The French Connection (film)
| The French Connection | |
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| Directed by | William Friedkin |
| Produced by | Philip D'Antoni (Executive Producer) G. David Schine |
| Written by | Screenplay: Ernest Tidyman Novel: Robin Moore |
| Starring | Gene Hackman Fernando Rey Roy Scheider Tony Lo Bianco Marcel Bozzuffi |
| Music by | Don Ellis |
| Cinematography | Owen Roizman |
| Editing by | Gerald B. Greenberg (as Jerry Greenberg) |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) | October 9, 1971 |
| Running time | 104 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English French |
| Budget | $1,800,000 (est.) |
| Gross revenue | $51,700,000 |
| Followed by | French Connection II |
The French Connection is a 1971 American crime film directed by William Friedkin. The film was adapted and fictionalized by Ernest Tidyman from the non-fiction book by Robin Moore. It tells the story of New York Police Department detectives named "Popeye" Doyle and Buddy Russo, whose real-life counterparts were Narcotics Detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso. Egan and Grosso also appear in the film, as characters other than themselves.
It was the first R-rated movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture since the introduction of the MPAA film rating system. It also won Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Gene Hackman), Best Director, Best Film Editing, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Ernest Tidyman). It was nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Roy Scheider), Best Cinematography and Best Sound. Tidyman also received a Golden Globe Award, a Writers Guild of America Award and an Edgar Award for his screenplay.
In 2005, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
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Plot
The film revolves around the smuggling of narcotics between Marseille, France and New York City, USA. In Marseille a policeman is staking out Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), a French criminal who is smuggling heroin from France to the United States. The policeman is assassinated by Charnier's henchman, Pierre Nicoli.
In New York, detectives James Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) are conducting an undercover stakeout in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After seeing a drug transaction take place in a bar, Russo goes in to make an arrest and the suspect makes a break for it. After catching up with their suspect and delivering a severe beating after the suspect cuts Russo on the arm with a knife, the detectives aggressively interrogate the man, forcing him to reveal where his connection is based.
After Russo's injury is treated, Doyle convinces him to go out for a drink. At the nightclub, Doyle becomes interested in Salvatore "Sal" Boca and his young wife, Angie, who are entertaining Mob members involved in narcotics. Doyle persuades his partner to tail the couple; although the Bocas run a modest newsstand diner, they have criminal records: Sal is said to have held up Tiffany's and also killed "a guy named DeMarco" while Angie drew a suspended sentence for shoplifting and Sal's brother Lou served jail time for assault and robbery. They make nearly nightly trips to several nightclubs, as well as driving several new cars, which indicates they may be involved in criminal activity. A link is established between the Bocas and lawyer Joel Weinstock, who is rumored to have connections in the narcotics underworld; Doyle and Russo allude to a drug shipment from Mexico bankrolled by Weinstock.
Doyle and Russo roust a bar in their precinct where the majority of the patrons are in possession of marijuana and other minor drugs. The rousting is a stunt for Doyle to find an undercover policeman whom he questions about an apparent shortage of hard drugs on the street; Doyle is told that a major shipment of heroin is on its way. The detectives convince their supervisor, Walt Simonson, to pursue wiretapping the Bocas' phones and use several ruses to try to obtain more information.
The film centers on three main points: the criminals' efforts to smuggle drugs into the United States which is made easier when Charnier dupes his friend, a French actor named Henri Devereaux, into importing an automobile (unbeknownst to Devereaux, the drugs are concealed within the vehicle) and the sale of the drugs to Weinstock and Sal Boca; the efforts of Doyle and Russo to shadow Boca and Charnier; and the conflicts the detectives have with Simonson and a federal agent named Mulderig, assigned to the case due to the wiretap. Doyle and Mulderig dislike each other; Russo and Doyle feel they can handle the bust without the government's help, and Mulderig criticizes Doyle on items ranging from trivialities like Doyle's appearance to an incident where a policeman was killed and Mulderig holds Doyle responsible. Doyle comes to blows with Mulderig.
Weinstock's chemist tests a sample of the heroin and declares it the purest he has ever seen, establishing that the shipment could make as much as $32 million on a half-million dollar investment. Boca is impatient to make the purchase (reflecting Charnier's desire to return to France as soon as possible), while Weinstock, with more experience in smuggling, urges patience, knowing Boca's phone is tapped and that they are being investigated.
