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11

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

2

The power of great location shooting.

10

this is dirty as hell and the criminals are so sleazy I love it. there are too many locations that I would hang out in to count! I think that if I were living in nyc in the 70s I would totally have done shady shit by the docks

19

“I go with my partner.”

Behind every great filmmaker are a great many capable people making countless contributions both great and small and often unsung. Every now and then, these ingredients come together in just such a way as to make something timeless. With that in mind, one may wonder why they don’t make movies like this anymore. More to the point, one should wonder why they never, ever made a movie quite like this again. And the answer comes down largely to legality. 

NYPD Detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, upon whom the two main characters are based, took a liking to director William Friedkin, granting him access and, when necessary, providing him with cover as he raged around…

27

For what? All that trouble and for what? That's the bitter feeling you're left with after watching The French Connection, an intricately framed, austerely striking crime thriller that quickly reaches a boiling point and keeps going at an unrelenting pace until it plainly but painfully deflates. It is a turbulent and feverish observation of one's obsessive behavior, an obsession that becomes consuming for its bearer as it is viewed from a distance, through a safety net. The invisible safety net consists of an impartial perspective that implies active examination rather than immersion, thus placing the characters in closer inspection while still allowing for tension and anticipation to build up.

A veritable auteur with a specific vision, William Friedkin sews this…

Review by brendan o'hare ★★★★½

I once chased an elevated subway train with my car like Gene Hackman (going way over the speed limit, hitting other cars, running into things, etc.) because I thought I saw Jerry Seinfeld riding inside. Turns out it was just an ad for Seinfeld. Live and learn

5

84/100

Cinema as volatile documentation, ready to explode at any moment. Its streamlined, relentless brilliance comes from its clear-eyed setup and the subsequent payoff of the mystery and those in pursuit. In of form, it's evident how influential all of it is. One obvious example is Mad Max: Fury Road, especially in how it throws an audience into an unique environment while never being told anything directly. It's all visual, shooting out gestures and clues but never spoon-feeding any information to the viewer. And like George Miller's recent masterpiece, The French Connection is a shot of adrenaline first and foremost, beginning with the prospect of action and ending with the elegiac aftermath.

6

Man, I hate all the CGI bullshit these days. More movies should attach cameras to the front of cars and illegally drive them down major roads at 90mph. smh

5

Probably the loudest crime procedural ever made until Michael Mann started making movies and even then it still might be. Not sure what else there is to be said about Friedkin's surprise Oscar-darling which effectively realized pretty simple journalistic cops-and-crooks/cat-and-mouse material about a real-life NYC drug bust as an austere and unsentimental Jean Pierre-Melville Eurocrime thriller had his films been stripped of their "cool" handsome style and shot like a handheld work brute force vérité docufiction. Owen Roizman's authentically textured guerilla photojournalist cinematography around the incredibly 70s New York grime-and-garbage street location shooting is unbelievable, Don Ellis' ominously screechy and clanging avant-garde jazz score is so haunting, Gene Hackman's rightfully acclaimed performance as the NYPD narcotics detective "Popeye Doyle" as…

2

The way minorities are treated in this is just terrible. Those poor French people, no wonder they're always so anti-American.

6

just can't get over how uncomfortably close Roy Scheider's name is to Rob Schneider

2

68/100

[Originally written on my blog.]

A first-rate procedural that also aspires to serve as a compelling character study and never really quite gets there. Apart from the random "pick your feet in Poughkeepsie" bit, Popeye Doyle is kept far too busy doing actual police work to establish a personality more distinct than generic hothead, which makes the film's last few seconds feel like a Hail Mary bid for psychological depth—Friedkin and Hackman just haven't earned an ending that startlingly unresolved. (It's still kinda thrilling, though, especially when you consider that this was a box-office smash and Best Picture winner. Them were the days.) All of the standout sequences function virtually without regard to the dramatis personae: You could put…