Thriller Thursdays: The French Connection

Intro: In our weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.

I still remember the feeling The French Connection provoked when it was first released. The chase sequences, the cars, the gritty realism, and the thrilling ride it afforded was literally burnt into one’s senses. Hence revisiting the movie after so many years was both a nostalgic trip and a revalidation that classics rarely disappoint even after several years!

The French Connection works on the most basic of plots, though based on a real story and real characters. A Marseille-based heroin dealer Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) plans to smuggle $32 million worth of heroin into the USA. Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) and his partner Buddy "Cloudy" Russo (Roy Scheider), smell a rat when they see a local small-time crook interacting with characters they know are involved in narcotics. On tailing him, they discover him meeting Alain and his associate Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi). And the investigation gathers momentum and the chase begins.

The incredible conceit of the film is that it doesn't even matter that the wafer-thin plot is stretched for the span of the film, thanks to the kinesis and the frenetic energy of the execution.

What complicates matters further is the hostility of Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle. He is almost crazy in his laser-sharp focus and belief in his often-wayward 'hunches'. For every right move, he is able to dissipate everything with two wrong ones. But his pursuit is relentless and is one with the urgent immediacy of the film. And he is just right for the city. Because New York is envisioned by the filmmakers as dirty, smoky, offal-encrusted, crowded, its seedy innards are brought to life almost like in a documentary.

The film is also a master class on how to tail a person — the switching, the signs, the communication, the alignment, the hastiness, the misplacement, the discovery, as the unending traffic of New York passes by, noisy, continuous, distracting, deceiving. There are stretches where literally nothing is happening but a bunch of detectives following a suspect, and we are at the edge of our seats.

This film is a harbinger of the way a car chase is executed and filmed (cinematographer Owen Roizman, who later went on to film Tootsie, The Exorcist and Network). There are several in the film, but the one which completely changed the grammar of what a chase should look like is when Popeye chases Nicoli, who escapes on an elevated train, and Popeye in pursuit in a car below the train. Nicole basically takes over the train, and Popeye below is traversing the roads in a battered car, uncaring of the destruction he is wrecking to the goods and property around. And people who come in front of his car? Well, there is a scene of a terrified mother with a baby in her pram. I will leave it to you to find out what happens!

Much before The Bourne trilogy and other innumerable films started using handheld cameras to get an unsteady urgency, this film used the technique, along with shooting from affixed cameras inside and outside a car to convey the full impact of a car driven by a purposeful screwball!

Director William Friedkin and music director Don Ellis are incredibly imaginative in doing the sound design of the film. There are stretches where they have completely eschewed music, and the only sounds are of the city street and its cacophony. And if there is a chase then sounds of the screeching of car tyres and a rail’s electric screams until the heart-pounding percussion begins its trippy accompaniment.

There are several set pieces that are established as classics now, including the denouement in the filthiest factory floors imaginable; a turn in the beginning with Gene Hackman dressed as Santa Clause; Gene Hackman left handcuffed in his bed by a random girl; Popeye and Cloudy shivering in the New York winter sharing a cold pizza whilst Charnier and Nicoli wipe off a multi-course dinner complete with dessert and coffee inside an obviously-expensive restaurant. But the one which has been studied endlessly for its concept, execution, and editing is the incredible cat-and-mouse chase of Popeye behind Alain Charnier. The contrast between the elegance and nonchalance of the Frenchman and the grimy impatience of Popeye is bookended with an absolutely cheeky and delightful ending!

In 1971, this film was a treasure of a thriller. And it has stood the test of time with marvellous ease. It won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Film Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay, and was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Sound Mixing.

But beyond the accolades, it is a thumping memorable game-changer of a thriller!

Trivia

1. The car chase was filmed without obtaining the proper permits from the city. Members of the NYPD's tactical force helped control traffic. But most of the control was achieved by the assistant directors with the help of off-duty NYPD officers, many of whom had been involved in the actual case.

2. Roy Scheider and Gene Hackman patrolled with real policemen for a month to get the feel of the characters. Hackman became disgusted at the sights he saw during this patrol. In one incident he had to help restrain a suspect in the squad car and later worried that he would be sued for impersonating a policeman.

3. The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited The French Connection as one of his favourite films. Director Steven Spielberg said that he studied The French Connection in preparation for his 2005 historical action thriller film, Munich.

4. William Friedkin notes that the film's documentary-like realism was the direct result of the influence of having seen Z, a French film by Costa-Gavras. Friedkin: "After I saw Z, I realized how I could shoot The French Connection. Because he shot Z like a documentary. It was a fiction film but it was made like it was actually happening. Like the camera didn't know what was gonna happen next. And that is an induced technique. It looks like he happened upon the scene and captured what was going on as you do in a documentary. "

You can watch The French Connection here 

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)