Charnier soon "makes" Doyle and realizes he has been observed since his arrival in New York. Nicoli offers to kill Doyle; Charnier objects, knowing killing one policeman will not amount to anything, but Nicoli says they will be in France before they can be detained. Nicoli attempts to assassinate Doyle, but botches the job, leading to a car chase scene that culminates with Nicoli hijacking an elevated train.
The train crashes into another, and Doyle shoots Nicoli in the back while he attempts to escape. The car containing the drugs is impounded when some thieves try to strip it of its valuables. Doyle and Russo take the car apart searching for drugs. When Russo notes the vehicle is 120 pounds over its listed weight, they realize the drugs must still be in the car. The mechanic tells them he did not remove the car's rocker panels; when he does, the drugs are discovered. The police put the car back together and return it to Devereaux.
It seems as though the drug deal has been a major success; Weinstock's chemist tests one of the bags and confirms its quality. Using a car that Sal Boca's brother Lou picked out, the criminals conceal the money. The car is to be imported into France, where Charnier will retrieve the money. Charnier and Sal Boca drive off, but run into a roadblock consisting of a large force of police led by Doyle. The police chase Charnier and Sal Boca to the factory grounds. Sal is killed during a shootout with the police and almost all of the others surrender.
Charnier escapes into the warehouse and Doyle hunts for him. Russo joins in the search. Doyle, trigger-happy and high on adrenaline, sees a shadowy figure in the distance and empties his revolver at it a split-second after shouting a warning. The man Doyle kills is not Charnier, but Mulderig. Doyle seems unfazed and vows to capture Charnier, reloading his gun and running into another room. The last sound heard in the film is a single gunshot.
Title cards before the closing credits note that Joel Weinstock and Angie Boca got away without prison time while Lou Boca got a reduced sentence and Devereaux served four years. Charnier was never caught. Both Doyle and Russo were transferred out of the narcotics division.
Cast
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Comparison to actual people
The plot centers around drug smuggling in the 1960s and early '70s, when most of the heroin illegally imported into the East Coast came to the United States through France (see French Connection). In addition to the two main protagonists, several of the fictional characters depicted in the film also have real-life counterparts. The Alain Charnier character is based upon Jean Jehan who was arrested later in Paris for drug trafficking, though he was not extradited;[1] the director credits a general lack of punishment to Jehan's military service with Charles de Gaulle. Sal Boca is based on Pasquale "Patsy" Fuca, and his brother on Fuca's brother Anthony. Angie Boca is based on Patsy's wife Barbara, who later wrote a book with Robin Moore detailing her life with Patsy. The Fucas and their uncle were part of a heroin dealing crew that worked with some of the New York crime families.[2] Henri Devereaux, who takes the fall for importing the Lincoln to New York, is based on Jacques Angelvin, a television actor arrested and sentenced to three to six years in a federal penetentiary for his role, serving about four before repatriating to France and turning to real estate.[3] The Joel Weinstock character is, according to the director's commentary, a composite of several similar drug dealers.[4]
Production
Production of the film started in November 1970 and was completed in March 1971. Peter Boyle was originally cast to play the role of "Popeye" Doyle but later turned down the role because his agent thought the movie was going to be a failure.
The movie established the careers of both Friedkin and Hackman and was instrumental in ushering in an era of neo-realist directors in Hollywood during the early 1970s. In an audio commentary track recorded by Friedkin for the Collector's Edition DVD release of the film, Friedkin notes that the film's documentary-like realism was the direct result of the influence of having seen Z, a French film. Additionally, this was the first film to show the World Trade Center: the completed North Tower and the partial completion of the South Tower are seen in the background of one scene.
Friedkin credits his decision to direct the movie to a discussion with film director Howard Hawks, whose daughter Friedkin was living with at the time. Friedkin asked Hawks what he thought of his movies, to which Hawks bluntly replied that they were "lousy." Instead Hawks recommended that he "Make a good chase. Make one better than anyone's done."[5]
The sequence on the Times Square-Grand Central Shuttle took two days to shoot. Car 6609 has been preserved and is in the New York Transit Museum. It is occasionally operated on fantrips along with other preserved cars.
