adapted Screenplay, Editing.

Nominations: Best Supp. Actor (Roy Scheider), Cinematography, Sound

• Production: 20th Century-Fox/D'Antoni. Director William Friedkin; Producer Philip D'Antoni; Screenplay Ernest Tidyman.
• Crew: Camera (De Luxe Celor),Owen Roizman; executive producer, G. David Schine; music, composed and conducted by Don Ellis; art director, Ben Kazaskow; set decorator, Ed Garzero; sound, Chris Newman, Theodore Soderberg, special effects, Sass Bedig; asst. Sonny Grosso; film editor, Jerry Greenberg; asst. directors, William C. Gerrity, Terry Donnelly. Reviewed at Loews State II, N.Y., Oct 4, '71, (MPAA Rating-R). Running Time: 104. MINS.
• With: Jimmy Doyle - Gene Hackman Alain Charnier - Fernando Rey Buddy Russo - Roy Scheider Sal Boca - Tony LoBianco Pierre Nicoli - Marcel Bozzuffi Devereaux - Frederic De Pasquale Mulderig - Bill Hickman Marie Charnier - Ann Rebbot Weinstock - Harold Gary Angie Boca - Arlene Farber Simonson - Eddie Egan La Valle - Andre Ernotte Klein - Sonny Grosso Chemist - Pat McDermott Drug Pusher - Alan Weeks The Three Degrees - The Three Degrees

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Director: William Friedkin Writer: Ernest Tidyman Stars: Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider and Fernando Rey.

Synopsis: New York City cop Doyle and his partner are trying to bust a drug cartel based in France. Albeit short-tempered, Doyle is a dedicated cop whose nemesis, Alain Charnier, is too polished for a criminal.

There is something magical that happens when you look back at classic cinema years after its release, the way they age over time only adds to their brilliance. I was excited about looking back at this film 50 years on because it is a technical joy and more exciting than any film I’ve watched in the past 20 years. Hailing from 1971 (the 70s had such good cinema) Hackman delivers with one of his most memorable roles – the first of his two Oscar wins – as the dedicated, albeit brash, New York detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle – nicknames don’t get much better. Hackman is surely one of the greatest actors of all time (no bias by any means), mastering the many gimmicks that contribute to a member of law enforcement – he is electric in this film. Roy Scheider is also superb as his partner (his finest role next to Jaws), more level-headed than the uncouth Doyle, but still very stern and effective.

To say this film was a success would be an understatement, it swept multiple awards at that year’s Oscars, including best director for William Friedkin. However, the travesty for me was that it didn’t win best cinematography, it is the standout of many standouts. There are certain scenes and certain framing techniques where you just sit back and admire its art form – simple yet stunning – as well as that rough and extremely edgy camera work that adds to the grittiness of the story and the characters.

In a star-studded career littered with iconic films and performances, surely this is Hackman’s most defining role? The Conversation, The Poseidon Adventure, Unforgiven, are just some of the memorable roles Hackman has graced us with, but Popeye is him and Hackman is Popeye, they are one of the same, manifesting as one of cinemas greatest pairings. I’ll tell you one thing as well; this was my Grandad’s favorite film from his favorite actor – I can tell the old man had taste – no wonder I hold The French Connection in such high esteem.

The French Connection revolves around New York City cop “Popeye” Doyle and his partner “Cloudy” Russo (Schneider) as they are trying to uncover a drug cartel in France that has been supplying heroin to the city. Doyle is short tempered but incredibly dedicated at tracking down the mastermind behind the imported drugs, one Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), Doyle’s self-titled nemesis and a man as slick as they come. Doyle and Russo spend weeks following various leads, establishing wire taps, just trying to discover where the drugs are coming in and who is involved locally. There is an intense noir feel attached to the film, with a cold blue color palate featuring quite predominantly throughout.

The film’s action consists of various games of cat and mouse; incredibly intense tailing segments all played out at walking pace – I couldn’t get enough of it. The way in which the framing accelerates these sequences is exhilarating; with the cops hiding behind every corner, jostling for different places of concealment, it is so fluid and natural. Never has a film sequence involving a man following another man been so exceptional, so lively, so exciting, and that is down to Owen Roizman’s cinematography skills. The score is sharp as well at times, providing an intense build-up and then a soothing exit and then on to the next scene – this really is a film ahead of its time.

Doyle and Russo begin to close in on Charnier (or so they think) before Charnier’s hitman takes it upon himself to have a pop at old Popeye, which leads to one of the most famous car chase sequences in cinema history, filmed on a very busy street as well by all accounts – the idea of which wouldn’t even be considered today. It has it all: gunshots, bad driving, train crashes, and a climactic ending – I’ve got hot sweats just thinking about it. With the police chief breathing down their necks, Doyle and Russo must salvage any information they have and attempt one final bust on Charnier, will they capture the elusive Frenchman, or has time ran out for the crime fighting duo, the ending is one we should all know by now.

Man, I just love classic cinema like this, it can be even more special when watching it from a present-day point of view; you appreciate its art form more, its robustness, and how it contrasts to today’s cinema. The French Connection is rightly in many a list of the greatest films ever made; it is an era defining film and a stylistic anomaly, from the acting to the camera work, to the editing (I didn’t even mention the brilliant editing) this film has a little bit of everything, it is grittier than a freshly tarmacked road and will leave you wanting more – it is a good job they did make a sequel, and not a bad one either by the way. They just don’t make cinema like this anymore, which is a travesty – take me back to that golden era of film, the magical 70s.

