44. The French Connection (1971)

Plot Intro

Two tough New York Police Detectives, Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Russo (Rod Scheider) start following a Suspicious Man called Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco). What they eventually discover is that Boca is tied into an elaborate operation in which a shipment of drugs are being smuggled into NYC from France, spearheaded by a French gangster named Charnier (Fernando Rey). The game of cat-and-mouse is on.

Doug says...

Oh dear, I don’t think I’m going to love the ‘70s. Last week was the abysmal Patton and this week is 1971’s thriller The French Connection. It’s a story about drug smuggling and French heroin dealers, with plenty of unrealistic car chases and a bad French man being chased by the still-not-good-but-less-bad American cops. 

So, I don’t hate it. It takes a long time to get going, and to be honest I couldn’t care less about any of the characters. But there’s a great scene on the train when a French baddie hijacks the train and the main policeman attempts to stop him, and there’s another bit in a nightclub where The Three Degrees (a Diana Ross-esque nightclub trio) sing a song ‘Everyone Gets To Go To The Moon’ with lyrics such as ‘it’s customary in songs like this to use words like spoon’. Beautifully surreal. 

The car chase scene (in the above mentioned hijacking of train) is considered the film’s highlight and it is a tremendous bit of cinematography. The camera is attached to the front of the policeman’s car (actually driven by stuntmen) which means that the cars that swerve out of the way and screaming nannies with prams that nearly get run over are real. It’s a great piece of footage - akin to the celebrated tracking shot in our very first film Wings (1927) which has a camera skim through multiple Parisienne couples at a cafe. 

But it’s not all great car chase scenes. I actually found the plot pretty dense and impenetrable at times. At one point there’s a sniper on the roof who randomly shoots a nanny dead. I’m still not sure why. And while I was able to figure out the ‘baddies’ and the ‘goodies’, I never quite knew any of their statuses or positions. And ultimately the film chooses to end quietly with no real catharsis. I felt this was because they were staying true to the real story (it’s based on a non-fiction book), but then I found out that the real story had far more resolution. 

And this feels like the issue. Like Midnight Cowboy, it’s trying to paint a grittier, ‘real’ picture of New York, but ultimately it becomes so fixated on showing you the grit that you end up not really caring about any of them. And while they may well be acting out against the sentimentality of the earlier decades, what transpires is that when you remove any semblance of heart from a film, you also remove the ability for viewers to stay interested. 

Highlight 

I did really enjoy the car chase scene. It was an engaging, thrilling piece of film work and is a really good example of how film can offer different things to theatre and other art forms.

Lowlight

I didn’t end up caring about any of the characters, and the captions at the film’s close wrapped up everything in a way that was meant (I think) to be melancholy, but actually came across a bit naff. 

Mark 

3/10 

Paul says...

Crime thrillers are something of a rarity at the Oscars. The Academy generally prefers to reward films with a strong social commentary and whilst crime films may point out that murder, drugs and assault are “bad”, they tend to place excitement over integrity and as a result, they become victims of the snobbery of prestigious award ceremonies. We’ve recently seen In the Heat of the Night, which tackled race relations in the same year that Martin Luther King got shot, and in the future we will be tackling The Silence of the Lambs and The Departed. But for now, I have one very big question to answer: why did The French Connection win?

To modern eyes, it’s a pretty simplistic crime film. Two policemen are chasing Bad Men. Classic 1990s equivalents such as the aforementioned Lambs and Se7en follow similar themes, but with some very intense character work. Se7en especially dissected Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman to Freudian proportions, and the film in general had big things to say about the darkest recesses of the human condition. The French Connection initially doesn’t appear to explore that kind of territory. Gene Hackman, who won Best Actor for this, displays the most potential analysis. He embodies a brutish, obsessive, racist misogynist with gusto. I get the impression that the audiences of the '70s would have enjoyed his rebellious, no-nonsense approach to police work. But in the 21st century, where we are far more conscious of police brutality, particularly towards ethnic minorities in the US, it’s difficult to support a character who takes pleasure in randomly searching black men for drugs, and verbally abusing them when he finds out that he is mistaken. 

