The French Connection

Released in 1971, The French Connection was part of the post-hippy hardedged wave of films including The Godfather and Serpico that did a hard reset on American, and especially New York, cops and robbers police procedurals. This movie, directed by William Freidkin and written by Ernest Tidyman from Robin Moore’s novel, revels in the mundane emotions of a cop’s job, the long stretches of boredom punctuated by a foot chase that leaves everyone heaving for a breath and imperfections generated by base emotions like jealousy and spite, as well as the dirt and hassles which pervade modern American urban life.

Gene Hackman stars as NYPD Detective Poppy Doyle along with Roy Scheider as his partner Det. Cloudy Russo, Tony Lo Bianco as Sal Boca and Fernando Rey as Alain Charnier; Marcel Boffuzzi has a great cameo as Charnier’s muscleman Pierre Nicoli and Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, the real life cops whose exploits were the basis of the film, also have small parts.

Doyle has about exhausted the patience of his boss and squadmates in the Narcotics Bureau, not to mention his liver’s capacity to clean booze from his blood when he notices a small time hood called Sal Boca throw around serious cash having dinner and drinks with some far larger fish. On a hunch he and Russo tail Boca and his wife, only to see them switching cars and scrambling to get home in time to open the greasy spoon they run in Queens. “Exercising discretion” the stay on Boca for a few more days until he meets up with Joel Weinstock, a man known for financing major drug deals.

This is enough, barely, to get their Lieutenant’s approval for a bigger operation with the FBI drug squad. Meanwhile, Boca really is trying to put together a French drug connection with Charnier, a Marseille mob boss, with financing from Weinstock. Staking out Boca brought Charnier onto their radar but he’s wily and experienced at detecting a tail.

Hackman establishes the screen persona here that he went on to use so effectively over his long, acclaimed career, ornery, convinced of his own correctness and resentful of authority and so it isn’t too surprising that he won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance. Scheider is also good playing the softer, suffering partner, willing to take risks and still clean up after Doyle and he was nominated for Supporting Actor but lost to Ben Johnson (for Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show). Rey and Boffuzzi are also really effective and Lo Bianco does well with, to be honest, the one major character not given much meat.

Friedkin and Tidyman also won Oscars for directing and adapted screenplay, respectively, and the movie took the Best Picture award for the producers. 36 years later much of what they accomplished here may seem less exciting but at the time was innovative; consider that three of the other Best Picture nominees were The Last Picture Show, Nicholas and Alexandria and Fiddler on the Roof, all quality films to be sure but nothing all that original, though the fifth was Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, which was even more creative and rush-inducing.

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