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The French Connection: shock of the old

This year, as every year, there have been some big anniversary rereleases. The 1981 Ivan Passer movie Cutter's Way has just been dusted off, Kubrick's 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange was treated to a big retrospective showcase at Cannes this year, soon Basil Dearden's Victim (1961) is to be revived at BFI Southbank in London as part of a Dirk Bogarde season, and Alain Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad (1961) has resurfaced.

I staged my own "anniversary" rewatching this week of a movie I hadn't seen in many years: the last time was on TV decades ago. It is William Friedkin's The French Connection, now 40 years old, based on a true story, and starring Gene Hackman as detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle, a driven New York cop who wears a hat that makes him look like some sort of hip jazz musician and whose intuitive street sense allows him to nose out the secret players in a colossal heroin import operation, bringing the drugs into New York from Marseille.

What an experience it is to see it again, a movie whose vivid evocation of New York bears comparison to Scorsese but which I now realise I remember chiefly from one single scene. The gangsters employ a "Chemist" – a small role comparable to the gun-dealing "Easy Andy" from Scorsese's Taxi Driver. This is a smart-mouthed, bespectacled individual whose job is to test the drugs before they buy, and is by implication paid from the wares themselves. He uses a complex chemical kit including a thermometer in which the mercury rises with the purity. (Is that kit genuine? Or did Friedkin dream it up?) "Eighty-nine percent pure junk," the Chemist finally pronounces, "if the rest is like this, you'll be dealing on this load for two years."

To watch The French Connection now is to experience the shock of the old: a lost world of the city, and a lost style of film-making. For a start, there is that poster image taken from the climax of the famous subway v car chase – Doyle shoots someone in the back as the man reaches the stop of a staircase, and his grimacing victim flings his arms out at the moment of death. It is a distinctive image, but eccentric, asymmetric, and utterly anti-heroic: the hero? The guy indistinctly in the background? And he's shooting someone in the back? Surely not! It's the sort of image that would never get used as a film poster today. A poster for The French Connection now would have the faces of Hackman and his partner Russo (Roy Scheider) sweatily to the fore, with a gun or two, and the automobiles in the background.

In the opening reel, the movie socks us with another scene that could never happen in 2011, or not without a multitude of ironising tics to deflect its potential for offence. Popeye and Russo storm into a black bar and harangue and slap around the customers, demanding answers. And when Popeye gets back to the station house, he drops the N bomb. The modern audience nervously asks itself: where is the black police chief to balance this? The black judge? Or maybe a black cop whose tough integrity and professionalism Doyle can come, finally, apologetically, to respect? Nowhere.

In one scene, Doyle and Russo take their suspect and give him a brutal working over in one of New York's vacant lots – a feature of the era – burnt out waste-grounds, sometimes large, that Tom Wolfe in his 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities called urban "gloamings" and which Malcolm Gladwell, in the chapter on broken-window theories in his 2000 book The Tipping Point, said were the key breeding grounds for crime.

A modern Hollywood action thriller like this would need to show redemption for Doyle. For example, the precise explanation for his nickname would be an opportunity for some gentle backstory comedy, and meet the all-important need for him to be a sympathetic character. Not in 1971. His name is Popeye. That's it.

One of his resentful colleagues, nettled at the chief's indulgence of Doyle, furiously remarks that these hunches of Doyle's once got a good cop killed. Again – a modern audience, schooled in modern screenplay verities, is primed for a big revelation somewhere before the big finale. Who was this good cop? Does Doyle, for all his bluster, feel desperately guilty? Will nailing the "French Connection" bad guys make up for it and bring Doyle redemption? Er, not exactly: the final moments of The French Connection are a powerful, even magnificent repudiation of the modern piety of redemption and sympathy. It is a stunningly nihilist ending, one to set alongside Polanski's Chinatown.

Perhaps most striking of all is the leisured, unhurried pace of The French Connection. It is fully one hour before gunshots are fired. There are many scenes in which Doyle simply cruises around New York, searching, brooding; these, to me, evoke the city as powerfully as Mean Streets or Taxi Driver. The details are lovingly recorded: sometimes it seems as if we are watching a documentary by the Maysles brothers. And the ghostly, ambient honk of car horns, sometimes fluttering a little on the soundtrack, say 1971 like nothing else.

Having said that, a lot of The French Connection feels contemporary. The long surveillance scenes, in which we watch the shadowy mobster coming in and out of his "front" operation – a low-rent diner – accompanied by Doyle's mumbling speculative commentary, anticipates the modern world of police work, as well as Hackman's own role in Coppola's The Conversation. And in their rackety, prehistoric way, Doyle and Russo look like the forebears of McNulty and Bunk in The Wire. Moreover, watching The French Connection again brings home to you how much the movie influenced James Gray's dramas The Yards (1999) and We Own the Night (2007).

This weekend, you could do a lot worse than get the DVD out and treat yourself to your own special 40-years-on rerelease of The French Connection.

