The French Connection

Popeye knows something's wrong at that table at the Copacabana.  Sal Boca is there, handing out currency to mobsters like it's going out of style.  It's wrong because Sol and his wife Angie own a store that only clears them 7 K annually.  Popeye and his partner Cloudy have been making the case that a cache of heroin is about to land in NYC.  A case that in addition to the Bocas involves a local dirty lawyer named Weinstock and a French syndicate head named Charnier.

The story depicted in 1971's THE FRENCH CONNECTION is based on actual people and events.  I'm not sure how much was fictionalized, as I have not read Robin Moore's book, which followed NYPD detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso in their pursuit of smuggler Jean Jehan.  Ernest Tidyman's lean scripting and William Freidkin's austere yet stylish direction suits the mean business so perfectly, so classically.  The movie remains after fifty years a gritty lesson in filmic economy, with no extraneous character exposition or padded police procedural.  Other viewers cite these things as to why the film falls short.  Pity them.

The casting is right.  Gene Hackman is at home in Popeye Doyle's thick skin.  A slovenly cuss whose obsessiveness with nailing the scumbag may get a cop or even a Fed killed in the process.  It is one of many signature Hackman performances.  Roy Scheider does fine work as Cloudy Russo.  Unlike Hackman, he doesn't have to swing for the fences, but rather go for a solid base hit.  Fernando Rey's laconic Charnier is menacing, yet in a somewhat playful fashion (note the subway car dance with Doyle).

Friedkin finally hit pay dirt with THE FRENCH CONNECTION, and his nimble steering gives the film a docu style, perfectly evoking early '70s NYC in its hellish glory.  The location work is exemplary, and kudos to the great Owen Roizman for his stark cinematography.  The film also has that exciting, famous car and train chase that tore through Brooklyn, not at all far from where my very young self was living in '70/'71.  That's fun to think on.  Even if Roizman used under cranking to give more of a perception of speed, Friedkin and company engineered a dangerous stunt amongst real traffic and pedestrians.  It is the sort of realism that infects a picture that already feels grimily realistic.