The French Connection

The French Connection (released October 9, 1971)

Directed by: William Friedkin

Starring: Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, Roy Scheider, Tony Lo Bianco

Produced by: Philip D'Antoni

Written by: Robin Moore (novel), Ernest Tidyman

Music by: Don Ellis

Cinematography by: Owen Roizman

Distributed by: 20th Century Fox

The French Connection didn’t connect with me

I understand a film in search of realism can be an exciting and rewarding thing to watch if handled with the utmost care. After all, most of us pay good money to enter theaters and be entertained by stories and characters  somewhat  removed from reality. William Friedkin’s, The French Connection sustains a gritty reality to it for 104 minutes, but I wassurprised to discover that after a while, I was less and less entertained.

Ah, look at all the ugly people...

I think it was a combination of things, really. I could have possibly forgiven the filmmakers for their lack of proper lighting, proper makeup for the actors, some less than stellar editing, or even the screeching, discordant soundtrack that was supposed to reflect some sort of edgy jazz theme as trademarks of a daring, edgy director, but all those things taken together just made the film look and sound really less than polished and professional. Yes, I understand that this film was not supposed to look slick, -- but wow! -- I don’t think I’ve ever seen an uglier looking movie. And after a while, I began to find the vulgarity rather tedious.

I think I know now where Martin Scorsese got the overall look for the hoods in his film, Goodfellas. Just check out the scene in the nightclub where Detectives Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) are watching the drug kingpins at play with their “womenfolk”. Now that’s a pretty scary looking collection of people. The big hair and the dresses on the ladies still have the power to shock and horrify!

Buddy Russo: a kinder, gentler cop.

Don’t look for much redeeming character traits in the hero of the piece either. Hackman plays tough-guy Doyle without any noticeable concessions to humanity. Even though his aim is to take down the drug lords, one finds his methods odious and his character extremely hard to root for. It’s saying something when Roy Scheider is cast as the kinder, gentler cop.

The justly-famous (for its time) car-chase sequence with the elevated train through the crowded Brooklyn streets has lost a bit of its sting simply because car-chases nowadays are practically a raison d'être to current action directors, and let’s be honest – we’ve all seen a million of them by now. 

Crash!

All these ponderous observations don’t leave me much to applaud when it is all said and done. And I am left with the personal estimation that William Friedkin as a director is over-rated.

As far as naming The French Connection the best picture for 1971, I am left wondering: were things that awful in 1971?

--kak

I’ve Been Called Worse

The French Connection won five academy awards. It gets glowing reviews from every source.  I looked up reviews online and people wax poetic about its dark gritty nature, its exceptional editing, and its amazing writing. Everyone thinks it is the pinnacle of what an American crime film should be. The crème de la crème.

I thought it was skunk brains on a Triscuit.

I know that this essay (which is now indexed by Google!) might make some people angry out there, because I am about to rip this movie a new one. Say what you want, I’ve been called worse.  This is different from The Greatest Show on Earth, because there was a reason (the Red Scare) that such a movie won. The French Connection seemed to have won on its own merit. And it beat out such movies as Fiddler on the Roof, A Clockwork Orange, and The Last Picture Show.

It was almost funny... almost.

I want you to know that when I sat down to watch this movie, I hardly knew anything about it. I hadn’t read anything about it online. I only knew what I had read on the back of the DVD case. I knew I liked Gene Hackman.  (Anyone who can play a blind monk in Young Frankenstein and Lex Luthor is all right in my book.) I knew I liked France. What could be so bad?

The French Connection is the story of two detectives (Doyle and Russo) who stumble upon a huge shipment of drugs coming into the country from France, and they want to nail the bastards who are in on it. I can get behind that.  Nailing crooks is always a fun movie past time. But there was so much wrong with this movie that the basic plot was all that was really right.

Doyle freezes his nuts off.

First off, there was no character development. I felt no connection to “Popeye” Doyle or Buddy Russo. They were two-dimensional. When the movie opens, we know they are cops.  When the movie ends, we know they are cops, and that Doyle is more of a badass than his partner.  I know that they both did a lot of stakeouts in cars, and froze their nuts off hanging around outside hotels, but that’s it. That’s all we know. I don’t know anything about their thoughts, their motivations, or their personalities.  And that made the movie feel flat to me – very Super Mario Brothers.  Strike one.

And Lord, was this picture ugly. Well, the 70’s in general were pretty bad, weren’t they? They started with a big bang, and hideously bled to death for a decade. Clothes, hairstyles, décor, cars, it was all one big, avocado, shaggy mess.  And this movie was no different.  When it first started playing, I believe I said, “Geez, this is a crappy transfer.” But apparently it was made to be that way – stark, grainy, and ugly…just like the streets of New York and the cops that defend them. (*snort*) Even the portions of the film shot in Marseilles, (in France, people) were not pretty. They made the French Riviera ugly too!  Strike two.

Even Marseilles was ugly.

Apparently they were trying to make a statement here. I have a theory as to what that statement is, too. If you think about it, the world was just coming out of the 60’s which was the decade of the musical. West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Oliver all won best picture in the 60’s, and there were many more that came out as well. I wonder if The French Connection and the 1969 winner, Midnight Cowboy weren’t a direct backlash to the colorful almost carnival-like spectacle that a musical often produces. Come one, even West Side Story has gang members doing grand jetés in the streets.  Not exactly gritty.

I felt the writing was confusing. Not only did the script run like a police report, (“We followed them here, then we waited outside for 2 hours, then we followed them there. They ate lunch. We stood across the street and froze. Then we followed them back to the hotel.”) but there was a lot of stuff that I didn’t understand. In the opening scenes of the movie, Doyle and Russo shake down a hood who has been dealing drugs in a bar. Doyle keeps asking him weird questions like, “Did you pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?” I found out later from reading about the movie that he was just doing that to throw the guy off guard with crazy questions.  How the hell was I supposed to know that? Was I just supposed to intuitively figure that out?

Strike three: the movie made me feel dumb. And it was full of stupid lines like this:

DOYLE

Apparently these guys talk like this.

Whatta you say we wait and give him

a tail?

RUSSO

Give who a tail?

DOYLE

The greaser with the blonde.

RUSSO

What for -- you wanna play Hide the

Salami with his old lady?

Who talks like this? Do people really talk like this? Please tell me people don’t talk like this.

It's hard to look tough in a LeMans.

There was a badass car chase, although probably not as much fun as Steve McQueen’s in Bullitt. A car chase is made cooler by the car you do it in. McQueen had a Mustang.  (Heh. James Bond had a damn tank in Goldeneye.) Poor old Doyle had a crappy ugly brown Pontiac. However, that the car chase was one of the highlights of the film, and I did gasp in a few places, and dig my nails into my palm – especially when the lady with the baby carriage pops up in front of him.

So the movie gets three strikes from me. In baseball, that means you’re out. I don’t know what that means in the movies. It probably isn’t good though.

All right, I’ve said my piece. You are welcome to 5 minutes of rebuttal. And….begin!

~Anna

Up next: The Sound of Music (1965)