I think the film won due to its stylistic element- something which we are seeing more of as plot becomes less relevant, and atmosphere is the order of the day. Like Midnight Cowboy, this is a cold, grey, ugly New York City. It’s visibly rotting and the whole film climaxes in one of the most dilapidated abandoned warehouses I’ve ever seen in film. The Big Apple is rotten to the core. Unlike Midnight Cowboy, the film is furiously edited, and I really enjoyed this. There are numerous lengthy sequences in which the police pursue the criminals on foot, and the rapid pace, the montage-like effects and the attempts by both forces to out-do each other are heart-racingly intricate. The best is when Charnier and Doyle move in and out of a train, with Charnier blatantly aware that Doyle is on his tail, but Doyle sweating over keeping the French gangster within eye sight. It’s one of the most tense moments I’ve seen so far in this project.

Add to this the infamous car chase, and attack from a sniper and the climactic assault on the criminal ring, and we have a film that has taken crime thriller into new territory. The '60s was fraught with James Bond-style action flicks where the hero is smooth and faultless, the women are Amazonian and the villain is a sultry Soviet psychopath. The French Connection brought realism into the genre - the heroes are almost as unpleasant as the villains and lack Sean Connery’s good looks; the women are just as awful and the criminal are simply a bunch of snivelling, money-hungry drug-pushers. As violence steams ahead in film, Hollywood has taken audiences out of colourful escapism into the grit of real life, and I think The French Connection won because it is symbolic of this turning point.

To conclude, I return to my initial statement that the main character is hard to support because he is, to put it bluntly, a disgusting human being. Throughout the film, whilst being gripped by the cat-and-mouse chases, I was struggling to figure out whom I am supposed to be behind. Would '70s audiences really idolise such awful policemen? Or am I supposed to hate everyone? The final two minutes (and this is no exaggeration) answered my question. I won’t divulge what happens, but there a couple of extremely unexpected events that, for me, turned the entire film on its head and showed me exactly what this film is about. This is a film about a man’s obsession with catching a criminal, not out of good will to society but out of a terror of un-masculine failure. It’s an obsession that drives him too far - and leaves his final fate obscure and dark.

For me, that final two minutes sky-rocketed the film from a middle-of-the-road outdated thriller into a thoughtful and surprising piece of work. And whilst its lack of humour makes The French Connection a bit of an acquired taste, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Highlight

The final 2 minutes threw me completely. I suggest that, even if you’re not enjoying the film much, focus on the plot and see if you change your mind at the last minute like I did.

Lowlight

I wasn’t massively convinced by the very ketchupy blood when people got shot. What is this, a media student’s film?

Mark

9/10

43. Patton (1970)

Plot Intro

It’s the height of World War II, and General George Patton (George C. Scott) is called in to command American troops stationed in Northern Africa, after a humiliating defeat in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia. His disciplinarian, tyrannical techniques prove controversial but (spoiler alert!) highly effective.

Paul says...

This is the first film since 1957’s high-scoring Bridge on the River Kwai to deal with the Second World War from the point of view of the soldiers. A lot has changed historically since then, and last week’s Midnight Cowboy displayed an attitude to America that was distinctly disenchanted and unpatriotic. So I was excited to see what a war biopic made at a time when the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon were under considerable fire had to say.

And Patton is extremely detailed. There are extensive explanations of army manoeuvres and internal politics between American, British and Russian commanding officers. Battles and events barely touched on in schools are re-enacted, and the attention to detail is so extreme that Scott even acted with the very ivory-handled pistols that Patton owned. Being a history geek, this had some appeal. I was interested in the same way that I would be interested if Louis Theroux were commenting on proceedings. 

But, and here’s the big problem with this film, it’s directed and written with such matter-of-factness and objectivity that it lacks heart. Did I feel anything at Patton’s various victories? Did I support him when he gave a rousing speech to motivate depressed soldiers? Did I hate him when he subjected some of them to nauseating abuse? No. I felt nothing. The film made no effort to bring historical events to life. They might as well have filmed a historical re-enactment society on a home camera and it would have the same effect. 

