'Popeye' Doyle (an Academy Award-winning Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) are tough New York cops attempting to crack a drug smuggling ring. They have a small candy store under surveillance, but Doyle is not happy when he receives the order to work with a pair of French federal agents on the case, one of whom he has a long-standing feud with. Gene Hackman and director William Friedkin both earned Academy Awards for the film, which also took Best Picture. The legendary car chase and the bleak, ambiguous ending remain amongst the greatest sequences in American movies of the 1970s.
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