Casting
Though the cast ultimately proved to be one of the film's greatest strengths, Friedkin had problems with casting choices from the start. He was strongly opposed to the choice of Hackman for the lead, and actually first considered Paul Newman (out of the budget range) then Jackie Gleason and a New York columnist, Jimmy Breslin, who had never acted before.[6] However, Gleason, at that time, was considered box-office poison by the studio after Gigot had flopped, and Breslin refused to get behind the wheel of a car, which was required of Popeye's character for an integral car chase scene. Steve McQueen was also considered, but he did not want to do another police film after Bullitt and, as with Newman, his fee would have exceeded the movie's budget. Tough guy Charles Bronson was also considered for the role. Friedkin almost settled for Rod Taylor (who had actively pursued the role, according to Hackman), another choice the studio approved, before he went with Hackman.
The eventually successful casting of Rey as the main French heroin smuggler, Alain Charnier (irreverently referred to throughout the film as "Frog One"), resulted from mistaken identity. Friedkin had asked his casting director to get a Spanish actor he had seen in Luis Buñuel's French film, Belle de Jour, who was actually Francisco Rabal, but Friedkin did not know his name, and Rey, who had played in several other films directed by Buñuel, was instead contacted. After Rabal was finally reached, they discovered he spoke neither French nor English and Rey was kept in the film.[7] In a further irony, after screening the film's final cut, Rey's French was deemed unacceptable by the filmmakers. They decided to dub his French while preserving his English dialogue.
Car chase
The film is often cited as containing one of the greatest car chase sequences in movie history.[8] The chase involves Popeye commandeering a civilian's car (a 1971 Pontiac LeMans) and then frantically chasing an elevated train, on which a hitman is trying to escape. The scene was filmed in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn roughly running under the BMT West End Line (currently; D trains) which runs on an elevated track above 86th Street and New Utrecht Avenue in Brooklyn.[9] The conductor played by Bob Morrone and train operator played by William Coke, aboard the hijacked train were both actual NYC Transit Authority employees.[10] Friedkin's plan included fast driving coupled with five specific stunts:
- Doyle is sideswiped by a car in an intersection
- Doyle's car is clipped by a truck with a "Drive Carefully" bumper sticker.
- Doyle narrowly misses a woman with a baby stroller and crashes into a pile of garbage.
- Doyle's vision is blocked by a tractor trailer which forces him into a steel fence.
- Doyle must go against traffic to get back on a parallel path with the train. Intercut with these car scenes underneath the elevated train is additional footage (shots facing the car, not from the driver's perspective) that was shot in Bushwick, Brooklyn, particularly when Doyle misses a moving truck and slams into a steel fence.
Many of the shots in the scene were "real" and while Gene Hackman drove well over half of the shots used in the film, legendary stunt driver Bill Hickman, who also had a small role in the film as Federal Narcotics Agent Mulderig, drove the stunt scenes and point-of-view shots through the windshield and from the front bumper, with Friedkin running a camera from the backseat while wrapped in a mattress for protection. The production team received no prior permission from the city for such a dangerous stunt, but they had the creative consulting and clout provided to them by Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso (which allowed normal protocol for location shooting like permits and scheduling to be circumvented), and the only precaution taken was to place a "gumdrop" style beacon on the car's roof and blare the horn. The most famous shot of the chase is made from a front bumper mount and shows a low-angle point of view shot of the streets racing by. This was the last shot made in the film and was, according to Friedkin, needed to increase the speed of the chase after a rough cut of the scene proved less impressive than he hoped. While Friedkin contends the front-bumper shot is made at speeds of "up to 90mph," director of photography Owen Roizman, wrote in American Cinemataographer magazine in 1972 that the camera was undercranked to 18 frames per second to enhance the sense of speed. Roizman's contention is borne out when you see a car at a red light whose muffler is pumping smoke at an accelerated rate. Other shots involved stunt drivers who were supposed to barely miss hitting the speeding car, but due to errors in timing accidental collisions occurred and were left in the final film.[11] Friedkin said that he used Santana's song "Black Magic Woman" during editing to help shape the chase sequence; though the song does not appear in the film, "it [the chase scene] did have a sort of pre-ordained rhythm to it that came from the music."[12]
The scene concludes with Doyle confronting Nicoli the hitman at the stairs leading to the subway and shooting him as he tries to run back up them. Many of the police officers acting as advisers for the film objected to the scene on the grounds that shooting an unarmed suspect in the back was simply murder not self-defense, but director Friedkin stood by it stating that he was "secure in my conviction that that's exactly what Eddie Egan (the model for Doyle) would have done and Eddie was on the set while all of this was being shot."[13][14]
As of July 2009, the two lead cars in the subway/car chase scene, R42 #4572 and 4573, were preserved by the New York Transit Museum as part of their museum fleet. At the time of the filming, the front rollsigns on these (and other) R42 cars didn't have the B train designation; therefore the N train sign was used instead.
