The French Connection is an anomaly to me. It’s an action film that was named Best Picture. It probably had the least amount of dialogue of any Best Picture winner to date (except of course for the silent Wings). It had a grittiness and edginess that had really only been seen to that point in Midnight Cowboy. The villain in The French Connection is in some ways more likable than the hero, and he certainly is more sympathetic. Putting all of that together adds up to a film that is as deep as any Best Picture winner and as intriguing.
Ranked #70 on the original AFI list of the top 100 films of all time, The French Connection clearly is one of the all-time greats, and there isn’t just one particular thing that you can point to with this film that makes it great. Sure, everyone has seen the iconic scene where a maniacal Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) speeds through the New York City streets in pursuit of the train carrying the man who just tried to kill him, but it is the totality of this film, with its intricate storyline, its deep and complex characters and gritty cinematography that creates in this film the whole package.
One thing that struck me about this film is the juxtaposition of the hero and the villain. It actually reminded me of Die Hard. I was discussing that film with a colleague recently and we were both in agreement that it’s one of the greatest action films of all time. There are a lot of reasons we felt that way, but one of the reasons was the depth of the characters. The hero, John McClain, is a New York City cop visiting Los Angeles. He’s the classic fish out of water, and he’s brutish, blunt and vulgar. He never misses an opportunity to stare at the pinup of a topless girl every time he passes by and shoots first and asks questions later. He is very much an anti-hero. Then in Hans Gruber, we have a sophisticated, articulate, witty, and educated man of taste and style. He aims high, plans to the last detail and has created comradery among his men. Although he is ruthless, he succumbs to the wishes of his hostages to make a pregnant woman comfortable and allow them basic needs like going to the restroom. I told my colleague that I don’t know if there’s a more likable villain in the history of mainstream cinema, and I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic in saying so.
That leads us to The French Connection and obvious influence for Die Hard. Popeye Doyle is not afraid to use questionable ethics when interrogating suspects. When we first meet him, he’s dressed as Santa Claus, and he and his partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) chase down a suspect. After a long pursuit on foot, the suspect pulls a knife and cuts Russo in the hand. The two cops proceed to kick the guy mercilessly while he’s down before dragging him to the station where they beat him up some more. He’s also a womanizer and is quite possibly a racist. Throughout the film, we see Popeye raid bars and neighborhood joints, mistreating the customers in order to gain information. He’s not above twisting and stretching the law in order to get the information that he needs. On the other hand, we have the antagonist of the story in Alain Charnier, a would-be drug smuggler dealing in heroin who is trying to corner the New York City market. We meet him at his well-to-do home in Marseilles, France presenting a gift to his wife and discussing the life of his daughter. He too is an articulate, sophisticated and witty man with expensive taste and refined etiquette. He is also clever, as he demonstrates when he outsmarts Popeye, who is trying to tail him, by tricking him into getting off the train and leaving him behind on the platform. He’s not nearly as likable as Hans Gruber, but he’s in no way unlikable.
This depth of character between the protagonist and the antagonist is brilliant storytelling. Even though Popeye should be unlikable on the surface, we root for him because at his core he’s a good person. He’s charming and roguish and is ultimately someone for whom the ends justify the means, and to a degree, he’s someone to whom we can relate precisely because he’s imperfect, just like all of us. Charnier, on the other hand, should be likable on the surface, but he is also aloof and a criminal. He is not the type of person with whom most of us could relate. Ultimately it’s a good buy/bad guy issue, and even though the depth of the characters creates imperfections in both of them, it’s never confusing or unclear who the bad guy is and likewise who the good guy is.
Another thing that occurred to me while watching The French Connection is the role of New York City in the film. Like Midnight Cowboy two years earlier, and other Best Picture winners to come through the seventies and other films throughout the seventies and eighties, New York City was actually like a character in this film. New York City had a personality in this film, and it was not a pleasant one. New York City in the 1970’s was a unique place. It was the type of place that was instantly recognizable and those qualities gave the city just as much personality as any of the actual characters in the film, and that personality is one that is tough, uninviting and grim.
