The French Connection is a true crime drama that tells the story of one of the biggest drug busts in history. The film was a hit when it was released in 1971 and has since gone on to become a classic due to its gritty visual style, powerhouse performances, and one of the most iconic car chase sequences ever put to film.
The story behind the making of the film is just as compelling as the movie itself. Producer Philip D’Antoni was inspired by the book The French Connection by Robin Moore and was drawn to the idea of a New York City police mystery with an edgy, street-level feel. He turned to director William Friedkin, who had just made the acclaimed thriller Bullitt and was in the middle of a career that would see him produce countless action and crime films.
D’Antoni and Friedkin went to work bringing the real-life story to life on screen. They filmed on the streets of New York, using locations that were burned out and rundown in order to capture the gritty, real world that the film was set in. The shabby, urban look of the film is part of what makes it so effective. It shows a New York that doesn’t care about being clean, with trash scattered everywhere and the streets cluttered with heroin bottles and other evidence of the criminal underworld.
The movie also relies on archetypes and stock situations to give the characters dimension and make them recognizable to audiences. There are the Good Guys, cops Popeye Doyle (Roy Scheider) and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo, and the Bad Guys, wealthy heroin smuggler Alain Charnier, hit man Pierre Nicoli, and middleman Sal Boca. The plot follows the Good Guys’ attempts to stop a huge shipment of heroin in New York and foil the plans of the Bad Guys.
While the movie does trade on tropes, it does have a certain sense of realism that makes it stand out from other early ’70s loose cannon cop pictures like Dirty Harry. This realism is largely due to the film’s use of street realism, which is an approach that borrows from Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Costa-Gavras’s Z.
It’s a genre-defying style that works well here, allowing the action to be fast and exciting but still seem authentic. The film also features some of the most impressive editing of the era, with quick cuts and split screens that create a frenetic, hyperreal feeling.
The french connection the higher the better is a remarkably influential film that set the standard for modern crime dramas and action movies. Its roots can be seen in all the cop flicks of the ’70s, from Badge 373 and Serpico to The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3. It was also the film that popularized the image of New York City cops as hardened, cynical, tough men willing to take a beating to do their jobs right. The hero of the movie typifies this style, standing in his raincoat with his hands on the steering wheel and a cylinder full of magnum slugs strapped to his belt, a sight that still gives people chills.
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