The French Connection - Film Review

A classic. It was also one I had missed. The film was originally released in 1971 and was a film that cemented Gene Hackman as a force to be reckoned with. It created a character that won Hackman an Oscar for Best Actor.

It was a film that I had heard of, knew little about other than it was a film everyone should have watched!

The first thing that struck me was it was very definitely of its time. The racial language and approach to policing for a start. Now that's not to say modern movies don't have race as a theme or negative racial words are used, but this seemed different. It would be something that would have been re-worded for today, I am not saying re-written as such but how the characters approach a scene would be very different, Gene Hackman did however have trouble saying Doyles racist language without cringing. I know that policing on film is also very different to actual police procedure and approach, but the portrayal of the renegade cop who plays by his own rules is handled differently. Maybe it is that the more modern films are in some respect caricatures of these original films and people, even in the more serious versions. This then brings the question of can anything be original, but that is for another day, place and time.

Knowing about how films today can be edited even within a scene to get the best performances of an actor (there is a great video about how David Fincher does this) I want to highlight one of the opening scenes.

This chase down of a suspect and back street interrogation shows how and why Gene Hackman deserves his plaudits for the film, however about 1 min 40 seconds in Hackman is on a roll and Roy Scheider is clearly corpsing at the questioning of the suspect and "picking his feet in Poughkeepsie" (If you read the IMDB trivia page for the film you learn this was an actual tactic used but the detectives the film is based on).

A few scenes in and the movie feel more like parody than they probably should, and I think this comes down to the imitation of films such as The French Connection. If you don't see the original first, it can skew your appreciation of it when you get to it. Your own knowledge of what the film should do plays with what they were trying to do. My example here is the subway foot chase between Doyle and Charnier. The hopping on and off the subway, changing cars and trains feels almost comical now, but I know that was not the intention. It is because of it now appearing across multiple films, styles and genres that the gravitas and weight that was there for initial audiences is lost on the those of us getting to the film much later in it's life cycle. The same could be said of things like Jaws, Star Wars (Empire Strikes Back) and  James Bond. They are part of our culture and language even though we may not have seen those films. (Arguably that's the same on a greater scale with classic literature like Shakespeare).

It was not until the end that I realised that the film was based around some truth of actual events. It felt while watching it that it was "just a story" and did not do what many modern films now do to attract attention, or add weight to the subject matter by listing it as being based on a true story or true events. It does however list is as based on the book by Robin Moore and the screenplay of Ernest Tidyman.

This film is a classic and one that if you have missed you should rectify, it's on Netflix (UK) and I am sure elsewhere in the world. It has very famous scenes and set pieces that changed the world of cinema and what other film makers strive to do. It is because of the attempts to capture what Friedkin did with The French Connection that make it such a well known film through many other films and television series. That being said Friedkin himself credits other work (Z 1969) as an influence to the style of the film, and will undoubtedly contain conscious or unconscious references to that work.

Whatever the flaws are with this film today, they are only because it created it such a piece of history. That being said, while I enjoyed it, and it is something you need to watch to draw your own conclusions from, it has not made it into my top ten list of great films. It was enjoyable, it is a classic but I think there are many films that may have taken from it and improved what it started.