• William Friedkin

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The French Connection (1971) | Review by Pauline Kael

• January 18, 2018

Urban Gothic

by Pauline Kael

When New York’s Mayor Lindsay began his efforts to attract the movie-production business, it probably didn’t occur to him or his associates that they were ushering in a new movie age of nightmare realism. The Los Angeles area was selected originally for the sunshine and so that the movie-business hustlers—patent-violators who were pirating inventions as well as anything else they could get hold of—could slip over the border fast. As it turned out, however, California had such varied vegetation that it could be used to stand in for most of the world, and there was space to build whatever couldn’t be found. But New York City is always New York City; it can’t be anything else, and, with practically no studios for fakery, the movie companies use what’s really here, so the New York-made movies have been set in Horror City. Although recent conflicts between the producers and the New York unions seem to have ended this Urban Gothic period,* the New York-made movies have provided a permanent record of the city in breakdown. I doubt if at any other time in American movie history there has been such a close relationship between the life on the screen and the life of a portion of the audience. Los Angeles-made movies were not about Los Angeles; often they were not about any recognizable world. But these recent movies are about New York, and the old sentimentalities are almost impossible here—physically impossible, because the city gives them the lie. (I’m thinking of such movies as Klute, Little Murders , The Anderson Tapes , Greetings , The Landlord, Where’s Poppa?, Midnight Cowboy , Harry Kellerman, Diary of a Mad Housewife , No Way to Treat a Lady, Shaft, Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Steagle , Cry Uncle , The Owl and the Pussycat, The Panic in Needle Park,  Bananas , and the forthcoming Born to Win.) The city of New York has helped American movies grow up; it has also given movies a new spirit of nervous, anxious hopelessness, which is the true spirit of New York. It is literally true that when you live in New York you no longer believe that the garbage will ever be gone from the streets or that life will ever be sane and orderly.

The movies have captured the soul of this city in a way that goes beyond simple notions of realism. The panhandler in the movie who jostles the hero looks just like the one who jostles you as you leave the movie theatre; the police sirens in the movie are screaming outside; the hookers and junkies in the freak show on the screen are indistinguishable from the ones in the freak show on the streets. Famous New York put-on artists and well-known street people are incorporated in the movies; sometimes they are in the movie the­atre, dressed as they are in the movie, and sometimes you leave the theatre and see them a few blocks away, just where they were photographed. There’s a sense of carnival about this urban-crisis city; everyone seems to be dressed for a mad ball. Screams in the theatre at Halloween movies used to be a joke, signals for laughter and applause, because nobody believed in the terror on the screen. The midnight showings of horror films now go on all year round, and the screams are no longer pranks. Horror stories and brutal melodramas concocted for profit are apparently felt on a deeper level than might have been supposed. People don’t laugh or applaud when there’s a scream; they try to ignore the sound. It is assumed that the person yelling is stoned and out of control, or crazy and not to be trifled with—he may want an excuse to blow off steam, he may have a knife or a gun. It is not uncommon now for fights and semi-psychotic episodes to take place in the theatres, especially when the movies being played are shockers. Audiences for these movies in the Times Square area and in the Village are highly volatile. Probably the unstable, often dazed members of the audience are particularly susceptible to the violence and tension on the screen; maybe crowds now include a certain number of people who simply can’t stay calm for two hours. But whether the movies bring it out in the audience or whether the particular audiences that are attracted bring it into the theatre, it’s there in the theatre, particularly at late shows, and you feel that the violence on the screen may at any moment touch off violence in the theatre. The audience is explosively live. It’s like being at a prizefight or a miniature Altamont.

Horror is very popular in Horror City—old horror films and new ones. The critics were turned off by the madness of The Devils; the audiences were turned on by it. They wanted the benefits of the sexual pathology of religious hysteria: bloody tortures, burning flesh, nuns violated on altars, lewd nuns stripping and orgying, and so on. Almost all the major movie companies are now, like the smaller ones, marginal businesses. The losses of the American film industry since 1968 are calculated at about five hundred and twenty-five million dollars. Besides Disney, the only company that shows profits is A.I.P.—the producers of ghouls-on-wheels schlock pictures, who are now also turning out movies based on Gothic “classics.” I don’t believe that people are going to shock and horror films because of a need to exorcise their fears; that’s probably a fable. I think they’re going for entertainment, and I don’t see how one can ignore the fact that the kind of entertainment that attracts them now is often irrational and horrifyingly brutal. A few years ago, The Dirty Dozen turned the audience on so high that there was yelling in the theatre and kicking at the seats. And now an extraordinarily well-made new thriller gets the audience sky-high and keeps it up there —The French Connection , directed by William Friedkin, which is one of the most “New York” of all the recent New York movies. It’s also probably the best-made example of what trade reporters sometimes refer to as “the cinema du zap.”

How’s this for openers? A peaceful day in Marseille. A flic strolls into a boulangerie, comes out carrying a long French bread, and strolls home. As he walks into his own entranceway, a waiting figure in a leather coat sticks out an arm with a .45 and shoots him in the face and then in the torso. The assassin picks up the bread, breaks off a piece to munch, and tosses the remainder back onto the corpse. That’s the first minute of The French Connection. The film then jumps to New York and proceeds through chases, pistol-whippings, slashings, beatings, murders, snipings, and more chases for close to two hours. The script, by Ernest Tidyman (who wrote Shaft), is based on the factual account by Robin Moore (of The Green Berets ) of the largest narcotics haul in New York police history until the recent Jaguar case. The producer, Philip D’Antoni, also produced Bullitt , and the executive producer was G. David Schine, of Cohn and Schine. That’s not a creative team, it’s a consortium. The movie itself is pretty businesslike. There are no good guys in this harsh new variant of cops-and-robbers; The French Connection features the latest-model sadistic cop, Popeye (Gene Hackman). It’s undeniably gripping, slam-bang, fast, charged with suspense, and so on—a mixture of Razzia and Z , and hyped up additionally with a television-thriller-style score that practically lays you out all by itself. At one point, just in case we might lose interest if we didn’t have our minute-to-minute injections of excitement, the camera cuts from the street conversation of a few cops to show us the automobile smashup that brought them to the scene, and we are treated to two views of the bloody faces of fresh corpses. At first, we’re confused as to who the victims are, and we stare at them thinking they must be characters in the movie. It takes a few seconds to realize that they bear no relation whatsoever to the plot.

