The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971): USA

Reviewed by Byron Potau.  Viewed on DVD.

In 1971, director William Friedkin’s Best Picture winner, The French Connection, with its rough edges and desaturated colors, was an excellent example of the kind of gritty filmmaking taking place in the 1970s.  One of the earliest buddy cop action films, few imitators afterwards could do it any better than this film.

The film is adapted from a true story and deals with two New York City narcotics cops, Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman), and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider).  When the two cops spot Sal Boca (Tony Li Bianco) in a bar and mark him as suspicious, they follow him home and discover he is part of a huge drug deal that is about to go down.  As the cops, with assistance from federal agents, begin following Boca and his associates, they discover that Boca is brokering a deal with big shot laywer Joel Weinstock and a slick, high class French criminal, Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey).

The film’s centerpiece is a heart-stopping chase scene involving Hackman’s Popeye Doyle in a commandeered Pontiac Le Mans chasing one of Alain Charnier’s henchman, Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi) in an elevated subway train.  The action, acting, stunts, and editing are top notch and this scene is still arguably the greatest car chase scene in film history.  Aside from this, there are plenty of other exciting scenes including when Charnier, who Popeye refers to as Frog one, manages to ditch Popeye in a subway station in a wonderful cat and mouse sequence, and smugly waves goodbye as the train passes with Popeye left on the platform.  The acting is uniformly excellent, with Hackman giving a warts and all portrayal of the flawed and coarse Popeye Doyle, who drinks a little too hard and has some trouble controlling his anger, but is nonetheless a dedicated cop.  Where Hackman’s Doyle is rough, Fernando Rey’s Alain is polished.  In this underrated performance, Rey gives his character a much needed charm, strolling the city streets with his umbrella on his arm, carefree, while all the time aware he is being followed.  He is the antithesis of Hackman’s bullying cop and we cannot help but find him appealing. Friedkin’s direction and Owen Roizman’s cinematography, along with Don Ellis’s brassy blaring musical score, give the film a raw and dirty look and sound that help the film’s realistic, down in the streets feel.  The film is a classic of its kind.


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