The French Connection

 

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In 1971 Twentieth Century Fox released a movie that changed everything for cop movies. Based on the real life story of two New York City policemen who busted one of the biggest drug rings in history, it became a blockbuster hit and launched the careers of director William Friedkin and actors Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider. It also established the benchmark against which all modern police thrillers are judged.

The French Connection is a film that owes a great deal of its realism to Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers and Costa-Gavras' Z, both fact-based political thrillers that used documentary realism as their claim to authenticity. However, unlike those films The French Connection takes this concept and makes it work in a commercial blockbuster film. It also benefited enormously from having technical advisors on hand, including the very policemen whose lives were the basis of the story. This gives the movie a gritty reality that's hard to find in any other film. It also pries the audience's attention away from any doubts that it might be a bit of a snoozer, thanks to its breakneck pace.

What the movie really set its sights on, though, was creating a specific type of cop that has shaped the way we look at antiheroes ever since. Popeye Doyle is not a good guy, he's an ugly, crude bad-boy with very little of the milk of human kindness flowing through his veins. He's the kind of cop that, like Dirty Harry before him, thinks that the ends justify the means and isn't above using extreme measures to get the job done.

It's not just that Hackman was the perfect choice to play him, although he certainly did that. The defining aspect of Doyle's character is his strong feeling that there's something wrong and that he knows what he has to do to fix it. This instinct is what drives him through the many claustrophobic stakeouts and endless tedium of waiting for someone named Lucky to come around and drop 60 kilos of heroin off an LTD's rocker panels.

There are whole scenes in The French Connection, and indeed stretches of the entire film, where no dialogue is spoken at all. That's because Friedkin believed that you didn't need dialog to communicate the action. He also realised that a good actor can convey emotion through facial expressions alone. He was right, and this approach has informed every other cop movie from this point on.

The sound design is equally impressive, with a soundtrack that uses the sounds of a city in an unobtrusive way that doesn't distract from the action. And of course there's the car chase scene itself, which is arguably one of the best ever put to film. It's a testament to the film that even now, over 50 years later, it still thrills and excites. And that's a tribute to the skill of the cast and crew. The French Connection is a modern classic that's not to be missed.