THE FRENCH CONNECTION 1&2 REVIEW

THE FRENCH CONNECTION/ FRENCH CONNECTION 2 REVIEW

10/10 – OSCAR BAIT
9/10 – EXCELLENT
8/10 – BRILLIANT
7/10 – VERY GOOD
6/10 – GOOD
5/10 – AVERAGE
4/10 – WATCHABLE
3/10 – POOR
2/10 – SLOW
1/10 – AWFUL
0/10 – UNWATCHABLE

THE FRENCH CONNECTION – 10/10
"The French Connection" is routinely included, along with "Bullitt," "Diva" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark," on the short list of movies with the greatest chase scenes of all time. What is not always remembered is what a good movie it is apart from the chase scene. It featured a great early Gene Hackman performance that won an Academy Award, and it also won Oscars for best picture, direction, screenplay and editing.The movie is all surface, movement, violence and suspense. Only one of the characters really emerges into three dimensions: Popeye Doyle Gene Hackman, a New York narc who is vicious, obsessed and a little mad. The other characters don't emerge because there's no time for them to emerge. Things are happening too fast.The story line hardly matters. It involves a $32 million shipment of high-grade heroin smuggled from Marseilles to New York hidden in a Lincoln Continental. A complicated deal is set up between the French people, an American money man and the Mafia. Doyle, a tough cop with a shaky reputation who busts a lot of street junkies, needs a big win to keep his career together. He stumbles on the heroin deal and pursues it with a single-minded ferocity that is frankly amoral. He isn't after the smugglers because they're breaking the law; he's after them because his job consumes him.Director William Friedkin constructed "The French Connection" so surely that it left audiences stunned. And I don't mean that as a reviewer's cliché: It is literally true. In a sense, the whole movie is a chase. It opens with a shot of a French detective keeping the Continental under surveillance, and from then on the smugglers and the law officers are endlessly circling and sniffing each other. It's just that the chase speeds up sometimes, as in the celebrated car-train sequence.In "Bullitt," two cars and two drivers were matched against each other at fairly equal odds. In Friedkin's chase, the cop has to weave through city traffic at 70 m.p.h. to keep up with a train that has a clear track: The odds are off-balance. And when the train's motorman dies and the train is without a driver, the chase gets even spookier: A man is matched against a machine that cannot understand risk or fear. This makes the chase psychologically more scary, in addition to everything it has going for it visually.The movie was shot during a cold and gray New York winter, and it has a doomed, gritty look. The landscape is a waste land, and the characters are hardly alive. They move out of habit and compulsion, long after ordinary human feelings have lost the power to move them. Doyle himself is a bad cop, by ordinary standards; he harasses and brutalizes people, he is a racist, he endangers innocent people during the chase scene (which is a high-speed ego trip). But he survives. He wins, too, but that hardly matters. "The French Connection" is as amoral as its hero, as violent, as obsessed and as frightening.The key to the chase is that it occurs in an ordinary time and place. No rules are suspended; Popeye's car is racing down streets where ordinary traffic and pedestrians can be found, and his desperation is such that we believe, at times, he is capable of running down bystanders just to win the contest. I had an opportunity at the Hawaii Film Festival in 1992 to analyze the sequence a shot at a time, using a stop-action laserdisc approach, at a seminar honoring the work of the cinematographer, Owen Roizman. He recalled the way the whole chase was painstakingly story-boarded and then broken down into shots that were possible and safe, even though actual locations were being employed. Lenses were chosen to play with distance, so that the car sometimes seemed closer to hazards than it was. But essentially, the chase looked real because its many different parts were real: A car threads through city streets, chasing an elevated train.The other key element in the film, of course, is Hackman. He was already well known in 1971, after performances in such films as "Bonnie and Clyde," "Downhill Racer" and "I Never Sang for My Father." But it's probably "The French Connection" that launched his long career as a leading character sta r-- a man with the unique ability to make almost any dialogue plausible. As Popeye Doyle, he generated an almost frightening single-mindedness, a cold determination to win at all costs, which elevated the stakes in the story from a simple police cat-and-mouse chase into the acting-out of Popeye's pathology. The chase scene has, in a way, been a mixed blessing, distracting from the film's other qualities.