It’s no wonder that The French Connection is a hit, but what in hell is it? It uses eighty-six separate locations in New York City—so many that it has no time for carnival atmosphere: it crashes light through. I suppose the answer we’re meant to give is that it’s an image of the modern big city as Inferno, and that Popeye is an Existential hero, but the movie keeps zapping us. Though The French Connection achieves one effect through timing and humor (when the French Mr. Big, played by Fernando Rey, outwits Popeye in the subway station by using his silver-handled umbrella to open the train doors) most of its effects are of the Psycho -derived blast-in-the-face variety. Even the expert pacing is achieved by somewhat questionable means; the ominous music keeps tightening the screws and heating things up. The noise of New York already has us tense. The movie is like an aggravated case of New York: it raises this noise level to produce the kind of painful tension that is usually described as almost unbearable suspense. But it s the same kind of suspense you feel when someone outside your window keeps pushing down on the car horn and you think the blaring sound is going to drive you out of your skull. This horn routine is, in fact, what the cop does throughout the longest chase sequence. The movie’s suspense is magnified by the sheer pounding abrasiveness of its means; you don’t have to be an artist or be original or ingenious to work on the raw nerves of an audience this way—you just have to be smart and brutal. The high-pressure methods that one could possibly accept in Z because they were tools used to try to show the audience how a Fascist conspiracy works are used as ends in themselves. Despite the dubious methods, the purpose of the brutality in Z was moral—it was to make you hate brutality. Here you love it, you wait for it—that’s all there is. I know that there are many people—and very intelligent people, too—who love this kind of fast-action movie, who say that this is what movies do best and that this is what they really want when they go to a movie. Probably many of them would agree with everything I’ve said but will still love the movie. Well, it’s not what I want, and the fact that Friedkin has done a sensational job of direction just makes that clearer. It’s not what I want not because it fails (it doesn’t fail) but because of what it is. It is, I think, what we once feared mass entertainment might become: jolts for jocks. There’s nothing in the movie that you enjoy thinking over afterward—nothing especially clever except the timing of the subway-door-and-umbrella sequence. Every other effect in the movie—even the climactic car-versus-runaway-elevated-train chase—is achieved by noise, speed, and brutality.

On its own terms, the picture makes few mistakes, though there is one small but conspicuous one. A good comic contrast of drug dealers dining at their ease in a splendid restaurant while the freezing, hungry cops who are tailing them curse in a cold doorway and finally eat a hunk of pizza is spoiled because, for the sake of a composition with the two groups in the same shot, the police have been put where the diners could obviously see them. It is also a mistake, I think, that at the end the picture just stops instead of coming to a full period. The sloppy plotting, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to matter; it’s amazing how much implausibility speed and brutality can conceal. Hitch­cock’s thrillers were full of holes, but you were having too good a time to worry about them; The French Connection is full of holes, but mostly you’re too stunned to notice them. There’s no logic in having the Lincoln Continental that has been shipped from France with the heroin inside abandoned on a back street at night rather than parked snugly in the garage of its owner’s hotel; it appears to be on the street just so the narcotics agents can spot it and grab it. There’s an elaborate sequence of an auction at an automobile graveyard which serves no clear purpose. And if you ever think about it you’ll realize that you have no idea who that poor devil was who got shot in the overture, or why. For all the movie tells you, it may have been for his French bread. But you really know what it’s all in there for. It’s the same reason you get those juicy pictures of the corpses: zaps.

Listen to Popeye’s lines and you can learn the secrets of zap realism. A crude writer can give his crummy, cheap jokes to a crude character, and the jokes really pay off. The rotten jokes get laughs and also show how ugly the character’s idea of humor is. Popeye risks his life repeatedly and performs fabulously dangerous actions, yet the movie debases him in every possible way. Hackman has turned himself into a modern Ted Healy type—porkpie hat, sneaky-piggy eyes, and a gut-first walk, like Robert Morley preceded by his belly coming toward us in those BOAC “Visit Britain” commercials. Popeye (the name is out of Faulkner, I assume) has a filthy mouth and a complete catalogue of race prejudices, plus some “cute” fetishes; e.g., he cases girls who wear boots. He is the anti-hero carried to a new lumpenprole low—the mean cop who used to figure on the fringes of melodrama (as in Sweet Swell of Success) moved to the center. Sam Spade might play dirty, but he had a code and he had personal style; even Bullitt, a character contrived to hold the chases and bloodshed together, was a super-cop with style and feelings. This movie turns old clichés into new clichés by depriving the central figure of any attractive qualities. Popeye is insanely callous, a shrewd bully who enjoys terrorizing black junkies, and the film includes raids on bars that are gratuitous to the story line just to show what a subhuman son of a bitch he is. The information is planted early that his methods have already cost the life of a police officer, and at the end this plant has its pat payoff when he accidentally shoots an F.B.I. agent, and the movie makes the point that he doesn’t show the slightest remorse. The movie presents him as the most ruthlessly lawless of characters and yet—here is where the basic amorality comes through—shows that this is the kind of man it takes to get the job done. It’s the vicious bastard who gets the results. Popeye, the lowlifer who makes Joe or Archie sound like Daniel Ellsberg, is a cop the way the movie Patton was a general. When Popeye walks into a bar and harasses blacks, part of the audience can say, “That’s a real pig,” and another part of the audience can say, “That’s the only way to deal with those people. Waltz around with them and you get nowhere.”

