The French Connection

Director: William Friedkin

Release Date: 1971

Should this be on the list?
This may be one of the best action movies ever made, and certainly one of the first to fit into this genre. Most certainly.

Rating: 5 Stars out of 5

Would I watch this again?
Oh, yes.

It’s been about a week and (as of this moment) there hasn’t been any significant development in the death of Gene Hackman, who died at the age of 95. As a tribute, I figured this was the best place to start, the movie that truly made him a front-line star. Prior to this, he had been a great character actor and second lead, doing some great work in Bonnie and Clyde and I Never Sang for My Father, receiving Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor in each, but he never really got top billing until now. For his performance as Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, based on real-life detective Eddie Egan, Hackman received a Best Actor Oscar, and he continued to be one of best-known and respected actors in the business for another three decades after it.

Plot: Narcotics squad detectives Jimmy Doyle and his partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) are tracing a shipment of heroin from Marseilles, hidden in a car owned by a French TV personality. They trace the ring to Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), who they refer to as “Frog One.” As they recover the drugs and close in on Charnier, nothing goes as expected.

Certainly there’s a lot to like about this movie apart from Hackman’s virtuoso performance, not the least of which is the justly-famous “car chasing an elevated train” sequence, which is made all the more breathtaking when you realize that the movie’s director, William Friedkin, not only failed to get the proper permits for filming, but he filmed a good deal of it himself from the back seat, reportedly because the rest of his camera operators had wives and children and he did not.

But there’s a lot more than just car chases. Friedkin enlisted two great international actors to play the heavies: first, Fernando Rey, who was in between playing his usual avuncular scoundrels for Luis Buñuel, is playfully menacing as Charnier. For more movies with Rey at his best, you can’t beat The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which he would do the following year. The other actor, playing Charnier’s henchman Pierre, is Marcel Bozzuffi, the man notoriously pictured on the poster. The rather unassuming-looking Bozzuffi was a legend at playing bad guys, notably in Melville’s Le Deuxième Souffle, and perhaps as the worst of the worst in Costa-Gravas’ masterpiece Z.

One of my favorite things in this movie is jazz trumpeter Don Ellis’ soundtrack, a consistently churning, weird time-change-y bit of genius that adds so much to the flavor of this movie. Ellis lived too short a life and left us in the late 70s, but he left behind a good amount of music, especially around this time period. If you have Spotify (or anything like it), check out his Electric Bath album from 1967.

And then, of course, Gene Hackman, who dominates the movie.

I first saw this movie in college, when I was in the “I’ma get into film history with the least amount of money possible” phase of my education, renting whatever was available in the public library. At that time, I had only seen two movies with Gene Hackman: Superman, as Lex Luthor, which was a great performance, although more of a comedic role even though he was the chief antagonist; and Young Frankenstein, which was a cameo appearance that he did on a whim for scale. I remember when I first saw the latter movie and my Dad saying that he couldn’t believe that they got GENE HACKMAN of all people to play the Blind Hermit. I didn’t know why he said it at the time or why he said it in that way, until I saw The French Connection.

And then I saw it. He was a Colossus, intense, haunting, everything you think about when you think of a “serious actor.” For him to show a sense of humor, even a sense of playfulness, was almost unthinkable, but here he was, getting paid scale for a day of work in full hermit makeup because it was just too good to not do.

There’s a story about Mel Brooks showing the screenplay of Blazing Saddles to John Wayne. He apparently loved it, thought it was one of the funniest things he had ever read, but when it came to accepting the role of the The Waco Kid, he turned it down. It wouldn’t have fit his image.

But this was the start of a new Hollywood and a new set of rules, and what did Gene Hackman do a year after winning Best Actor at the Oscars? He went on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

There were stories of Hackman being extremely unpleasant to David Anspaugh, the director of Hoosiers, and to Wes Anderson when he was shooting The Royal Tennenbaums, and these are an unfortunate legacy, but he was much more than that. He may have been a pain at times, but he always did good work and always showed great range, even movies that he admittedly only did for the money. Since then, I’ve seen him in many other movies where he was just so, so good you can’t even believe it. Effortless.

That’s how I’d like to remember him.