The French Connection

The French Connection (1971), directed by William Friedkin

The French Connection has a tremendous reputation, deserved in part, as the seminal modern police drama. Rather than being the benevolent do-gooders from the era of the Hays office, these cops, particularly Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) are violent, profane, and live in squalor. The villain, on the other hand, is urbane, witty, and (on the outside) a model citizen. This pattern has been followed by hundreds of film and television plots since then, some good, some bad. Many of them have surpassed The French Connection, the pioneer.

It doesn't help that the plot takes a long time in developing, and that the main characters (Hackman and Roy Scheider) never develop beyond "bad cops who are actually good." A quarter-century later, it seems hard to believe that this film was awarded the Best Picture Oscar. So much of the film seems to have impressed only through shock effect: the profanity, the gratuitous violence, the racial brinkmanship seems pale years later. Only the justly acclaimed chase sequence (you know the one I'm talking about) maintains its full power on the viewers years later. Of all the elements of this film that have been copied over the years, only this chase scene has not yet been equalled.