“I had this epiphany that what we were doing wasn’t making fucking films to hang in the Louvre. We were making films to entertain people and if they didn’t do that they didn’t fulfil their primary purpose.” These are the words of the landmark film director William Friedkin, speaking of his 1971 film, The French Connection. Very few films will grip you with their suspense the way this film does, a suspense which for forty years film makers have ached to establish in their films. It’s the kind of tension that only great films carry along with them, it is a feeling present as the haunting and unpredictable Travis Bickle roamed the sidewalks in Taxi Driver, it is in the twisted nausea of A Clockwork Orange, in the vice grip of Pulp Fiction’s Ezekiel 25:17 and in the lingering and darkly comic violence of Fargo. The French Connection is the grand-daddy of this greatest of film attributes. Gritty, intense, pessimistic and mesmerising; The French Connection is one of a kind.
New York City Detective “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and his partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) are attempting to unravel a drug smuggling ring between a small group of French criminals and NYC crooks. Doyle is an obsessive, short-tempered man, rough, hard-drinking and sleazy; but ultimately fascinating and determined to break a major narcotics case. Doyle and Buddy are rogues, not playing by the book. They are old fashioned, their story taking place before the CCTV takeover of society when cops did not depend on surveillance but on their own vision and hearing for investigations. This makes The French Connection is unique; the film is essentially one enormous chase with the authorities’ always one step behind their suspects. There is an air of cluelessness about the cops. Does Doyle know what he is doing? How does he prove there is a “French Connection” at all? But Doyle is possessed by his “hunch” and as a result the viewer is too, Doyle whose “brilliant hunches cost the life of a good cop,” convinces us. We are at one with him and his hunch. Thus this unique and dastardly character grows on us, as he does so he blurs the preconceptions of the traditional screen protagonist. Popeye is both the good guy and the bad guy; a loveable bastard. John McClane and Hans Grüber. He will protect the life of a child but he will also shoot an unarmed man in the back.
Doyle and Buddy are amongst the few stand-out characters in the film, alongside the key French men Devereaux and the hit man Nicoli. The film does not introduce many characters but instead depends on the visuals of the streets of New York City to give off its gritty charm. The dialogue too is thin, coming to us only when crucial to the plot. This is something which is really quite spectacular about the French Connection; it has us almost solely depending on its visuals for the unfolding of the plot. Nothing is verbally explained. Friedkin has really tapped into something here; it is almost as if he’s saying to the viewer “if you don’t have the brain capacity to understand this film through its action then I don’t want you watching it.” He has made an effort to not have everything explained through dialogue. Friedkin has even said in interviews that the script was partially abandoned during the five-week shoot and that much of the dialogue was ad-libbed. The script was just a “guideline.” It all works beautifully, the energy of New York City, its busyness and often its bleakness adding to the wonderful intensity of the action.
The first few scenes of the film establish a nice contrast between the dangerous metropolis of New York and the picturesque beauty of Marseilles, where the “French Connection” is rooted. In dialogue-free moments we watch as a man, presumably a French detective wanders the city’s pleasant streets only to be shot at point blank range in the face by an assassin. Whilst in the cold New York evening, Popeye and Buddy pursue a crook through the messy and graffiti-adorned Brooklyn alleyways. The message is clear: violence is everywhere. New York is no more or less dangerous than any other city, and the style in which the chase in Brooklyn is filmed, and in fact all other chases in the movie are filmed, give off an inspiring city vibe that only American cinema can achieve.
Mixed in amongst the many chases of The French Connection are snippets into the life of the protagonist Doyle. We are given flashes of this character’s “other side,” the side that is not a determined Detective; and it is a life which is pitiful, ordinary and humorous. Doyle is revealed to be apathetic and sleazy. In one of the film’s best scenes he wakes up on a bar stool with his head resting next to his beverage. Arising, he puts on his noir-esque hat and wanders outside into the empty street by the Brooklyn Bridge. He gets into his car, still drunk, and begins to stalk a young female cyclist, staring lustfully at her backside as she cycles. Cut to a minute later in the film and Buddy finds Doyle in his filthy apartment, naked, handcuffed to his own bed by the cyclist whom he had managed to woe. Buddy unlocks him, and without showering he puts on his clothes and they get back to work. This scene really spoke to me. Not only is it funny and gritty but as someone who has grown up into the “slacker” generation, Doyle seems to be on the same level as the modern man. When he is not working he is drinking and chasing after woman; he has no family tying him down. Doyle exists just to seek pleasure and respect. This is something I think many men can relate to.
