Gene Hackman, a car chasing an elevated train, and the Best Picture winner that reset the rules of the American thriller.
New York and Marseille, 1971. NYPD narcotics detective Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle and his partner Buddy Russo become aware of a major heroin-trafficking operation involving a French organised-crime figure named Alain Charnier and his Brooklyn-based middleman. Doyle's pursuit is dogged, unconventional, and often legally improper. The film follows the surveillance, the foot pursuits, the rooftop chase, and finally — in its most-famous sequence — a high-speed car chase down a Brooklyn street under an elevated train line.
The film closes on Doyle losing his target in an abandoned warehouse on Wards Island, firing wildly at a man who turns out not to be Charnier, and the on-screen text noting that Charnier escaped to France and was never captured. The film's refusal of a triumphant ending was, in 1971, structurally unusual for an American thriller.
The French Connection won Best Picture, Best Director (Friedkin), Best Actor (Hackman), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Editing at the 1972 Oscars. The win was structurally significant: the Academy was, for the first time in its history, recognising a film shot in the documentary-realist register that European cinema had been working in for years and that American cinema had largely refused.
Friedkin had been a documentary director before The French Connection. The film's surveillance sequences, in particular, are shot with the operational authenticity of an actual stakeout — handheld cameras, long lenses, ambient sound, no music. The grammar Friedkin established here would, across the 1970s, become the standard register of the American crime film. Almost every major 1970s thriller is, in some sense, downstream of The French Connection.
The film's most-famous sequence is the five-minute car chase down 86th Street in Brooklyn, in which Doyle is pursuing an assassin who has boarded the elevated subway above him. Friedkin shot the sequence without permits, in real Brooklyn traffic, with the camera mounted in the chase car driven by stuntman Bill Hickman. Multiple unrelated cars are involved in actual collisions; the production paid them out of its own contingency fund.
The sequence is, by most surveys of working filmmakers, the foundational text of the modern car chase. The Bourne films, the John Wick films, almost every subsequent American police thriller has been measuring its chase sequences against this one. The technical achievement is the more remarkable because the film had a $1.8m budget.
Doyle is the rare American film protagonist who is openly racist, sexist, and willing to abuse his authority — and the film does not soften any of it. Hackman has spoken in subsequent interviews about how uncomfortable the role was for him personally; the actor and the character are not on the same political wavelength, and Hackman had to play several sequences (particularly Doyle's racist treatment of Black suspects) that violated his own values.
What the performance does, by refusing to render Doyle as a hero, is allow the film to be morally honest about American policing. Doyle is competent and obsessive and effective and also a bad man. The film does not resolve this. It is, structurally, the first major American film about a police officer to refuse to choose between celebrating the officer and condemning him.