Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. The French Connection is the forty-fourth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. **The Sound of Music will be reviewed out of order so we can see it in theaters As much as media tends to fixate on the Oscars — this blog included! — the Academy Awards are rarely indicative of the very best in film and even less frequently instructive about the popular narratives of any given year. They are, however, interesting in what they reveal about Hollywood’s self understanding. The postwar period saw voters fascinated with the fall out of global Armageddon, with some distance filmmakers were won over by comedy and musicals. In the seventies, the Oscar voters took a turn towards grittier stories about crime, corruption, con men and conflict. William Friedkin’s The French Connection transformed the police procedural into a sleazy, ground level thriller. Popeye Doyle (a wonderfully hapless Gene Hackman) is a New York City narcotics detective with a penchant for going rogue when he gets a strong hunch. It happens more often than his superiors would like and has landed him in hot water before. Now Doyle can’t shake the feeling that something big is about to go down in the drug market. As he and his partner Cloudy Russo (Roy Scheider) track down leads, they find more questions than answers in a vast conspiracy involving ruthless French drug dealers. Friedkin took a unique tact when composing The French Connection, citing the political thriller Z as an inspiration to shoot the film as if it were a documentary. The result is fascinatingly kinetic. Hackman’s Doyle is frequently out of his depths and the camera reflects that uncertainty as it lurches around him. The detectives lurk in the background of wide shots as they fail miserably at tailing their targets. Everything from performance to cinematography to staging reveal the ineptitude of these characters. That is what works so well about The French Connection. Even though Doyle and Russo are hunting down dangerous drug traffickers, they are not the uncompromising heroes that had become so common in depictions of the police. At times the film takes a too much pleasure in its protagonists regular violence against racial minorities, particularly Black folks. These scenes are tough to watch, although Friedkin makes very clear that the cops are little more than violent buffoons. It is fascinating to watch a film plant itself in a hero-less gray area and marinate there. Within that gritty tone, The French Connection is full of fun set pieces. One of the very best moments involves a twist on a car chase in which Doyle is behind the wheel trying to run down an elevated metro train. Filmed mostly from the car’s front bumper and frame rated up, the chase is incredibly exciting. The cat and mouse between the cops and drug smugglers is also tremendously satisfying, particularly a moment where Hackman tries to follow the kingpin (Fernando Rey) onto a subway car. Not all of it works perfectly and the line Friedkin tries to walk between admiring and admonishing his characters gets a little too fine at times. As the detectives bumble their way deeper into this sting, there is a bit of repetitiveness to all the stakeouts and near misses. Inefficient police work certainly moves at a slower pace. Still, The French Connection is such a gritty deconstruction of heroic archetypes that permeated films in decades prior. Hackman plays Doyle as a dope who thinks he’s one of the hard boiled gumshoes in a classic noir. Its a phenomenally nuanced performance and one of the more interesting characters of the era. The combination of performance, direction and tone make The French Connection a riveting watch. 8/10
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