The French Connection: Review

Gene Hackman Owes His Career to Popeye Doyle

If The French Connection were made today, we’d have more detail about the heroin enterprise run out of Marseilles by the smugglers. Writers would create more backstory on the Roy Scheider character, Cloudy Russo and the beleaguered captain. We’d certainly have a compelling story arc about the black bartender, who feeds information to the police when they rough up the patrons. But writers can do too much with a movie and make a mess of the whole thing.

Simple Stories

Sometimes simple is best. Focus on one character…amoral, racist, vitriolic, determined. Don’t even bother to give him a family or a pet or an interest outside of kicking in doors and roughing up junkies.  

 Thankfully it was made in 1971. If you want an antihero with a singular focus on winning, Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) is your guy. There were a few detective movies at the time with rule breaking cops and evil criminals without an ounce of humanity. Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (also 1971) comes to mind, as does Death Wish (1974). Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey didn’t carry a badge, but in a lot of ways he’s a more sympathetic character than Hackman’s Doyle.

 I’m not sure what it was about this time period, maybe the urban crime rate was high in big cities. New York, as the largest American city, was notorious for muggings, murders and all purpose felonies. The mafia ruled the city’s underworld and drug use and crime soared.

The Breakdown

William Friedkin’s The French Connection begins with 2 narcotics detectives chasing down a black heroin addict in a foot chase. Popeye Doyle is undercover as a street Santa Claus while Cloudy Russo serves hot dogs from a vendor’s cart. It’s clear that most of their time is spent roughing up junkies while hoping for larger scores. Both men go out to a disco club one night and tail an Italian café owner who they assume is a big-time dealer. Their hunch pays off, but only after they convince their captain to get the necessary warrants to wire tap the café. The heroin is coming from Marseilles on a ship, with a famous French businessman and his entourage.

The rest of the film is a chase. Either on foot or in a car, it’s cops against criminals. There isn’t a lot of detail to the plot, it’s very focused in the person of Popeye Doyle. The film is known for its riveting car chase. Doyle steals a car from a random passenger and follows the elevated train to the next stop. A sniper who tried to shoot him just minutes ago evaded him and hoped onto the train as the doors were closing. Doyle barks at the attendant for directions and tries to outrun the train to the next stop. After countless near misses and swerving onto the incoming lane he gets to the station only to see the train blow past the stop.

The Chase

The sniper held the train conductor gunpoint, forcing him to keep moving. Doyle jumps back in the car and continues his high speed, frenetic pace below the tracks. Eventually the French assassin runs out of space and Doyle shoots him. Filmed mostly from the viewpoint of the driver, it’s nerve wracking to see cars miss and oncoming traffic peal off just in time. He gets sideswiped at one point and keeps going.

The second great scene shows the wealthy drug kingpin Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) trying to evade Doyle at the subway station. Charnier is slick where Doyle is clumsy. Realizing the police are on to him from very early on, he tricks them into following and then dumps the tail. Charnier is relaxed and stylish throughout. He dines with the wealthy in exquisite restaurants and stays in 4 star hotels. He is charming and evasive.

Popeye Doyle is messy and violent. He drinks until he falls asleep on the bar. He wears an old porkpie hat and looks as if he’s slept in his clothing. If we could smell him, he’d smell like day old bourbon. His quick and dirty nature is a perfect contrast to the sophisticated man he chases.

The French Connection doesn’t have time to develop a lot of characters around Gene Hackman’s Doyle. That makes it very similar to Dirty Harry. But what we get is a very crisp movie about a man on a mission. It doesn’t leave us with a sense of pride in the police force, but we accept his behavior because he gets results. One of the detectives complains that Doyle’s assumptions lead to good cops getting killed. Doyle takes a swing at him in a later scene. It’s a way to explain his recklessness and reinforce the image of an emotional detective who goes hard and doesn’t explain himself.

The Classics

I watched this movie for the first time probably 20 years ago. Like classic novels, I like to find out for myself what the big deal was. I’m not one who loves everything that won an Oscar (this one did) or was selected for some literary prize. But The French Connection is a fantastic movie for people who like cop movies. I like the straightforward portrayal of New York in the seventies. I like what one reviewer said, “This is a story about ugly things and awful people”. And I would add, told with excellent pacing and energy.

There is a scene that catches my eye every time. As someone with almost no flair for the camera, I don’t generally pick up on cool shots. But I love the image of Doyle leaving the bar when the sun comes up. It’s framed beautifully with the bar in the lower left corner of the screen while the Manhattan Bridge runs overhead and parallel while an opposite highway runs perpendicular. It looks like dawn. The only real light is from the electric red and green horizontal images on the tavern. The rest of the shot has a blueish grey hue suggesting another cloudy day is in store. It seems like a perfect image for the film somehow.