I imagine that the people who put this movie together just naturally think in this commercially convenient double way. This right-wing, left-wing, take-your-choice cynicism is total commercial opportunism passing itself off as an Existential view. And maybe that’s why Popeye’s determination to find the heroin is not treated unequivocally as socially useful but is made obsessive. Popeye’s low character is used to make the cops-and-robbers melodrama superficially modern by making it meaningless; his brutality serves to demonstrate that the cops are no better than the crooks. In personal style and behavior, he is, in fact, deliberately shown as worse than the crooks, yet since he’s the cop with the hunches that pay off, the only cop who gets results, the movie can be seen as a way of justifying police brutality. At the end, a Z -style series of titles comes on to inform us that the dealers who were caught got light sentences or none at all. The purpose of giving us this information is also probably double: to tell us to get tougher judges and to make tougher laws, and to provide an ironic coda showing that Popeye’s efforts were really futile. A huge haul of heroin was destroyed, but the movie doesn’t bother to show us that—to give a man points for anything is unfashionable. The series of titles is window-dressing anyway. The only thing that this movie believes in is giving the audience jolts, and you can feel the raw, primitive response in the theatre. This picture says Popeye is a brutal son of a bitch who gets the dirty job done. So is the picture.

The New Yorker, October 30, 1971

*After two and a half months, the live major companies signed an agreement with the unions and production in New York was resumed.

• More: Movie reviews , Pauline Kael , The French Connec­tion (1971) , The New Yorker , William Friedkin

