Review of The French Connection (1971) by Tino R — 08 Nov 2010

This is a really interesting piece of cinematic history, though it is a bit hard today to see what made it so special at the time. It's a gritty, gray, realistic, downbeat story about cops and drug dealers.

Nothing in the film is glamorized, and everyone seems miserable. Basically, it was the first movie to do the sort of thing that the TV show The Wire recently got so much acclaim for doing. The one sensational bit everyone remembers is the famous car chase scene, which, while indeed exciting and well done, is not glamorous either: Popeye Doyle races heedlessly down the street in a car he just confiscated, running into several other cars and nearly running over a baby carriage.

He seems more crazy than heroic. The movie isn't really conventionally entertaining, but it's not going for that. The plot doesn't really matter much at all - it just serves as an excuse for this gritty, angry cop who has no life to pursue rich French gangsters like a mad dog.

I can see how this movie was enormously important, and its influence has been felt ever since in things as diverse as Martin Scorsese movies, Law & Order, The Wire, and Grand Theft Auto IV. Gene Hackman won the Oscar, I think maybe less for his actual performance than for playing a new type of protagonist.

Roy Scheider is just kind of there and bland as his partner. Oh, and the ending does definitely suck - it seems like they ran out of money. After all the action movies we've seen, this one no longer seems very exciting to us, but it is important to bear in mind how influential and innovative this movie was.