The French Connection Hello

 

The French Connection Hello

In 1971, William Friedkin delivered a harrowing heist thriller that would become a landmark in American cinema. It starred Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider as New York City narcotics detectives Popeye Doyle and Cloudy Russo on the trail of international heroin dealers. It was based on the 1969 book The French Connection: A True Account of Cops, Narcotics, and International Conspiracy by Robin Moore.

The film was a success from the outset, winning five Academy Awards. Among those awards was Best Picture, but more than that, it launched the career of Friedkin. He would go on to direct some of the most acclaimed films in Hollywood history.

He is a master at creating a trend-setting niche for his films. And he was especially skilled at creating such a niche with The French Connection, which was the first of what became known as the "New Hollywood" wave of action movies.

While many of these films were slickly filmed and boasted star-power, The French Connection was a little different. It was a rough-and-tumble reworking of the classic movie formula, and it also featured a The french connection keep in touch famous car chase that became one of the most iconic scenes in cinematic history.

It is the kind of scene that should make you squirm, but it's actually pretty fun to watch. It's a good example of how the director calibrates important action to maximum visceral effect, with everything from the sound of the train to the pacing and performances playing a role in making the chase as authentic as possible.

And it's also a reminder of how much these kinds of scenes can influence the rest of a movie. In fact, a great deal of what makes The French Connection a cult classic is credited to the editing.

The car chase under the elevated train is perhaps the most famous, but it's not the only tense and exciting sequence in The French Connection. The other most memorable one involves a masked assassin on the loose in Corsica and his pursuit of the two New York City drug investigators by bus.

While the sequence has become an icon of grit and over-the-top violence, it's not without its flaws. Unlike most of the other action in The French Connection, it does not have a clear narrative or emotional core that keeps the viewer engaged; it's more about the characters and their interactions than it is about anything else.

In addition, there are a lot of implausible elements in the film, from the improbable police uniforms to the tense confrontations between Popeye and Cloudy. It's not a film that would have been very successful if it had been set in present-day New York, but it was still a major success fifty years ago.

As it is, however, the character of Doyle is a misguided and racist thug who does not follow the rules of policing; he's a jerk and has a history of brutality, but he gets away with it because he's a supercop. If you put him on the witness stand, he'd probably have to admit that he was not a very good cop. And that would have absolutely tainted the case.