Another problem is the depiction of the central figure. Scott’s performance as Patton is the fulcrum around which the entire film revolves, and he’s vaguely memorable. I liked his calm-voiced menace when distributing orders, and his commanding of crowd scenes too. The famous opening speech which he delivers to the camera in front of a sprawling US flag has icon status and it’s probably the reason why he won Best Actor (he was the first actor to reject the award, calling the Oscars a “meat parade”). I was, however, expecting more complexity in the writing. Patton was jingoistic, egomaniacal and disgustingly unsympathetic to anyone he considered a coward. He slaps soldiers suffering PTSD, shoots farmers’ horses in the way of tanks, was convinced that he was the reincarnation of one of Napoleon’s army, and would have probably voted for Trump. The film depicts this but, surprisingly, maintains a sense of Patton being a hero - he gets all the speeches, all the glory, and I think we’re meant to laugh when he insults a Russian ally. History books (and by “books” I mean Wikipedia) will give you a far more ambiguous dissection of such a man. Bearing in mind that this was Richard Nixon’s favourite film, I get the sense that this film is not as critical of 1970’s politics as I hoped, and actually has nothing to say other than the usual Republican pro-American propaganda. 

Patton has won acclaim over the years, but I think this is from a predominantly American audience. It’s the same reaction that Darkest Hour has had from British critics- it’s a film about a national icon so it MUST be praised. I found it one-dimensional and slow-moving. But if you happen to share Britain First Facebook posts about respecting veterans, you’ll probably love it.

Highlight

The amusing scene involving some dogs - I’ll let Doug describe it in more delightful detail.

Lowlight

The battle scenes had so much more potential. Dunkirk, for all its faults, at least brought the audience into them so that you could not only see and hear it, but smell, taste and feel it too. Patton takes a more pedestrian approach and it doesn’t liven up the film no matter how much tanks get blown up.

Mark

3/10

Doug says...

I’ve been trying my best over the past couple of years - and especially in this project - to open up my mind and try and enjoy films I’d normally keep at arm’s length. And it has resulted in some delightful discoveries - Citizen Kaine was a fantastic film, and I found myself enjoying epics such as Lawrence of Arabia despite them being pretty far away from my usual viewing fare. 

But the one genre of film that I think I’m never going to warm to is war films. By war films I mean out-and-out, only-point-is-to-have-lots-of-gunfire, drawn out scenes where people talk about shooting each other, followed by scenes where the people shoot each other. And unfortunately for me, Patton is nearly three hours of the following: 

BANG CRASH BANG

[long technical scenes with really dull details and cardboard characters]

MORE BANG CRASH BANG

[more long technical scenes]

(Repeat ad infinitum)

So I dislike war films, this is a war film and nothing changed my mind. The main actor turns in I assume a good impression of Patton, but as Paul says, no one is likeable - or dislikeable. It’s incredibly dry and I spent most of the film on my phone, waiting for the dullness to end. 

What was good? Well, as Paul says, there’s a great scene with two dogs. And as I can’t be bothered to spend any more time talking about films with white army men wielding guns, here’s why the dog scene was so great. 

Firstly, Patton’s dog is a bull terrier, with the menacing glare, and Patton being your usual stereotype of toxic masculinity has decided he’s ‘William the Conqueror’ (don’t ask). But then he encounters a little fluffy poodle called Abigail. William snarls at Abigail, much to Patton’s pleasure, but then Abigail bears her teeth, growls right back and William slinks away, terrified. Patton renames him ‘Willie’ and Abigail’s little-old-lady owner approaches to apologise for Abigail scaring Patton’s big macho canine. 

Why is this scene great? Well, it’s not the best, but it’s the only scene I was remotely interested in, and featured two dogs, so I liked it. It just goes to show: if your film is dull, overlong and rambling on about Men With Guns (TM), you can always chuck a couple of dogs in and at least one of your scenes will be half bearable!

Highlight

Willie & Abigail, as above. I eagerly await a spin-off about their tempestuous will-they won’t-they relationship complete with cute puppies and a wise-cracking greyhound.

Lowlight

Yet another film about macho white men with guns, complete with millions of gunfights/bombs/etc etc. It’s so predictable and uninteresting that I had to immediately put on an episode of Ugly Betty to make sure the evening didn’t feel a waste. War films are my kryptonite. 

Mark

1/10