The Good: Decent enough plot, Great DVD bonus features
The Bad: No real character development, Plot intensive, Moments of predictability
The Basics: A disappointing Best Picture winner, The French Connection divorces character from plot to make a police story that makes little overall sense.
I've heard it said of such things as director's cuts to movies that whatever version one sees first is the version they are most likely to enjoy. I mention this at the outset to my review of The French Connection not because there is a director's cut, but rather because it is a very typical cop drama and in watching it, I kept finding myself thinking "This is a lot like NYPD Blue." I love NYPD Blue and because I was so attached to that long-running show, much of The French Connection underwhelmed me or seemed predictable to me.
I am also beginning to think that the best thing a director can do for their film is set it in New York City in order to get nominated and win the Best Picture Oscar. The French Connection won the Best Picture and while it is a very standard and obvious cop drama, it is remarkably dated. There are, for example, elements of blacksploitation films in some of the movie's earliest moments which have the cops chasing black men through the hood and shaking down predominantly black joints to clean them up. Still, I can see its influences and it is clear that it was a predecessor to my beloved NYPD Blue. The differences, though, make all the difference. While the protagonist of the television show, Andy Sipowicz, is a man plagued with demons, the protagonist in The French Connection just seems problematically incompetent.
Doyle is a New York City detective who is working the streets with his partner, Buddy. After a series of disappointing raids which net no real perps, Doyle and Buddy learn that the City is in the middle of a narcotics dry spell and that they expect will soon be broken. Doyle sees this as a great opportunity to nail the drug suppliers bringing heroin into the City. Learning that there is a supplier from France, Doyle and Buddy begin an investigation in earnest. When the dealer in Marseilles visits Brooklyn, the opportunity to bust the entire ring seems to have come.
But the dealers are not as incompetent as Doyle and while Doyle tries to tail the lead suspect, he is "made" and this puts him, his partner, and the investigation in peril. While the American buyers get skittish because of the obvious police dragnet being lowered on them, the French become more ballsy; looking to eliminate the police, starting with Doyle.
First, I have to ask, what the heck is it about movies in the 1970s and blood?! Blood in The French Connection., which is rated "R," probably because half a dozen people get shot in graphically bloody ways and the sheer amount of drug paraphernalia featured in the film, looks more like pizza sauce and it undermines the emotional resonance of some key moments when the effects look so fake. Did the subway police officer get shot or just have an accident at lunch? If you blink, you might be asking yourself that very question!
The French Connection seems campy by today's standards for other reasons as well; it utilizes far too many of the obvious conceits of a police drama. There is a car chase, though it is completely redundant because the viewer has just sat through ten minutes of Doyle chasing a subway with a car he borrowed from a citizen on the street. There are reversals and early in the movie it is no surprise at all that Doyle is pumping a police informant (or undercover cop) for information during the raid on a bar. What is surprising is just how bad the cops seem to be at their jobs in this. Doyle fails far more often than he succeeds and when he tries to tail suspicious characters, he always sticks out like a sore thumb. In fact, The French Connection would be a clever satire of police incompetence, were it not for the resolution to the movie. Instead, it stands as a strangely droll film where even with detectives who play one bad hunch after another, they still manage to stumble upon the result they are looking for.
The thing is, Doyle is hardly an empathetic character and while something like NYPD Blue is character-driven, The French Connection is exceedingly plot-driven. Doyle is not very good at his job, yet he still plays the generic cop hunches which allow him to find the extremely unlikely results that are more plot-convenient than the result of his great policework. The film is hard to care about because the results to not track with the efforts expended. Doyle fails to adequately track every perp he is after, yet he manages to come out with the desired results as if he had been the best detective ever.
The somewhat nonsensical nature of the plot and character elements can be seen in the movie in performances like that of Roy Scheider. Scheider plays the supporting role of Buddy and he actually looks bored through most of the film. As for the performance of leading man Gene Hackman, he is very hard to judge as Doyle. He plays Doyle with a steely disposition and obsessive facade that has become cliche. He is the generic pulp fiction police detective and he is somewhat monolithic in his performance. Doyle never seems human; he is all work and despite an early scene where he is frisky with a woman (and his handcuffs), Hackman plays Doyle with the monotony of a man who is all-business.
On DVD, The French Connection comes as a two-disc special edition that has two commentary tracks. The one with director William Friedkin is goes through the entire film and is focused on the technical aspects of making the movie, while Hackman and Scheider pop up only for a few scenes to talk about their memories of being onset. As well as having the original theatrical trailer, The French Connection has an additional disc with a documentary on the making of the movie, a BBC documentary and seven deleted scenes, which do not make the film substantially better. And there is a trailer for the sequel, which actually made my stomach turn a bit (just to think that they made a sequel to this).
In short, The French Connection is a dated, often-campy police drama which might have been seminal to paving the way to other works, but much of what came after succeeded at being more enduring than this actually is.
[As a winner of the Best Picture Oscar, this is part of my Best Picture Project available here! Please check it out!]
For other movies with police work, please be sure to visit my reviews of:
Angel Eyes
Columbiana
In The Heat Of The Night
4/10
For other film reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!
© 2011, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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