My favourite scene in the film however is the “Popeye’s Here!” scene which takes place in a small New York bar filled with African Americans. Popeye’s mere presence here is tense, him being a moderately racist Irish-American cop makes him immediately out-of-place. When he bursts into the bar proclaiming “Popeye’s Here!” you may even cringe at his boldness. Immediately the men in the bar begin to hurriedly empty the illegal pills and the dope from their pockets onto the floor, causing an echoing clicking sound. Popeye soon holds the whole bar in his wrath, commanding them all to stand against the wall as he inspects the various pills and bags and pipes. A man steps out of the toilet, immediately named “haircut” but Doyle, and Popeye takes him outback where the man turns out to be his insider. At the end of their chat he says to the man ,“Where do ya wan’ it?” before landing a punch on the left hand side of his face. It is one of those rare scenes in cinema which will have you smiling at a character’s nerve; a “Dirty Harry” moment that has the viewer both laughing and shaking their head.
However the most intense and suspenseful scene in the film is the famous subway chase. In all my years of wasting away my life watching films I have never witnessed a more gripping chase. It has more in common with the “Grand Theft Auto” game franchise than with any other film. What is most incredible about the scene is the way it is stretched out from one small incident into an epic chase which sees Doyle racing after a hijacked subway train. One moment Doyle is walking to his apartment block, a sniper tries to assassinate him, next thing Doyle is “borrowing” a civilian’s car as he chases after the train which the French assassin has boarded. “When will I get it back?” – asks the car’s owner, but he does not get an answer and soon the car is flying down the streets, underneath the subway line, through red lights and into oncoming traffic. In one nail-biting shot, the camera has been placed on the front of the car as Doyle shoots straight into a busy intersection. It is another kind of intensity.
The two aspects of The French Connection’s production which triumph are the cinematography and the sound; and the two combine and coincide beautifully, emitting a rare excitement and energy – and this may be the correct word to sum up the film itself – energetic. It is non-stop like a great Hitchcock film only set in a seedy, underground world that Hitchcock himself never explored. Friedkin has often spoken of the influence of the 30’s and 40’s-era American action films as his inspiration for the movie, but at the same time he has kept something of his love for the French New Wave alive through the often dizzying and accidental beauty of the character’s surroundings. The cinematography is the element which stood out to me because I have seen the range of its influence in so many films over the years: Tarantino’s works, Heat, A Guide to Recognising Your Saints, The Wrestler, and so on. The camera is shaky, moving, stalking, following – like a cop itself tailing the characters. There are shots in The French Connection which are stunning in their subtlety, and they come for brief moments, unexpectedly; and with the superb editing they blend to produce a wondrously edgy portrait of the character’s New York City environment.
The French Connection, however, is Hackman’s film. He blends perfectly into Doyle and the wastelands of Brooklyn which he roams. Like the culmination of every noir cliché of the American cinema and Brando’s legendary Terry Malloy, he merges beautifully into the bloody underbelly of America. The character of Popeye Doyle, his demeanour, his swagger, his recklessness was surely a catalyst for the swarm of cinema anti-hero’s which would emerge in the wake of the French Connection’s release, not just in the 70s and 80s with the like of Nicholson’s Randall.P.MacMurphy and Jake Gittes, De Niro’s Bickle and La Motta, Pacino’s Carleone and Montana, Sheen’s Kit Carruthers and Willard and every Gordon Gecko, Barnes, Mr Blonde and Chopper to come, but also in cinema today. Nothing brings more pleasure to the big-screen than an amoral, reckless anti-hero, an “inglorious bastard,” the anarchic “Joker’s” and Cool Hand Luke’s; and Popeye Doyle is the Godfather of them all. Only in the final minutes of the film do we realise that Doyle’s obsession has consumed him, his story is doomed, and The French Connection ends with a fitting, echoing gunshot.
If you have never seen The French Connection before then please for your own good – do. If you have seen it, - watch it again, and again, and again, and again. It’s that good.
