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
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