FRENCH CONNECTION II – 10/10
Popeye Doyle, the New York narc created by Gene Hackman in "The French Connection," was the most compelling of characters, a man driven by violent hungers that had little to do with his job as a cop. He needed the violence, maybe, to survive the toughest beat in town. He had such presence, such a capacity to explode, that when he ran a bust on a bar, the patrons -- pretty tough themselves -- were actually intimidated. Popeye was something unique among film characters, and Hackman deserved the Oscar he won for the performance.But whatever Popeye was, he wasn't a clown, and that's what he comes disturbingly close to looking like in "French Connection II," John Frankenheimer's continuation of the story. This isn't really a sequel, it's a fresh start with the same character, and it's not a rip-off of William Friedkin's 1970 film. It leans over backward, indeed, to avoid yet another version of that car-train chase that inspired so many imitations. Frankenheimer apparently wanted to get inside Popeye, to understand him more completely. But if that was his purpose, then he made a mistake by moving the action from New York to Marseille.Frankenheimer obviously knows Marseille, and his portrait of the city is sharply seen. But it's not Popeye's city, and that's the trouble. On his own turf, Popeye either ran things or knew what made them run. In Marseille, he's hopelessly stranded -- an awkward, confused, highly visible American with that silly little porkpie hat and about three words of French. He's been sent to Marseille (very implausibly) to capture the Frenchman of the first movie, the master criminal of the heroin trade. But this far from home, he can barely function as a tourist, much less as a cop, so the movie shows him in a different light than the original Doyle.
He has conversations with the French that apparently are inspired by Mark Twain's assertion, in 'The Innocents Abroad,' that anyone can understand English if it is spoken slowly enough and loudly enough. He has run-ins with local cops, who assign him a desk next to the men's room and won't let him carry his pistol. He plunges into the case with the grace of a beached whale, and in no time at all, he's been kidnaped by the heroin smugglers. With exquisite irony, they keep him a prisoner by hooking him on heroin.And then we get an extended central section of the film devoted to Hackman's addiction and (after the French cops get him back) his cold-turkey ordeal. There's a lot of good acting here by Hackman, who leaves no emotion unchurned, and there are good laughs in a virtuoso sequence (written by an uncredited Pete Hamill) in which he gets drunk and launches into a discussion of the New York Yankees with his uncomprehending guards. But the movie comes to a standstill. The plot, the pursuit, the quarry, are all forgotten during Hackman's one-man show, and it's a flaw the movie doesn't overcome.We find it a little difficult to get involved in the plot anyway, since it's a bit confusing. I may be impenetrably dense, but I couldn't figure out what was being carried around in the white flight bags that seemed so important (money, I guessed, but I wasn't sure). And I was thrown off the pace by a scene in which Hackman, trying to order Scotch from a French bartender, has no luck.Now every French bartender knows the English word "whisky," thank heaven, because the French use the same word. So when the bartender didn't understand, I figured he was deliberately playing dumb -- especially since he inexplicably seemed to understand what Hackman was saying when he offered to buy the bartender a drink. It's a trap, I thought. But it wasn't. It was just a loophole.Scenes like that, with the audience invited to laugh at Popeye's discomfort, just don't feel right. Here's a guy whose competence, whose ability to function at a gut level, whose street instincts made him a new and original kind of movie cop. And now he's being used for comic relief and stripped of his dignity. I kept wondering why "French Connection II" hadn't stayed on location in New York, where Popeye belonged, instead of going to Marseille, a place it's patently clear no sane superior would ever send him.The movie does have a nice sense of place, though, and the Hackman performance, and a final sequence in which Popeye runs and runs and RUNS and finally nails the Frenchman in a tight little shocker of an ending. If Frankenheimer and his screenplay don't do justice to the character, they at least do justice to the genre, and this is better than most of the many cop movies that followed "The French Connection" into release. It's an indication, in a way, of how certain kinds of stock characters have been remade in the last five years. After "The French Connection" and "The Godfather," with their deeply felt under standing of cops and gangsters, the old stereotypes just won't do anymore. They're silly and we've seen the real thing.