Don Siegel would do likewise with Dirty Harry a few months later, but there’s something uniquely shrewd about Friedkin’s mix of realism and dynamism – he could stage a white-knuckle caper for a mainstream audience while making it seem raw and uncommercial, like everything happened exactly as depicted.Īnd some of it did. This is who Popeye Doyle is, Friedkin suggests, and it’s up to the audience to decide how much of a hero they judge him to be.Ī deserving best picture winner, albeit in a loaded field with A Clockwork Orange and The Last Picture Show – as well as masterpieces like Klute, McCabe and Mrs Miller and Sunday Bloody Sunday competing against it in other categories – The French Connection was Friedkin’s attempt to reinvent the Hollywood thriller for a new era. He also has racial blind spots that put him in line with characters like Nick Nolte in 48 Hrs., though the film is less conscious about pointing them out. As played by Gene Hackman, Popeye is a hugely flawed detective, notorious for pursuing hunches that fail to pay off, cutting procedural corners when necessary to make a case, and, in the end, making decisions in the field that are risky at best and consequentially awful at worst. Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle also feels like a character who no longer exists, at least not as the type of morally ambiguous screen hero the audience might be asked to support. But The French Connection, now 50 years old, remains one of the great New York films because it feels so much like a seedy backlot tour through a city that no longer exists. (Friedkin had said he was particularly influenced by the latter.) That’s obviously a deceptive gambit, since none of these films are actual documentaries and deviate from history at their pleasure. The street realism of The French Connection, perhaps the best film of Friedkin’s career, owes much to films like Gillo Pontocorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Costa-Gavras’s Z, both fact-based political thrillers that used documentary realism to assert their own authenticity.
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