When Kevin suggested that he wanted to show William Friedkin‘s 1971 Oscar winner The French Connection, I insisted – absolutely insisted – that he had already shown it. Well, the beauty of keeping this website is that I could look back and establish that in fact nobody, Kevin or otherwise, had actually ever showed it. I’m pretty certain that I DVRed the film years ago and mixed up watching it by myself with watching it at movie night. At any rate, it has now been presented at movie night! So what’s the deal with this movie?
One of these is fried chicken, one of these is cauliflower
The film opens up with the murder of an undercover police officer in Marseilles by elements of a French heroin smuggling cartel. As the film introduces itself, we cut back and forth between France and New York City. We establish that Hackman’s narcotics officer Popeye Doyle is a grumpy, mean, probably racist stereotypical rule-breaker of an anti-hero, and that his partner, Scheider’s Russo, is…well, he’s…he’s in shot a lot of the time at least. Meanwhile in France, Fernando Rey’s “Frog One” has lined up a struggling French actor to assist on a heroin smuggling operation, which is pretty much exactly the sort of thing we would expect a heroin smuggling cartel to do. Would be kind of disappointing if they didn’t, really.
Anyhow, one night when Doyle and Russo are out for drinks, Doyle notices that some usual suspects are interacting with some other usual suspects or some such and he gets the idea that maybe there’s some narcotics operation going on. He convinces the appropriate powers that be to open up an investigation on a hunch, and is gifted not only with a surveillance warrant but also the assistance of Antagonistic Cop, who (soon enough, ironically) doesn’t like Doyle because apparently once upon a time one of Doyle’s hunches ended up getting a cop killed. That might actually indicate that Doyle’s hunches would tend to be right, but maybe that’s beside the point.
The Discreet Charm of the Proletariat
What follows feels like about an hour of investigation and tedious surveillance, where the clues come in slowly and confusedly, but at least we get the impression that Doyle is figuring something out and knows who he needs to follow for legitimate reasons. But outside of that completely irrelevant scene where Doyle decides to flag down a young woman riding a bicycle who seems perhaps a bit too young to appropriately handcuff him to his bed, it’s just kinda slow, gritty ’70s cop movie stuff.
For some reason, the smugglers don’t make the drop immediately but rather delay and delay and delay apparently on the pretense that they are concerned that they are being surveilled. Well, I guess that’s right, but it doesn’t really explain why the buyer and Frog One both travel to D.C. just to have a conversation which really only establishes why the movie has been so boring. I guess the Frog-One-Shakes-Doyle-By-Repeatedly-Getting-On-And-Off-The-Subway scene was mildly amusing.
Would somebody please think of the vegetables?!?
Eventually one of Frog One’s subordinates decides that he needs to murder Doyle to get the heat off. The murder attempt doesn’t take, and leads instead to what is usually referred to as one of the greatest car chases in movie history, where Doyle commandeers a vehicle and chases the subordinate, who has commandeered an elevated train. Eventually the train runs out of track, and Doyle is able to catch up to the subordinate, and murder him as he’s running away.
You might be forgiven for thinking this car chase should happen at the climax of the film, but there’s still plenty left to go. Anyhow, the police have apparently decided that the drugs must be hidden in the French actor’s car, so when he leaves the car in a bad neighborhood overnight, they stake out the car expecting it to be picked up. Well, it isn’t picked up, but some street hoods try to jack it, which gives the police an excuse to impound it temporarily and tear it to bits trying to find the heroin. They remove every screw on the vehicle. Every panel. They knife through every soft surface. And they find nothing. But Russo points out that the car’s impound weight was 200 pounds higher than the manufacturer’s specs, so the heroin has to be in there somewhere. Well, the literal only place I didn’t check is under the rocker panels, says the NYPD mechanic who apparently neglected to check in the one place the heroin actually was hidden in order to allow Russo to have a useful role in the film.
Why are they blockading a “Do Not Enter” zone?
So the police put the car back together, heroin and all (wouldn’t they want to seize the heroin, maybe?), and have it pretty much ready to go when the French actor arrives to complain about the impounding and pick up his car. But, man, you gotta give the mechanics some credit because they apparently sewed up all that upholstery they tore out real nice so that the actor doesn’t even notice. This happens all in one night!
Once the police give the car back, the actor hands it off to Frog One and they tail it almost immediately to an abandoned factory where the drop goes down. Now, you might think that after what would seem to be several months worth of delays stemming from concerns about police surveillance, the exact wrong time to make the drop would be fifteen minutes after recovering the heroin-spiked vehicle from a police impound, but maybe you don’t think like a hardened criminal. At any rate, when Frog One tries to leave the scene, he finds that the police have blockaded the only road out, and we’re set for the police raid and a confusing shootout where the only thing that definitely happens is that Doyle (accidentally?) shoots and kills Antagonistic Cop. Then, instead of a proper ending, we get some title cards telling us about dropped cases and distressingly short sentences and the fact that Frog One got away. Thanks, movie. The End.
The French Connection is widely regarded as one of the best movies of all time. It is not. I’m not even convinced that it is a good movie. I would field arguments that it’s not even a competent movie. Some of this may stem from the fact that one of my very least favorite film genres is the 1970s police procedural (so gritty! so real!), but notwithstanding that, few movies underperform the oversell more than this one. It’s boring, very little of it makes any sense in terms of what all parties do, what they know, and why they know it, and the few moments of interest are either completely irrelevant to the film (e.g. the gratuitous and probably creepy sex scene) or seem to happen at the wrong time and involve the wrong characters (e.g. the “epic” car/train chase – which really wasn’t that great…maybe it was great in 1971). The film ends in the middle of the climax (while hardly showing the climax) with literally no denouement, and proceeds to underscore how much of a waste of our time it was by telling us that basically all of the criminals involved in this huge, nay, record-setting heroin bust got off light or scot free or in the case of the leader of the operation inexplicably escaped. What was even the point of watching the movie? Maybe the worst sin of the film is that it’s a highly fictionalized version of real events – they had to make up almost the whole plot of the film (other than “French-connected huge heroin bust”) and this is what they came up with? Like, the only good thing about this movie is that it inspired the name of a pretty good fast food chain – Popeye’s Fried Chicken. Not a joke, unless Wikipedia is lying to me. (That has been known to happen.)
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 