Product: French Connection [VHS] (1971)
Rating: 3.0
I used to love this movie; now I wonder what I saw in it...
For years, I loved the weird music and the pacing of this movie. The scene where they're stewing over why the car weighs too much and how to find the hidden stuff. The fantastic setup of the ending. And the City of New York---so gritty and ugly-beautiful. This movie showed me the New York visual that I remembered from when I was a kid. New York itself as another actor in the movie...essential stuff. Image upon image piling up. Winning me over. Taking me along.Trouble is, I hadn't bothered to see this movie from the true beginning of the film for quite a few years...I seemed to always be picking up on this movie on TV when it was about 30-45 minutes in. So I always saw it at its best. When I finally watched it right from the beginning four or five years ago, after I bought the movie for myself, I was appalled at how tissue-paper much of this movie's emotional heart was: Popeye Doyle is an obsessed character without depth or even much intelligence. He has very little personality---just a mouth, really. Roy Scheider is decorative and a supporter of Doyle, a bit of a Greek chorus to Doyle's schemings, but not much else. The racism and general bullying nature of the Popeye character is painful and even embarrassing to me now...why did I ever like this movie? The humanity is entirely missing. It's just cars, buildings, music. When Doyle pleads his case ("let me do this, I know I can do it", his superiors don't care. I find that I don't care either. He isn't convincing. He's just a mouth under a hat. Why DO they let him? We never really see why. He just DOES it. No one discusses anything. It all just happens. (I know this is Friedkin's style, but it's not working for me in this movie anymore. I've grown up.)Hmmm. The movie's good points now? It's a tarnished idol. A time-slice, the first of its gritty cop-movie, fast-paced, tell-it-like-it-is, don't stop for breath, chase-scene kind, admittedly. But to weigh its merits now presents a true dilemma. As long as I don't watch it from the beginning, it's pretty good. Maybe even more than that, at times. It has much of the old gritty magic...but it isn't worth the "it's a masterpiece" rhetoric anymore. It has spooky-good bits but a lot of that has to do with the marriage of the visual pace with the occasional musical score; it supplies a disjointed but jarring emotional link that the characters themselves cannot give you, they are too disaffected.This movie's early scene featuring NYC gritty cop reality laced with racial bullying just makes me feel bad and embarrassed as a white person, frankly. And as horrible as drugs and heroin and the overall heroin trade seem to me (and always has), I just don't think society cares about getting rid of it to the extent that it once did. So that single-mindedness seems kinda crazy now, kinda Hollywood-exaggerated. There's just too many other crises to deal with that are Level 10 nowadays. And the later bit about Doyle commandeering the citizen's car just seems...delusional and a total classic authority-gone-mad-power-trip from the past, representative of when cops and officials were allowed to do whatever they pleased, seemingly...yeah, a cop can just run into the middle of the street and stop somebody, pull them bodily out of their car, jump into their car, drive it away, smash it up, and it's OK...police business...he's just being a cop. It makes this movie's car-chase seem like a slice of bad 70s TV...and it's probably this exact movie that inspired much of the bad 70s cop crap we had to watch back then.Now, I don't have any sentiment against cops. The opposite of that, if anything. I respect them and thank God they're there. Always have. But Popeye Doyle is an embarrassment from an embarrassing, notoriously corrupt era, and I don't think you should bother with this movie unless you realize it is very dated now. Man, that bit where Doyle goes in the bar and insults and slaps around all the black drug dealers in there (because every single person in the crowded bar is both black and automatically assumed to be a drug dealer, of course!) just makes me cringe. And I never thought I was a knee-jerk type of PC person. I figured I could get the subtext and overcome the other stuff...but it's too stark to me now, I can't overcome it. It's garbage, that scene practically a ficto-documentary of police abuse and disrespect to black men, and has no merits other than its telling of a bad, sad, nasty time in this nation's history. The scene ACTUALLY MADE ME FEEL BAD FOR THE DRUG DEALERS, if that's possible! And I don't want to be feeling bad for drug dealers. I want to hate them...this movie makes me hate Doyle instead. I find that grotesque somehow, a real failure---but at this point in my life, I can tell it is not my personal failure; the failure is in this movie. And I've had years to find this out, I've outgrown easy emotions. The Doyle character, at least as portrayed in this movie, is just not worth watching. (I like, even love Gene Hackman in so many other movies: The Conversation, Hoosiers, Downhill Racer, Get Shorty...even as Lex Luthor...he's nearly always worth watching, at times even fascinating to watch.)Yeah, I guess you could say I'm a little disillusioned about this movie. I can still enjoy To Live And Die in LA, though...