Product: French Connection [VHS] (1971)
Rating: 5.0
The Dangers Of Picking Your Feet In Poughkeepsie...
Back in the days before the Oscars were hijacked by politically correct pressure groups who were only interested in rewarding boring films that promoted their tedious agendas and concerns, there were a few years in the seventies when they actually rewarded films that were well-written, well-shot and well-acted pieces of drama which, more importantly, said something valuable about the human condition regardless of how unseemly, politically incorrect or unfashionable such statements or observations might have been.William Friedkin's "The French Connection" was such a film.Friedkin freely adapted the exploits of Eddie "Popeye" Egan and Sonny Grosso - two New York cops who, through a mixture of tenacity, intellect and plain old-fashioned hard work, managed to bust a highly lucrative narcotics pipeline that was flooding the boroughs of New York with Heroin - into a superlative example of the police thriller and a masterclass in film-making. The film itself is essentially a police procedural in which NYC Narcotics detectives Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) initially become aware of a new player on the drugs scene after noticing something amiss whilst drinking in a bar, and then track their way back along the chain of dealers, traffickers and money-men to the source, Gallic Narcotics trafficker and former Marseilles Longshoreman, Alain "Frog One" Charnier (Fernando Rey) - who is gearing up to import a vast shipment of smack into the US.What sets Friedkin's film apart from the numerous scores of predecessors and imitators was it's absolute commitment to reality: Hackman's Doyle is a hard-bitten, unflinching, bully of an obsessive who is only too happy to beat a suspect up in an alleyway if it will get him one step closer to the object of his quest and it is his increasing obsession with collaring the elusive "Frog One" that eventually becomes the focus of the film; the final devastating moments illustrating to both his shocked partner and the audience just how far along the path of darkness he is prepared to go in order to make his collar. Neither Friedkin nor Hackman shy away from depicting what "Popeye" Doyle 'is' and I cannot imagine that a major studio in this day and age would release a film featuring the plentiful depictions of Afro-Americans being systematically harassed by the Police that appear in this film. Similarly, Friedkin's commitment to almost Verite-style location shooting manages to capture New York in all of it's recession-blighted early seventies dilapidation. It looks like the last place on the Earth that you'd want to make your home and is the stark antithesis of the kind of whimsically nostalgic portrayal of the city recently screen in the terrible, execrable US remake of "Life On Mars".In terms of acting, Hackman and Scheider have never been better than they are in this film and make possibly the most realistic cop duo to ever grace the screen. The respect, tolerance, weariness and latent antagonism of two men who have spent a considerable amount of time watching each other's backs is there for all to see. In opposition to many of today's so-called screen actors, they 'show', they don't 'tell'."The French Connection" is a brilliant film that quite rightly garnered 'best director' and 'best actor' Oscars for Friedkin and Hackman respectively in 1972.If you have any interest in cinema, consider it a must-see and pick up this lavish two-disc edition package.