Movie Review – The French Connection

The French Connection (1971)
Written by Ernest Tidyman
Directed by William Friedkin

It’s not the story that compels you to keep watching. It’s the lead performance by Gene Hackman. It’s the bleak atmosphere of a decaying New York City. It’s the sense that no matter how this turns out, no one really wins. The rot will just keep spreading. Reactionary cinema had its Golden Age in the 1970s. Most of those depicted the rogue cop or the street vigilante as a bastion of “real justice,” pushing aside those pesky civil rights laws to “get the job done.” You might lump The French Connection in with something like Dirty Harry, but that would be a mistake. Dirty Harry revels in Callahan’s sadism and hatred of pretty much all humanity. Popeye Doyle is not someone we’re meant to admire. He’s an animal we’re observing who stalks and hunts vulnerable prey, invoking the Law as his justification. He doesn’t care about the Law, though. This is about ego.

There’s a heroin smuggling ring based in Marseilles, France, that is about to move $32 million worth into the United States by hiding it in a car. NYPD Detectives Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) notice an ex-con they know schmoozing with mobsters at a bar. They track the guy and his girl and eventually establish a link between the couple’s seemingly mundane soda fountain shop and a notorious lawyer & buyer for the mob. Through wiretapping and surveillance, Doyle & Russo get a rough sketch of how things will go down. The details are still blurry, but the clock is ticking. In a rush to shut it down, Doyle begins pushing his limits and eventually makes a horrific mistake.

Most of The French Connection is pure surface level procedure. That doesn’t sound like the makings of anything exceptional. What propels it into the realm of a great film is Friedkin’s direction and Hackman’s lead performance. Friedkin adopts a documentarian’s eye for this movie. There’s an often-cited example of how Doyle goes into a Black bar and starts roughing up the patrons. Friedkin never told the cinematographer where Hackman would go next. He just gave him a handheld rig, and they shot it. This provides the scene with a perfect looseness. It makes us feel like we are watching something real happen as the cameraman hunts for the action. Those are the best moments where it feels like we are running just behind Doyle as he launches in pursuit.

I can’t imagine anyone else as Doyle than Hackman. He looks the part, an everyman character actor type. It’s the cockiness that brings the character to life. Doyle is so self-assured and never doubts a single decision he makes. But so many of his choices are wrong and dangerous. What he’s betting on is that he’s more cunning than the people he is after. For the majority of the movie, that is a true statement. 

When dealing with low-level perps, Doyle bosses them around and asks intentionally disorienting questions during interrogation. But when he comes head-to-head with the leader of the smuggling operation, he’s outwitted immediately. The man knows he’s being tailed, and so through some light footwork, he leaves Doyle behind on a subway train platform fuming.

There was some recent controversy over Disney, who owns The French Connection due to various mergers, choosing to edit out Doyle’s use of the N-word early on in the film. While that is not a word that should be used casually, the purpose it serves in this film is justified. 

Friedkin told a story about attending a screening of the picture in Harlem. Packed theater. Almost exclusively Black people. When Doyle drops the line, “Never trust an n-word”, Friedkin says the theater erupted in laughs and applause. Why? Because for the first time in a big Hollywood movie, these people who were systematically harassed from birth in their neighborhoods saw an accurate depiction of a cop. Doyle is a vicious, hateful racist and a reminder that main characters are not good guys by default. 

At every turn, Doyle makes horrible decisions that endanger others. The most famous of these is the car chase under the elevated train. Doyle races to intercept a suspect who has commandeered the train, pushing it past all its stops. He barrels through traffic, causing numerous crashes, and only slams on the brakes to prevent hitting a mother and her baby carriage. Doyle commits numerous crimes, so he doesn’t want to make the world safer; he just wants to win. It doesn’t matter who is hurt; Doyle has to prove he’s better than the other guy. 

Hackman kept trying to push Friedkin to make Doyle more relatable and likable to the audience during filming. The director refused to budge on this. For him, Doyle was a “son of bitch” and “prick.” His delight at the audience’s response in Harlem was because of this. He didn’t want to present some power fantasy like Dirty Harry or Death Wish. The French Connection is a film without a firm resolution. It’s ending just trails off. 

We get title cards that reveal the fates of those involved, but that doesn’t override the existential horror of the final scene. Doyle grows smaller as he disappears into the shadows of the warehouse. He’s done something horrible, but he’s justifying it to himself right away. As long as he catches the bad guy, he didn’t do anything wrong, he reasons. It’s one of the darkest films of an era full of very bleak movies, and it reminds us why Friedkin was such an incredible filmmaker.