"The French Connection": review

So young: (L) a 1971-era Roy Scheider as Cloudy, and (R) Gene Hackman as a hard-bitten Popeye Doyle

[WARNING: spoilers for a 1971 movie.]

I rewatched a classic from the early 1970s: 1971's "The French Connection," a bleak detective drama directed by William Friedkin ("The Exorcist"—how have I never reviewed this?) and starring Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider, Fernando Rey, Tony Lo Bianco, Marcel Bozzuffi, Frédéric de Pasquale, Bill Hickman, and Arlene Farber. The movie is based on a non-fiction book by Robin Moore also titled The French Connection. The last time I saw this movie, I was just a kid in either junior high or very early high school; I had no idea what was going on, and I certainly wasn't fluent in French at that point in my life. Now, all of these decades later, I'm old enough to get the plot and to understand the French.

"The French Connection" takes its time in bringing our main characters together in New York: initially, the story is split between (1) detectives Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Hackman) and his partner Buddy "Cloudy" Russo (Scheider) in New York City and (2) drug-dealing bigwig Alain Charnier (Rey, speaking French with a strong accent) in the port city of Marseille, arranging a deal that will require the transport of millions of dollars of heroin across the Atlantic to the States. Charnier's reliable henchman/hit man is Pierre Nicoli (Bozzuffi); we initially see Nicoli take down a French detective in Marseille. Charnier and Nicoli are to come to the States via the same boat that is carrying French movie star Henri Devereaux (de Pasquale), who has no idea that the land yacht he's transporting across the ocean (he's traveling by boat to avoid phone calls; this is way before the era of cell phones) is already loaded with the heroin for the US-French deal. Devereaux is helping Charnier, but he doesn't know details. Charnier's Stateside contacts are Sal Boca (Lo Bianco), his young wife Angie (Farber), and big-time lawyer/buyer Joel Weinstock (Harold Gary). The characters all converge in New York City. 

Popeye Doyle has had hunches fail him before, and one bad hunch led to the death of another cop. He nevertheless becomes unshakably convinced that a huge drug deal is about to go down in his city. As he begins following tenuous leads up the food chain, he realizes that Boca, the small fry, can lead him to Weinstock. Once Charnier is on American shores, Popeye begins to follow the Frenchman, too, but Charnier is too savvy not to notice the attention; he and Doyle play a game of cat and mouse, with Charnier's henchman at one point doing his best to kill Popeye (you may remember the classic car-versus-subway chase for which the film is renowned). Popeye, at one point, manages to get hold of Henri Devereaux's huge car (in the 70s, all of the cars were huge, really), but after having it ripped apart, he's unable to find any evidence of drugs until his partner Cloudy realizes that the car's factory weight and its weight in Marseille are different by 120 pounds—with that same difference being reflected at the New York chop shop where the car is being taken apart. In other words: the drugs must still be hidden in the car. Energized, Popeye orders the rocker panels to be ripped out, and sure enough, they finally find the drugs—over $80 million worth. With the original car destroyed by its disassembly, a twin is found, and the drugs are placed back in the equivalent hiding place to allow the drug transaction to go down. The criminals apparently suspect nothing: they have no idea the cops now have definitive proof of the hidden drugs. Things come to a head when the police track the criminal parties down to where their international deal is to take place: on Wards Island in an abandoned factory complex. Police and FBI surround the criminals, have a gun battle, and try to chase the bad guys down, but Charnier himself gets away while Sal Boca is killed. Popeye accidentally kills one of the feds (Hickman); with the failure of the operation to net any big fish, Popeye and Cloudy are transferred out of Narcotics and reassigned elsewhere. It's not that Popeye's hunch had been bad: it's how the joint police-federal operation played out, with one fed dead and no prominent criminals caught. Of the criminals who did get arrested, we learn that most of them received little to no punishment.

