The French Connection And The Birth Of The Modern Cop Movie
"Doyle is bad news - but a good cop."
“By the time a film of mine makes it into the theaters, I have a love-hate relationship with it,” claims William Friedkin. “There is always something I could have done to make it better.”
But it’s hard to see how the man responsible for The Exorcist and Sorcerer could possibly have improved on The French Connection, his take on the real-life cracking of a French heroin ring by a pair of New York City street cops.
Based on the real-life rule bending rozzers Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, Friedkin’s film was shot in a semi-documentary style that was at ground-breaking as it was at odds with his personal vision of cinema. Convinced that cinema really could change the world, Friedkin had started out making ‘serious’ movies. But after the release of his forth feature, the gay drama The Boys In The Band, the young artist decided a change was in order.
The French Connection was Williams Friedkin’s attempt to engage a mainstream audience. Of course, this being the Vietnam emasculated 1970s, the battle lines aren’t drawn too clearly. Sure, foul-mouthed Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle (Hackman, cast against type but rarely better) might have carried a badge but he wasn’t above shooting a suspect in the back.
But while the film might end with the escape of French drugs baron Alain Charnier (aka ‘Frog One’), The French Connection plays a populist game and so doesn’t really deal with the questions of corruption and paranoia that were part and parcel of the Watergate era. “What we were doing wasn’t making fucking films to hang in the Louvre,” recalls the director. “We were making films to entertain the people and if they didn’t do that first, they didn’t fulfill their primary purpose.”
Entertaining The French Connection most certainly is. Featuring career-best turns from Hackman and Roy Scheider (who secured the Jaws gig on the strength of this performance) and a superb semi-improvised script (credited to Shaft writer Ernest Tidyman but more properly credited to Friedkin and producer Phil D’Antoni), the picture highlights the drudgery of police work (the unrevealing wiretaps, the soporific stakeouts) while delivering all the prerequisites of the modern cop movie.
This combination of social commentary and superb stunts comes to a head in the film’s most celebrated sequence. With D’Antoni having helped co-ordinate the ultimate car chase in Bullitt, Friedkin set out to wrest the title from Peter Yates’ picture by having a cop car pursue an L-train through the streets of Brooklyn. With time and budget both against him, the director ended up sitting beside stunt driver Bill Hickman, bellowing at him to give him everything he had while the pair, together with technical advisor and real life cop Randy Jurgensen, careened through the city streets - streets that hadn’t been closed to the public since the filmmaker didn’t have the time or the patience to get the necessary permits.
As reckless and audacious as the car chase was, so the French Connection’s Oscars-success was every bit as thrilling. Winning the awards for Best Picture, Director, Actor and Screenplay (Scheider missed out in the Best Supporting Actor category), you’d imagine William Friedkin was very happy with his evening’s work. Instead, he spent the day after the ceremony visiting a psychiatrist.
“I was profoundly unhappy,” he explains. “I told the shrink I won an Oscar and didn’t think I deserved it. It was not so much unworthiness I felt as much as I had a perspective: Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I’ve never done anything like that.” Atypical modesty from a man so full of wind, he was nicknamed ‘Hurricane Billy’.