The French Connection

Sunday, February 10, 2008

This was a long time coming. The French Connection is not only widely regarded as an all-time classic action picture with one of the greatest chase scenes of all time, it's a winner of the fucking Academy Award for Best Picture. Try to think off the top of your heads how many action films are even nominated for Best Picture, let alone how many have won. Yeah. That's right. It doesn't happen. Ever. That makes it both a significant film in one of my most cherished genres, as well as a classic all-around. It's director, William Friedkin, is a talented fellow who I enjoy but I think tends to make mixed-bag movies. However, he made The Exorcist, which is one of the few horror films to get a Best Picture nod. Meaning he's gotten serious critical respect for movies in my two favorite genres that are almost never given any respect.

What I'm saying about The French Connection is this:

1) This is a movie I should have seen.

2) I had not, to my shame, ever seen it in its entirety.

3) I am now Kommitted to Klassiks, ensuring that I pretty much had to see it, or admit to a lack of kommittment.

4) Expectations were high.

Then to top it all off, co-star Roy Scheider up and dies the day I watch it, making my viewing into an inadvertent tribute. The pressure was on.

OK, let's cut it with this buildup shit. All said and done, The French Connection is a pretty good, probably not great, tough guy cop movie. I dug it. I am, however, a little mystified by the Best Picture win. I mean, it's not much more than a good genre film. Which is fine by me, great, give it an award, but the Academy doesn't tend to recognize these types of films. I was expecting something a little more... I don't know. Deep? Ambitious? Important? Pretentious? Something like that.

Also, there's Gene Hackman. He's good, as always, but Best Actor? There's not much range in the performance here, or development, or anything like that. He acts tough, and he gets mad a lot. That's it. Also, whats up with that stupid scene of him sleeping with the bicycle girl?

I'm thinking this movie must have seemed really gritty, fresh, and "real" at the time. That's the only way I can understand such acclaim. From my perspective, this movie is a little too far fetched and dramatized at times to be so serious/realistic, but it is certainly well made. I guess maybe people were blown away back in 1971 at how dark and gritty this one was, but after a million of these movies, it seems pretty tame and unrealistic by today's standards.

I did like the abrupt, mysterious, open ending... puts a weird, arty, ambiguous spin on an otherwise straightforward procedural. It sort of predicts Friedkin's Cruising, which if you go back through my posts you will see I didn't exactly like, but was fascinated by.

So there it is. Not the masterpiece it's been painted as, but a good one regardless.


Oh shit! There was something I liked that I forgot to mention. The main character is not only a pretty shitty human being, like a lot of drunken detective protagonists are in these movies, but a pretty shitty cop, too. He's a fascist, racist asshole who spends a lot of the movie fucking things up and putting people's lives at risk. Even though we follow things mainly from his perspective, the movie is critical of his behavior without making a point of it. He's more of an anti-hero (something I'm noticing is a common theme in Friedkin's flicks), and it adds a nice layer of moral ambiguity to the film.