The French Connection

Friedkin’s masterful cop thriller has Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider as the detectives investigating the possibility of a major drugs delivery coming out of Marseille a... more >

Friedkin’s masterful cop thriller has Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider as the detectives investigating the possibility of a major drugs delivery coming out of Marseille and being overseen by the talismanic Fernando Rey. A bridge between the tough G-Men movies of the studio era (from which Hackman has kept the hat) and two later schools of law-and-order storytelling: the gritty street-level realism of NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life On The Street, and the ambient procedurals of Michael Mann’s cop movies and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Given Friedkin’s predilection for bombast, what’s remarkable is how little gets trumped up. Much of the movie is a study in the minutiae of surveillance: we’re left watching the detectives, and pondering the lot of those employed to stand around outside in the cold making do with a pizza slice while their mark takes a lavish lunch in a fancy restaurant. That said, there’s always that terrific car-versus-train chase – still one of the cinema’s most exciting action sequences, shot on the lam – in which the bodywork of Hackman’s increasingly dilapidated auto almost comes to serve as a metaphor for what mavericks like Popeye Doyle put themselves through in the relentless pursuit of justice. < less

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DVD Extras

• 2 discs.

Film Details

Cast

Roy Scheider, Gene Hackman

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