As the sixties gave way to a whole new decade, crime thrillers seemed desperate to further pick at the unsightly scabs that had formed in the wake of ever more grittier cop films. The image of the cop as a righteous crusader for truth was becoming about as blurry as the lines that real cops would cross every day and by the time we reached 1971, cinema was openly offering the concept of a lawmen as deeply flawed as the criminals they shot, coerced or brutalised. While Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry gave us a titular cop whose overenthusiastic practices put him right in the moral grey area, leave it to arch provocateur, William Friedkin, to muddy the waters even further with The French Connection.
Based on a true story and delivering cops and robbers thrills caked with the filth and grime of a warts and all documentary, The French Connection delivered an experience in law enforcement the likes of which the world had never seen – and probably never wanted to. Car chases, stake outs, the merciless shooting of an unarmed suspect? All are delivered with a sense of realism the public had never seen before; which was strange considering that they saw it every day on the corners of their own streets…
Before entering the frigid hellscape of early 1970s New York, we first take a quick stop over in Marseille where we find gentleman drug smuggler Alain Charnier planning to smuggle $32 million worth of heroin into the United States. He has the means and the cover to transport the product without fear of discovery, but all he needs is some buyers in New York to take the drugs off his hands. It’s here that we’re introduced to Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle and his partner Buddy “Cloudy” Russo, two police detectives working narcotics who don’t mind being fairly heavy handed with the people they chase.
In fact, it would be pretty fair to say that Popeye in particular isn’t much more than an obsessive, abusive thug, but his dedication to the job is exemplary even if his actions are highly questionable. However, when Popeye gets wind of this sizable shipment, he doubles down on on fingering the perpetrators with an aggressive zeal that seems excessive even for him. Burning bridges back at the department on practically a daily basis and logging in hours of painstaking stakeout work with cloudy in order to get his ducks in a row, Popeye manages to get a good lay of the land.
But now that he’s scoped out his big fish, can he possibly hope to land it? As obsessive and desperate as Popeye is, Charnier wasn’t exactly born yesterday and a frantic game of one-upmanship ensues that feels like a game of chess being played at the same time as playing chicken with a ten-ton truck. Will Charnier’s smarts win out, or will Popeye’s near demented determination win the day as he trawls his way through the underbelly of Brooklyn to nail his prey once and for all?
While Siegel indulged in a little glorification as detective Harry Callahan broke all manner of rules to halt the rampage of the Scorpio Killer, Friedkin seemed to have no intention of pulling a single punch as he endevored to make one of the most magnificently unsavory cop movies of all time. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the filmmaker who would go on to make a film about demonic possession that contained an instance of crucifix masturbation would pull out all the stops when it came to out and out realism, but even decades after it’s release, it’s still a shock to discover how raw The French Connectiom still is. While you’re not expecting to find a sympathetic character in the bunch, Friedkin strives for realism to such an extent, that not only do his two main characters lack any real backstory, we don’t even know what the fuck their nicknames mean.
But that’s the marvel of the film. Much like Popeye himself, The French Connection is the job, tirelessly slugging away at the criminal element with no time or inclination to turn its attention to anything else. While other films might focus on the buddy movie relationship between Popeye and Cloudy, Friedkin realises that small talk would be kept to a minimum when you have two obsessive professionals who’ve known each other for a while. Another comfort that the director gleefully removes from the viewing experience is the fact that movie doesn’t baby us with simplistic notions of good or bad as Gene Hackman’s volcanic Doyle is a brutish motherfucker of epic proportions. Going all-in on a character who is openly racist, hates virtually everyone he ever meets and is quite happy to hold interrogations with his fists, the actor makes his cop an odious force of nature and a true product of the grotesque, crumbling Brookyn where he pounds his beat.
And yet, with Popeye as our guide, shooting fleeing suspects in the back and confounding perps by angrily demanding to know if they ever picked their feet in Poughkeepsie, Friedkin exposes us to another irrefutable truth about 70s policework – it’s astoundingly fucking gruelling. Once again, the filmmakers elect to show and not tell, giving us countless scenes of both Doyle and Roy Scheider’s Cloudy spending weeks at a time in the freezing cold staking out their prey and apparently not having a single decent meal to eat. You can virtually feel the cold and almost taste the tinge of rotten garbage in the air as Friedkin grinds your face into the numbing monotony of the job, be it trying to keep a tail on someone on a busy street, or painstakingly stripping a car down to it’s component parts to try and find hidden drugs, it’s no fucking wonder that a driven man like Doyle is so pissed off all the time.
However, when things finally occur, they fucking explode as The French Connection not only contains some of the most hair raising setpieces of the decade, but it contains one of the finest (and legitimately scariest) car chases ever recorded on film. Being it stretching out the tension of Doyle and Charnier trying to out-maneuver one another as the latter tries to evade his tail by both hopping on and off a subway car before the doors close, or the eyeball searing chase that’s sees Popeye try to keep up with a runaway train as he barrels through real traffic in a commandeered car, Friedkin pays off your patience with interest by delivering action sequences that don’t just break the mold, they shatter it into dust.
However, there’s always room for Friedkin yo squeeze in one last kick in the balls before the film ends, and the abruptness and cruelty of The French Connection’s risky downbeat ending proves to be the hardest hitting moment in the film. As Popeye wades through literal sludge, his career literally slipping away from him after a disastrous mistake, he’s still frantically searching for his target even after the main crime is stopped and if it wasn’t for the existence of John Frankenheimer’s sequel, it could have been one of the most haunting non-endings to any cop thriller until David Fincher’s Zodiac came along.
A dark, dirty film loaded with dark, dirty people, William Friedkin’s morally vacant docu-thriller still carries a mean swing even after all this time as it ricochets from soul-sapping police work to synapse-snapping action and back again. Searing performances, fearless direction and an unflinching glimpse into the contradictory monsters that enforce the law, The French Connection is free to pick it’s feet wherever it damn well chooses.
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