The French Connection ***** (1971, Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider, Fernando Rey, Tony Lo Bianco, Marcel Bozzuffi) – Classic Movie Review 2,040

William Friedkin’s legendary five-Oscar-winning 1971 movie The French Connection is one of the all-time great action thrillers, with a star-making, Oscar-winning star turn by Gene Hackman.

Director William Friedkin’s legendary multi-Oscar-winning 1971 movie The French Connection is one of the all-time great action thrillers, with a star-making, Oscar-winning star turn by Gene Hackman. It tells in fictional form the story of real-life New York City narcotics detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso.

In the movie’s stupendous fact-based police story, a pair of New York Police Department drug squad detectives Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle and Buddy ‘Cloudy’ Russo (played so memorably by Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider) stumble onto a drug smuggling job and back a risky hunch to try to bust an international drug-smuggling ring with a French connection.

This tough, exciting, now classic, thinking person’s action picture is sparked by Hackman’s brilliant, breathless performance as Popeye Doyle, which unexpectedly turned the 41-year-old character actor into a much-admired, enduring star, an essential ingredient in movies until his retirement in 2004 after Welcome to Mooseport.

The movie won five Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor (Hackman), Best Director (Friedkin), Best Film Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ernest Tidyman). It was nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Scheider), Best Cinematography (Owen Roizman) and Best Sound Mixing. Tidyman also received a Golden Globe Award, a Writers Guild of America Award and an Edgar Award for his screenplay.

Robin Moore’s 1969 non-fiction source book is based on a real narcotics bust in 1961, and Ernest Tidyman’s crackling screenplay makes a great piece of work out of adapting and fictionalising it. Tidyman’s script boasts a remarkably strong narrative drive and powerful dialogue, and a relentless zest for New York’s scumbag low-life. Friedkin’s direction is inspired and on fire, bringing all of Tidyman’s elements to the most vibrant life on screen.

The movie also has powerful stunts, effects and action, and, vitally, one of the cinema’s all-time great car chases, in which Hackman’s seemingly crazed Popeye is behind the wheel in full flight after a speeding subway train. Fernando Rey and Marcel Bozzuffi make fine villains, nearly as memorable as Hackman and Scheider. Rey plays Alain Charnier, a wealthy French criminal who runs the largest heroin-smuggling syndicate in the world, and Bozzuffi plays Charnier’s henchman Pierre Nicoli. Tony Lo Bianco also has a good role as Salvatore ‘Sal’ Boca.

The two real-life NYC Narcotics Bureau  cops on whom the leading characters are based, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, both have sizeable supporting roles. Don Ellis scores the music, and the film is produced by Philip D’Antoni.

French Connection II followed in 1975, with Hackman and Fernando Rey returning.

Friedkin recalled that the film’s documentary-like realism style was the result of having seen Costa-Gavras’s 1969 French film Z: ‘My first films were documentaries but I never thought you could do that in a feature at that time until I saw Z.’

Friedkin was living with Howard Hawks’s daughter at the time. Hawks told Friedkin his movies were ‘lousy’ and told him to ‘make a good chase. Make one better than anyone’s done.’

Friedkin was opposed to the choice of Gene Hackman as ‘Popeye’ Doyle, until Peter Boyle, Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, James Caan, and Robert Mitchum all turned it down.

In a mix-up, Fernando Rey was cast when the casting director contacted him instead of Francisco Rabal.

The cast are Gene Hackman as Detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle,  Fernando Rey as Alain “Frog One” Charnier, Roy Scheider as Detective Buddy ‘Cloudy’ Russo, Tony Lo Bianco as Salvatore ‘Sal’ Boca, Marcel Bozzuffi as Pierre “Frog Two” Nicoli, Frédéric de Pasquale as Henri Devereaux, Bill Hickman as FBI Agent Bill Mulderig, Ann Rebbot as Mrs. Marie Charnier, Harold Gary as Joel Weinstock, Arlene Farber as Angie Boca, Eddie Egan as Captain Walt Simonson, André Ernotte as La Valle, Sonny Grosso as FBI Agent Clyde Klein, Randy Jurgensen as Police Sergeant, Alan Weeks as Pusher.

William Friedkin (August 29, 1935 – August 7, 2023) directed The French Connection (1971), which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and for himself Best Director, and The Exorcist (1973), for which he was Oscar nominated as Best Director.

Gene Hackman (born January 30, 1930) won Best Actor as Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle in The French Connection (1971) and Best Supporting Actor as ‘Little’ Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992). His other Oscar-nominated roles are in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), I Never Sang for My Father (1970), and Mississippi Burning (1988).

Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2,040

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