Awards and honors
Academy Awards
Wins[15]
- Academy Award for Best Picture - Phillip D'Antoni
- Best Director - William Friedkin
- Best Actor - Gene Hackman
- Best Adapted Screenplay
- Film Editing
Nominations
- Best Supporting Actor - Roy Scheider
- Best Cinematography
- Best Sound
American Film Institute recognition
- AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies #70
- AFI's 100 Years…100 Thrills #8
- AFI's 100 Years…100 Heroes and Villains:
- Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle, Hero #44
- AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) #93
Home video
The film has been issued in a number of home video formats. For a 2009 reissue on Blu-ray Disc, William Friedkin controversially altered the film's color timing to give it a "colder" look.[16] Cinematographer Owen Roizman, who was not consulted about the changes, dismissed the new transfer as "atrocious".[17]
Sequels and adaptations
A sequel, French Connection II appeared in 1975, and in 1986, the NBC television network aired a made-for-TV movie, Popeye Doyle, starring Ed O'Neill in the title role.
While not a sequel, The Seven-Ups (1973) is closely related as it stars Roy Scheider and Tony Lo Bianco, was directed by Philip D'Antoni, written by Sonny Grosso and features another famous car chase choreographed by Bill Hickman. The score for this film was also by Don Ellis.
References
- ↑ Turner Classic Movies spotlight
- ↑ The French Connection (book)
- ↑ Jacques Angelvin, French Wikipedia article
- ↑ Film commentary
- ↑ McCarthy, Todd. Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Pg. 625. Grove Press, 2000 ISBN 0802137407, 9780802137401
- ↑ Friedkin recounts his casting opinions in Making the Connection: The Untold Stories (2001). Extra feature on 2001 "Five Star Collection" edition of DVD release.
- ↑ This story is recounted in Making the Connection, supra.
- ↑ Top 10 car chase movies - MOVIES - MSNBC.com
- ↑ R-42 cars 4572 and 4571 were chosen for the film and had no B subway line signs because they were normally assigned to the N subway line. Consequently they operated during the movie with an N displayed. The D line uses the tracks today. As of 2008, these cars are still in service on the E line.
- ↑ IMDb trivia
- ↑ This account of the shooting is described in Making the Connection, supra.
- ↑ "From 'Popeye' Doyle to Puccini: William Friedkin" with Robert Siegel (interview), NPR, 14 Sep 2006
- ↑ Director's commentary on DVD
- ↑ "Making the Connection" and "The Poughkeepsie Shuffle", documentaries on The French Connection available on the deluxe DVD.
- ↑ "IMDb: The French Connection". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067116/awards.
- ↑ Dave Kehr (February 20, 2009). "Filmmaking at 90 Miles Per Hour". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/movies/homevideo/22dave.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=french%20connection&st=cse&scp=3. Retrieved August 8, 2009.
- ↑ Jeffrey Wells (February 25, 2009). ""Atrocious...Horrifying"". Hollywood Elsewhere. http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2009/02/atrocioushorrif.php. Retrieved August 8, 2009.
External links
- The French Connection at the Internet Movie Database
- The French Connection at the TCM Movie Database
- The French Connection at Allmovie
- The French Connection at Rotten Tomatoes
- Under the Influence: William Friedkin and The French Connection, DGA Magazine.
- Anatomy of a Chase, DGA Magazine.
- Filmmaking at 90 Miles Per Hour retrospective article in The New York Times
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