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The French Connection

• A pair of NYPD detectives in the Narcotics Bureau stumble onto a heroin smuggling ring based in Marseilles, but stopping them and capturing their leaders proves an elusive goal.
• William Friedkin's gritty police drama portrays two tough New York City cops trying to intercept a huge heroin shipment coming from France. An interesting contrast is established between 'Popeye' Doyle, a short-tempered alcoholic bigot who is nevertheless a hard-working and dedicated police officer, and his nemesis Alain Charnier, a suave and urbane gentleman who is nevertheless a criminal and one of the largest drug suppliers of pure heroin to North America. During the surveillance and eventual bust, Friedkin provides one of the most gripping and memorable car chase sequences ever filmed. — Tad Dibbern <[email protected]>
• Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle and Buddy Russo are Brooklyn-based NYPD narcotics detectives who often work undercover. They make a lot of arrests, but they are all of small time users, busting who which makes no dent in the NYC drug trade. While the two are out for drinks one night at a club, Popeye sees a table of people which to him doesn't seem right, the people who include an unknown "big spender" out of his league next to known organized drug criminals. Just for fun, they decide to tail the big spender and his girl. Beyond the couple's obvious suspicious activity, they find out that they are Sal and Angie Boca, small time crooks who own and operate a Brooklyn newsstand/luncheonette. Based on other evidence including information from one of their snitches of rumors of a major drug shipment entering New York, Popeye and Buddy get the official albeit reluctant OK from their superior to surveil Sal to find if he leads them to the incoming drug shipment, that surveillance including authorization for wiretaps. That surveillance does show that Sal is connected and that the probable persons selling the drugs are two Frenchmen having recently arrived in the city. It then becomes a game of cat and mouse as Sal and the two Frenchmen, Alain Charnier and his muscle Pierre Nicoli, are aware that they are being tailed, the two Frenchmen in particular who are willing to go to any lengths to protect their investment, estimated street worth of approximately $32 million. Popeye, Buddy and their third, Mulderig, who has an antagonistic relationship with Popeye due to Mulderig's belief that Popeye's police work led to the death of a colleague, have to learn when the lead is not the three men but the locale of the drugs themselves. — Huggo
• Popeye Doyle and Buddy Russo get wind of a big shipment of heroin and begin a tail of the suspects, and their French Connection, two French nationals who are the european link. As money troubles begin for the hoods they decide to kill Popeye and Buddy to give them enough room to bring in the heroin. A combination of police procedural and action/car chase. — John Vogel <[email protected]>
• Police partners Doyle and Russo put a candy store under surveillance based on a hunch that something fishy was going on. Eventually it turns out that the proprietors are involved in one of the biggest narcotics smuggling rings on either side of the Atlantic, and the cops go to work. — Philip Brubaker <[email protected]>
• In December 1970 in Marseilles, France, a plainclothes policeman is observing former longshoreman turned entrepreneur Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) chatting with some unsavory types. Charnier is being tailed by the undercover cop because he is a kingpin in smuggling heroin overseas - a fact that costs the cop his life when he later returns home and is shot in the face by Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi), Charnier's henchman. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, New York City, a corner Santa is chatting with some children outside a seedy bar while a hot dog vendor completes a transaction. The Santa is Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) and the vendor is his partner, Detective Salvatore Russo (Roy Scheider), whom Doyle nicknames "Cloudy." The two narcotics cops are staking out the bar in hope of finding a pusher named Willie (Alan Weeks). When Popeye sees Willie in the bar passing some drugs to a companion, he starts singing to the children, his signal to Cloudy. Cloudy enters the bar and grabs Willie's buddy. Willie sees the commotion and suddenly flees outside, with Popeye and Cloudy in hot pursuit. They corner him in an alley and Willie slashes Cloudy's arm with a hidden knife and runs. The cops chase him on foot to a deserted lot where he trips and falls and is beaten by both cops before Russo implores Doyle to stop. Once the two cops calm down they confusingly interrogate Willie, trying to get information on his drug connection. In France, Charnier finishes a day overseeing dock work and drives home to his seaside villa and his young trophy wife (Ann Rebbot), who obviously has expensive tastes. The two exchange gifts for their upcoming trip to the US. Charnier later meets his gunman Nicoli at a rendezvous point for an acquaintance of Charnier, TV personality Henri Devereaux (Frédéric de Pasquale). Devereaux is traveling to the US to make a film and has decided to aid Charnier's smuggling effort because he needs money. Nicoli believes involving Devereaux is a mistake, but is reassured by Charnier. In NYC, Popeye and Cloudy sign off for the night and Popeye takes his reluctant partner to a nightclub called The Chez. Popeye notices one table in particular, populated by known narcotics connections who are being entertained by a free-spending young man whom Popeye describes as a "greaser." Popeye smells a drug deal underway and persuades Cloudy to help him tail the greaser and his companion, a big-haired blonde. Throughout the night they tail the two, watching them drop off a suitcase in Little Italy and then switch cars early the next morning from an attractive coupe to a beat-up sedan. They then drive to a candy store/luncheonette, "Sal and Angie's", in a working-class area of Brooklyn. Peering inside as the couple prepares to open for the day, Popeye and Cloudy notice that the blonde is now a brunette, having worn a wig the night before. Realizing they are on to something, the two cops stake out the candy store for a week using audio surveillance. Cloudy poses as a photographer to question Angie. Combing records they find that the greaser is Salvatore "Sal" Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) and his wife is Angie (Arlene Farber). The candy store's income could not explain Sal's free-spending ways. The posh coupe is owned by Angie while the beat-up sedan is owned by Sal's brother Lou (Benny Marino), a garbageman in training at a facility on Ward's Island in the East River. All three Bocas have criminal records. The candy store is regularly visited by unsavory types from New Jersey, and Sal makes numerous trips to an expensive condo in Manhattan at which lives lawyer Joel Weinstock (Harold Gary), a known drug financier who bankrolled a heroin shipment from Mexico. Popeye and Cloudy raid a junk-house bar. One Afro-haired patron (Al Fann) talks back at Popeye and is hauled into a men's room to be beaten up - actually cover so Popeye can debrief his informant, who reveals that a big shipment is due within a few weeks that will satisfy everyone in the city. In order to make the ruse look convincing, Popeye punches his colleague in the jaw, a bit too enthusiastically. Popeye's boss, Walt Simonson (Eddie Egan, the real-life inspiration for Popeye Doyle), is reluctant to let the two cops continue with their investigation of Boca, pointedly reminding Popeye of a previous case where his hunches backfired. But with Joel Weinstock, whom the police have long wanted to arrest, potentially involved, Simonson relents and goes to court for a wiretap on Boca's house and candy store. The federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) now becomes involved and assigns Agents Bill Mulderig (Bill Hickman) and Bill Klein (Sonny Grosso, the real-life inspiration for Cloudy Russo), who've worked with Popeye before; Popeye and Mulderig are at constant loggerheads because Mulderig blames Popeye for the death of a policeman in a previous case and doesn't believe Popeye's hunches to begin with. Charnier, Nicoli, and Devereaux arrive in NYC and Devereaux brings with him Charnier's Lincoln, signed for in Charnier's stead. They speak fair English, but nonetheless have an interpreter, La Valle (Andre Ernotte), with them. La Valle escorts Charnier to a police auction of impounded cars and identifies Lou Boca as the scrap metal buyer for Charnier's business (suggesting how the Bocas may have linked up with Charnier). After several days of monitoring mundane conversations, the wiretap finally brings Popeye and Cloudy their first break - Charnier phones Sal to arrange a 12 o'clock meeting the next day. Popeye, Cloudy, and Mulderig tail Sal to midtown Manhattan, where they spot Sal meeting with Charnier and Nicoli. While Mulderig follows Sal, Popeye and Cloudy tail Charnier, dubbed "Frog One," and Nicoli as they walk through the city. The Frenchmen stop to eat at an expensive restaurant, which the cops observe while standing outside in freezing temperatures and eating bad pizza with worse coffee. Later, Popeye finds out that Frog One is staying at the Westbury Hotel, but Mulderig still doesn't believe Popeye is on to anything, leading to a brief argument. At Joel Weinstock's condo, a young dope chemist (Pat McDermott) tests a sample of Charnier's heroin and it measures to 89% pure. There are sixty kilos due to arrive; when cut down into "dime bags" it will total out to $32 million with a half-million cash down payment. Weinstock, however, wants to wait before the switch is made, much to Sal's displeasure as Sal fears that Charnier will abort the deal if Weinstock drags it out too long. The next day Popeye arrives at the Westbury just in time to see Charnier breeze right by the distracted Mulderig and Klein and walk into the city without a tail. Popeye tails Charnier himself, almost loses him at a flower shop, but then picks him up again at the Grand Central subway station. They play a cat-and-mouse game on the platform, but the wily Charnier manages to hop back on a train at the last moment and waves goodbye as the furious Popeye futilely runs after the train. Charnier meets Sal in Washington DC - Sal followed there by Klein - where Charnier insists that the deal must be consummated by the end of the week, despite Sal's protests that his mob pals want to wait. On the flight back to New York, Charnier expresses his worries to Nicoli, who points out that Sal's concern about the police is warranted. The Frenchmen agree that Doyle is the main problem, and Nicoli volunteers to assassinate Doyle. Charnier reluctantly agrees, unaware that a fight has erupted between Popeye and Mulderig, and that Popeye has been taken off the case by a furious Simonson. The dejected Popeye returns to his Brooklyn apartment building, where he is fired upon by Nicoli from the roof. Popeye manages to enter the building and pursues Nicoli to the roof, and then back down when he sees Nicoli fleeing. Nicoli runs to a nearby elevated train station and boards the train while Popeye screams for a uniformed transit policeman on board to stop him. As the train leaves the station, the transit policeman follows Nicoli as he moves forward through the train. Popeye commandeers a Pontiac Le Mans from a flabbergasted citizen. Nicoli kills the transit cop and seizes the motorman, forcing him to keep the train going through all the regular stops. Popeye furiously pursues in the car, barely escaping as other cars sideswipe him, and he nearly strikes a woman pushing her child in a baby carriage. Nicoli then kills the conductor who tries to intervene, and the crowd on the train flees while the terrified motorman collapses with a heart attack, locking the train on a collision course with a stopped train. The two trains crash and passengers, including Nicoli, are thrown about. Despite injuries and losing his gun, Nicoli slips out undetected - by everyone except Popeye. Nicoli starts down the stairs but is cornered by Popeye, and when he tries to flee he is shot dead. Popeye and Cloudy, now back on the case, tail Sal as he takes the Lincoln from a parking garage to a side street. The police stake out the car all night; at 4:10 AM a gang of thieves tries to strip it, but they are arrested by a horde of policemen and the car is towed to a garage to be searched as evidence. The mechanic (Irving Abrahams), cannot find any narcotics in the car, but Popeye refuses to believe it. While Devereaux (who signed for the car) and La Valle argue with the garage desk sergeant, Cloudy notices a 120-pound discrepancy between the car's listed weight and actual weight. The mechanic reveals one area he didn't open up - the car's rocker panels underneath the doors. Popeye chews him out and then helps open up these panels, and the stash is found. The car is replaced (either repaired or the department acquires another, intact one), the stash replaced, and it is returned to Devereaux, while the police now wait for the dealers to make their final move. Devereaux meets again with Charnier and is reluctant to do any more favors, until Charnier reveals that Devereaux is now an accomplice - to Devereaux's surprise and horror. Devereaux walks away, but Charnier takes the car himself and drives it to Ward's Island, where Lou Boca directs him to an abandoned factory building. There the heroin stash is revealed and tested positively. The stash is hidden inside the building and cash payment is hidden in the rocker panels of the junker car Lou Boca bought. With the deal completed, the Bocas briefly celebrate and Sal drives Charnier back to the city - and right into a police roadblock led by Popeye. Sal drives back to the factory with police in pursuit, and the mobsters hide inside the main building while Charnier hides in a secondary building. A gunfight ensues, in which Sal Boca is shot dead. Popeye hunts for Charnier inside the dilapidated warehouse. Cloudy joins him as Popeye appears to have cornered Charnier, but as the two cops approach the room Popeye sees someone from another door. He opens fire before Cloudy can corner the now-dead man - who turns out to be Agent Mulderig. Determined to get Frog One at any cost, and not caring that he just killed a Federal agent, Popeye strides through the warehouse, believing the Frenchman is still in hiding. After he rounds a corner a single gunshot is heard. In a montage epilogue, it is revealed that Joel Weinstock was indicted by a Grand Jury, but the case was quickly dismissed for "lack of proper evidence." Angie Boca was found guilty of a misdemeanor, but received a suspended prison sentence. Lou Boca was tried and found guilty of conspiracy and possession of narcotics, but received a reduced sentence. Henri Devereaux was tried and found guilty of conspiracy and served four years in a Federal prison. Alain Charnier escaped and is believed to be living in France. Both Doyle and Russo were transferred out of the Narcotics Bureau and re-assigned to other departments in the NYPD. (Note: The French Connection drug bust that inspired the film took place in 1961. However, the film's script sets the action at the time of actual filming, i.e. the winter of 1970-71, in order to avoid the need for period accuracy in the many New York street scenes.)