Director William Friedkin went to great lengths to show New York as a gray, gritty and dirty place. There’s trash littering the streets in almost every exterior shot, and the interiors are dull and drab places. Friedkin’s New York is a dirty place where dirty people do dirty things. Only when we see Charnier having lunch with his associate Nicoli in the fine dining restaurant do we see anything positive about New York, and even those shots are juxtaposed with Popeye across the street eating cold pizza and drinking cold coffee and shivering in the cold air as he stakes them out. Another thing that’s interesting is the grayness of New York. The scenes in Marseilles are shot with vibrant colors, as are the couple of scenes that were shot in Washington, D.C. The scenes in New York generally lack color. In fact, this is basically a black and white movie when we’re in New York.
I should also mention the script. As I mentioned earlier, this might be the lightest amount of dialogue in any Best Picture winner since Wings, and that film was silent. There is an economy of dialogue in this script that any aspiring screenwriter, or professional screenwriter for that matter, could learn from. We are shown almost everything that we need to know and dialogue is used primarily to fill in the blanks. No one says anything that is unnecessary in this film. Even the throw away lines that seem like sophomoric banter are important to show the personalities of the people involved and the characters that they’re portraying. The French Connection is also short compared to recent Best Picture winners, coming in at a brisk 104 minutes. It’s a streamlined and entertaining film that doesn’t waste time with any monologues, and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman resisted the urge to show how smart he was by gratuitously adding unnecessarily cumbersome dialogue. Like the version of the city of New York The French Connection shows, this film is a no nonsense, no frills, and straight to the point story that will leave you behind if you can’t keep up.
I had seen this film before, but not for a long time, and watching it this weekend was a lot like watching it for the first time. Especially since this time I was paying closer attention to a lot of the nuance and a lot of the details sprinkled throughout the film. I had forgotten that it’s basically and action film, not unlike a lot of the great action films that would come later in the decade and throughout the 80’s. In fact, films like Die Hard, Lethal Weapon or even Beverly Hills Cop probably wouldn’t have existed without The French Connection. It clearly influenced, if not started, a genre that would blockbusters over the ensuing four decades. That in and of itself, makes it one of the great and most important films of at least the second half of the 20th Century.
Did the Academy get it right?
Even with all that said my personal opinion is that no they did not. Fiddler on the Roof and The Last Picture Show are films that are remembered as classics. In fact, the latter was ranked #95 on the 10-year anniversary list of AFI’s top 100 films of all time. As great as those films are, I wouldn’t have voted for either of them for Best Picture. I’ve never seen Nicholas and Alexandra so I can’t speak to that film. No. Had I had a vote in 1971, I would have voted for A Clockwork Orange, which is one of my top 2 favorite films of all time (Casablanca is the other one.) To me, A Clockwork Orange is as close to a perfect film as has ever been made. Just like in The French Connection, we have a story with an anti-hero who on the surface should be as unlikable as any hero in the history of cinema, but we root for because of his charm, wit and the fact that he becomes the victim in the third act. Also, the screenplay that Stanley Kubrick wrote is as structurally sound as any screenplay that I’ve read or scene on film. It’s actually told in four acts rather than three, and each act takes the story in a new direction. Many people find the content of A Clockwork Orange to be too violent or disturbing. Yes, the content is violent, but not gratuitously so. The violence in A Clockwork Orange serves an integral purpose to the story as well as to the overall message of the film. I’m also not alone with this opinion, as A Clockwork Orange was ranked higher on the AFI list than was The French Connection (46-70). However, I do not think that The French Connection winning Best Picture was an egregious error in the same way as How Green Was My Valley beating Citizen Kane or Going My Way beating Double Indemnity. I actually don’t have a problem with The French Connection winning, as it was a well-crafted story with well shot action sequences, deep characters and a complex story. It was a deserving winner, but just not my first choice for 1971.