I had serious questions about the story. Let's put aside the 70s-era racism and police brutality; most cop dramas of the period weren't shy about portraying lawmen as perpetually pissed off and not hiding it. Look at the Dirty Harry films of the time. Instead, let's concentrate on two major story problems: first, why did the cops put the heroin back in the car instead of impounding the drugs right away? The only answer I can think of is that they wanted the deal to go down so they could catch every party in a large dragnet. This makes little sense, though: they could have packed the car with fake heroin. Sure, it would have been discovered since the bad guys had brought along a crooked scientist as a purity tester, but this would only have prompted one side to shoot the other, making the criminals do the authorities' dirty work for them. Second: when Charnier tries to drive away, he finds himself facing a police blockade on only one side of the bridge he's on. He is thus able to turn his car around, flee back to the factory complex, abandon his car, and literally just run away from the ensuing gunfight. If this is a faithful portrayal of what happened in Robin Moore's book, then I'd have to say the feds and the New York police were abysmally stupid and utterly inept when it came to tactics. They didn't think to block the other side of the bridge once Charnier's car was halfway across? These two story problems took me almost completely out of the narrative.

Otherwise, the quality of the acting is fine. Hackman and Scheider both take to their roles with aplomb as, respectively, a jaded, slobbish, cynical cop and his cleaner-cut-yet-faithful partner. (Four years later, in 1975, Scheider would catapult to fame in "Jaws.") Having not seen "The French Connection" in decades, but remembering that Popeye accidentally shoots someone, I spent most of the movie convinced that Scheider's Cloudy would be the one to get gunned down in a moment of cosmic irony. The trope of the younger, loyal, earnest, ill-fated partner has been done to death by now. But Cloudy survives to the end: it's Agent Mulderig (Hickman), the asshole who kept busting Popeye's balls about having once gotten a good cop killed, who ends up buying it when Popeye mistakenly thinks Mulderig is Charnier. Charnier, meanwhile, is played by the actor Fernando Rey, who is Spanish. Rey speaks French for most of the movie, and he delivers his lines very clearly and correctly, as if he were comfortable with the language, but the adult me picked up on the fact that his French had a very heavy accent (I had to look up who he was to realize his accent was Spanish). Aside from that annoying quirk—that the filmmakers were trying to pass Rey off as a native-French character when he could have been rewritten to be an immigrant—Rey's Charnier makes for an excellent counterpart to Popeye Doyle. One of the great pleasures of "The French Connection" is watching these two spar. At first, we're not even sure whether Charnier knows he's being surveilled by Popeye, but as time goes on, it becomes painfully obvious that he's known from the beginning.

70s-era films didn't always have neat conclusions and happy endings. Whether the country was aware of this or not, the 70s ended up being an awkward, tacky bridge period between the agitated Sixties and the maniacally happy, artificially pastel-colored Eighties. "The French Connection," which came out in 1971, was consistent with the changing Zeitgeist. The movie portrays a grimy, hopeless, trash-strewn New York City full of racist cops who are, impossibly, the good guys of the story. Black characters in the movie serve as little more than background punching bags, and cops fling around terms like "dumb spic" and "greaser" as they interact with or talk about various ethnicities. Part of the problem may be the pervasiveness of the PC lens through which we see things these days, but part of the problem could well be that things really were as bad, back then, as Hollywood portrayed them. That said, I hope today's society doesn't try to hide or whitewash (what a term) these old movies. I also have to wonder why I find the racism of Hackman's character, Popeye Doyle, so repugnant while I easily give Clint Eastwood's various policemen and crotchety old men a pass. Maybe it really is all in the delivery. Or maybe, despite the fact that Gene Hackman was always a better actor than Eastwood, Eastwood adopted an ironic pose more naturally than Hackman ever did. Any racist thing uttered by an Eastwood character is thus guaranteed to be freighted with layers of self-subverting meaning or, at least, a good measure of irony. In this movie, Hackman's Popeye just comes off as a nasty brute, especially whenever he interacts with black people.

"The French Connection" still hits hard even today; it must be a Friedkin film. The language is a bit dated ("pick your toes in Poughkeepsie"), but it's still rough and raw; the no-holds-barred portrayal of New York City as a collapsing shithole feels apt; the movie's musical soundtrack is scarce almost to the point of nonexistence, with long silences; but the movie retains its gritty, rough-edged charm despite the aforementioned major story problems. William Friedkin's cold, stark direction revokes any notion or hope of comfort, and the story ends in such a way as to confirm that any justice won't come until the afterlife. Like Friedkin's later film "The Exorcist," this movie affirms that this realm here below is a hell, and dark powers freely roam it. That said, I think I'd recommend "The French Connection" more for its cultural significance than for its story or entertainment value. It's definitely watchable, but it's also far from perfect—uncomfortably similar to Popeye Doyle himself.