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EMPIRE ESSAY: The French Connection Review

01 Jan 1971

104 minutes

EMPIRE ESSAY: The French Connection

Almost 30 years before the Florida recount decided the US presidential race, another close-run contest between two equally popular men ended in a similar re-examination of ballot papers. The Best Actor trophy at the 1972 New York Film Critics awards was a tie between Gene Hackman for The French Connection and Peter Finch for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). They conducted a recount, and Hackman clinched it. The best man won.

The role of hardball New York cop Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle made Gene Hackman. With typical good grace, he plays down his part in the film's success: "I really don't think I had anything to do with the quality of the film. That was a director's film. Anybody would have been good in my role."

He's wrong, of course, though The French Connection might be described as a director's film. When producer Philip D'Antoni put forward 31 year-old William Friedkin for the job, 20th Century Fox swallowed hard. Friedkin had only The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968) and The Boys In The Band (1970) to recommend him, but D'Antoni (who'd previously produced Bullitt (1968) with the equally untried Peter Yates) fancied him for being an unconventional choice. This was not intended as a standard cops-and-robbers flick.

The book, by Green Berets author Robin Moore, was written like a fictional potboiler but based on fact: the story of a 1962 heroin bust in New York, in which detective Eddie "Popeye" Egan (his name was tweaked for the film) and his partner Salvatore Grosso (Buddy Russo on screen) led the swoop on $32 million's worth of incoming brown stuff from Marseilles. For a true story — the book even has maps! —it read like a cracking movie. But all credit to creator of Shaft (1971), Ernest Tidyman for an imaginative job on the screenplay b which he won an Oscar), ding in the memorable establishing sequence in which Popeye and Russo (Scheider) go undercover in a biting New York winter as Father Christmas and pretzel vendor. They chase and interrogate a vendor of less legal wares, and Popeye taunts him with his now-legendary riddle, "Do you pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?" (Hackman was so offended at having to retake this violent assault 27 times, he threatened to walk away from the picture, but was dissuaded by the threat of legal action.)

