Gene Hackman | French Connection [VHS] | Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider

The Dangers Of Picking Your Feet In Poughkeepsie... | French Connection [VHS] | Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider

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	• French Connection [VHS] Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider 20th Century Fox, 1992 average customer review:based on 131 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Classic

The absolute brillance of French Connection is not the story, a pretty straightforward one about an obseesed cop and a drug dealer. The absolutle brillance is in the story telling.

From the word go, we do not follow the story as much as feel it. Detectives Doyle and Grasso start their tail of a drug dealer on a hunch late at night and this extends-unexpectedly-to morning. Both detectives are cold and tired, told by the slow walks and rubbing of worn eyes. "Its eight in the morning." Grasso jabs at Doyle, and you hear the break in his voice.

The pursit continues as "the frog" comes from France. In probably one of the most viceral scenes ever filmed, the drug smuggler takes his connection to lunch in a gourmet resturant and the detectvies wait outside. They eat cold pizza and drink watery coffee. Doyle has to move his feat to avoid numbness. He blows into his gloves and rubs his hands together. Suddenly, we as viewers start to feel cold.

All this materfully conveyed viceral detial is not a flash of technique. Undercover is exausting, frustratining work, and this is told by Friendkins use of micropoints. He shows us how cops burn out.

Friendkin may be our best director not because of what he shows us but how he makes us feel what he shows. He is the only filmaker I know that can make me feel tactile sensations the way most great autaurs make me feel emotions. Scorcesee may be more consistent and yes, I have never seen Martin shoot a frame that did not have perfect composition and more texture in one shot than most commercial features pack in one film. He is by far our America's most consistent film genius. But if I want to feel cold during a summer heatwave, I go to Freidkin.

French Connection takes paitiance, especially by today's quickie cut MTV editing standards. But with Friendkin, the message is in the medium, and if younger viewers can adapt to the slower pace of this 1971 film and wait with Doyle and Grasso, their effort will be 100 fold rewarded

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Gene Hackman

One of the classic cop movies of all time. Keeps moving with plenty of action. Never forgot the name Popeye Doyle.

The Dangers Of Picking Your Feet In Poughkeepsie...

Back in the days before the Oscars were hijacked by politically correct pressure groups who were only interested in rewarding boring films that promoted their tedious agendas and concerns, there were a few years in the seventies when they actually rewarded films that were well-written, well-shot and well-acted pieces of drama which, more importantly, said something valuable about the human condition regardless of how unseemly, politically incorrect or unfashionable such statements or observations might have been.

William Friedkin's "The French Connection" was such a film.

Friedkin freely adapted the exploits of Eddie "Popeye" Egan and Sonny Grosso - two New York cops who, through a mixture of tenacity, intellect and plain old-fashioned hard work, managed to bust a highly lucrative narcotics pipeline that was flooding the boroughs of New York with Heroin - into a superlative example of the police thriller and a masterclass in film-making. The film itself is essentially a police procedural in which NYC Narcotics detectives Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) initially become aware of a new player on the drugs scene after noticing something amiss whilst drinking in a bar, and then track their way back along the chain of dealers, traffickers and money-men to the source, Gallic Narcotics trafficker and former Marseilles Longshoreman, Alain "Frog One" Charnier (Fernando Rey) - who is gearing up to import a vast shipment of smack into the US.

What sets Friedkin's film apart from the numerous scores of predecessors and imitators was it's absolute commitment to reality: Hackman's Doyle is a hard-bitten, unflinching, bully of an obsessive who is only too happy to beat a suspect up in an alleyway if it will get him one step closer to the object of his quest and it is his increasing obsession with collaring the elusive "Frog One" that eventually becomes the focus of the film; the final devastating moments illustrating to both his shocked partner and the audience just how far along the path of darkness he is prepared to go in order to make his collar. Neither Friedkin nor Hackman shy away from depicting what "Popeye" Doyle 'is' and I cannot imagine that a major studio in this day and age would release a film featuring the plentiful depictions of Afro-Americans being systematically harassed by the Police that appear in this film. Similarly, Friedkin's commitment to almost Verite-style location shooting manages to capture New York in all of it's recession-blighted early seventies dilapidation. It looks like the last place on the Earth that you'd want to make your home and is the stark antithesis of the kind of whimsically nostalgic portrayal of the city recently screen in the terrible, execrable US remake of "Life On Mars".

In terms of acting, Hackman and Scheider have never been better than they are in this film and make possibly the most realistic cop duo to ever grace the screen. The respect, tolerance, weariness and latent antagonism of two men who have spent a considerable amount of time watching each other's backs is there for all to see. In opposition to many of today's so-called screen actors, they 'show', they don't 'tell'.

"The French Connection" is a brilliant film that quite rightly garnered 'best director' and 'best actor' Oscars for Friedkin and Hackman respectively in 1972.

If you have any interest in cinema, consider it a must-see and pick up this lavish two-disc edition package.

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Political Correctness must have been invented after 1971

As long as you're not easily offended, there's a lot to enjoy in this gritty film. No doubt aided by Friedkin's background in documentary filmmaking, the handheld cameras are reminiscent of later works by Paul Greengrass (director of the second two Bourne movies).

Seven bucks for the Two-Disc Collector's Edition? Ridiculously good deal. Includes a full-length commentary by the director, plus commentary snippets from Hackman and Scheider. Also a couple documentaries, deleted scenes, and more.

I don't like DVD cover but that's just nitpicking. The one from the Blu-Ray release is better, but from what I've heard, the content itself on that release isn't.

FYI the sequel isn't even in the same league.

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Sonny Grosso

The second DVD- "Making Of The French Connection" really adds a lot of depth the particulars of making this film.

William Friedkin's classic policier was propelled to box-office glory, and a fistful of Oscars, in 1972 by its pedal-to-the-metal filmmaking and fashionably cynical attitude toward law enforcement. Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle, a brutally pushy New York City narcotics detective, is a dauntless crime fighter and Vietnam-era "pig," a reckless vulgarian whose antics get innocent people killed. Loosely based upon an actual investigation that led to what was then the biggest heroin seizure in U.S. history, the picture traces the efforts of Doyle and his partner (Roy Scheider) to close the pipeline pumping Middle Eastern smack into the States through the French port of Marseilles. (The actual French Connection cops, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, make cameo appearances.) It was widely recognized at the time that Friedkin had lifted a lot of his high-strung technique from the Costa-Gavras thrillers The Sleeping Car Murders and Z--he even imported one of Costa-Gavras's favorite thugs, Marcel Bozzuffi, to play the Euro-trash hit man plugged by Doyle in an elevated train station. There was an impressive official sequel in 1975, French Connection II, directed by John Frankenheimer, which took Popeye to the south of France and got him hooked on horse. A couple of semi-official spinoffs followed, The Seven-Ups, which elevated Scheider to the leading role, and Badge 373, with Robert Duvall stepping in as the pugnacious flatfoot. --David Chute

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