The French Connection is a deftly-mixed cocktail of realism and dramatic licence, encapsulated in the blending of Moore's reportage and Tidyman's streetwise invention (as in the bit where a hip chemist tests the French importers' heroin for purity and describes it as "junk of the month club"). Friedkin's hand-held documentary style was the perfect vehicle for the film's pumped-up verite: it's since become Hollywood shorthand for "gritty realism" to shoot long and let the camera wobble, but in 1971 this was really radical stuff for a mainstream studio film.

However, for all the sleazy authenticity (much of the action was shot in real-life junkie hotspots in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Hackman went on patrol with Eddie Egan to research the unconventional ways of the Narcotics Bureau), the high point of The French Connection remains its car chase, a sequence that was added to Tidyman's screenplay when no studio would touch the script. Its inclusion was a bare-faced commercial decision, no doubt inspired by Bullitt's own four-wheeled money shot. It's testament to Friedkin's commitment (and that of stunt driver Bill Hickman) that the car chase trashed all before it and has yet to be matched for visceral, brake-squealing energy.

The sequence is actually a train chase, as Doyle's Pontiac sedan pursues an elevated subway carriage containing French smuggler Nicoli (Marcel Bozzufi, star of the film's poster image). Wreaking controlled mayhem for weeks of shooting under the Stillwell Avenue Line was not enough realism for Friedkin; he wanted an uninterrupted shot of the entire chase with one camera on the bumper and one inside the car to capture Popeye's point of view. Hickman took the wheel and drove 26 blocks with a flashing light to alert the very real pedestrians and drivers. See that woman with a pram? Real woman. Real pram. Real baby.

Maverick cops are ten a penny in the cinema, as are their trusty sidekicks but there is something about the way Hackman plays Popeye that elevates him above the herd. When he first read the script he saw his chance to emulate Cagney, but he's far more than a screen-filling tough guy — he exhibits the same insouciant, grinning authority that Hackman managed to subtly invest in characters as diverse as The Poseidon Adventure's Rev Scott and Crimson Tide's Captain Ramsey, over 20 years apart. Popeye Doyle is Gene Hackman finding his own brand.

Maybe The French Connection is an actor's film after all.

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The French Connection

Time Out says

An urban crime thriller which won undeserved acclaim for its efficient but unremarkable elevated-railway chase and its clumsy, showy emphasis on grainy, sordid realism. The performances are strong, although Hackman has done far better than this portrayal of a hard-nosed cop obsessively tracking down a narcotics ring in New York, using methods disapproved of by his superiors. The real problems, however, are that Friedkin's nervy, noisy, undisciplined pseudo-realism sits uneasily with his suspense-motivated shock editing; and that compared to (say) Siegel's Dirty Harry , the film maintains no critical distance from (indeed, rather relishes) its 'loveable' hero's brutal vigilante psychology.

Release Details

• Duration: 104 mins

Cast and crew

• Director: William Friedkin
• Screenwriter: Ernest Tidyman
• Roy Scheider
• Gene Hackman
• Frédéric de Pasquale
• Fernando Rey
• Marcel Bozzuffi
• Tony Lo Bianco

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The French Connection (1971)

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French Connection, The (United States, 1971)

The storyline is deceptively straightforward, focusing on the efforts of two cops, Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider), to stop a major drug shipment from hitting the streets. The “French Connection” refers to the origin of the shipment, which is handled by “Frog One,” Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), who is working with his main New York contact, Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco). Also involved are a French TV star, Devereaux (Frederic De Pasquale), whose car is used to transport the drugs around NYC, and assassin Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi), who does Charnier’s dirty work. The French Connection follows a classic three-act structure. In the first part, Popeye and Buddy learn about the shipment. In the second, whose centerpiece is the chase sequence, they track down the participants. And in the third, they spring the trap. The film offers an intentionally ambiguous open ending (followed by a few “what became of them” captions) that represents the least historically accurate aspect of the movie.

The French Connection is many things but one of its most compelling (and infrequently mentioned) ingredients is how it works as a study of obsession. Charnier is Moby Dick to Popeye’s Ahab. The detective, who by all accounts has little to live for beyond the job, will stop at nothing to kill his whale. He is reckless and, as we see in the surprising final minutes, unconcerned about anyone who gets in his way – ally or enemy. The ambiguity of the ending (a gunshot) underscores the ultimate futility of obsession. A fictional sequel, The French Connection II , provides closure (both Hackman and Rey return) for those who may be frustrated by this film’s conclusion.

According to the filmmakers, Gene Hackman was nowhere near the top of the pecking order to play Popeye. (Friedkin’s “dream choice” was Paul Newman, but he was out of the film’s budget range.) Egan was violently opposed. As so often happens, however, the performance became so indelible that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. The Academy agreed, awarding Hackman the Best Actor trophy (beating Peter Finch, Walter Matthau, George C. Scott, and Topol). Roy Scheider earned a nomination (his first of two) in a breakthrough role that resulted in a string of high-profile opportunities. Although there’s sufficient chemistry between Hackman and Scheider, The French Connection wasn’t envisioned as a “cop buddy film” and, in large part because of its aesthetic, it doesn’t come across as such.

With the Academy Awards ceremony often honoring films “in the moment” rather than with a view to their likely historical importance, many Best Picture winners over the years have faded like poorly-preserved photographs. The French Connection , however, joins other 1970s victors in having weathered the tides of time. Viewed today, it’s like a perfectly-made period piece, capturing details of ‘70s-era police activities without a hint of nostalgia. The chase holds up and the performances remain compelling. There’s nothing about The French Connection that seems dated. Its approach and style contrast markedly with the artificiality and lack of ingenuity that has infected the genre over the years.

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