07/19/10 - The French Connection

The French Connection (1971, 104 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067116/

The French Connection is one of those gritty police action / drama films I'd been wanting to check out for a while. Obviously, the car chase was at the forefront of things I wanted to see but I'd read the whole film was pretty good.

The film follows the police duo of Jimmy Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Det. Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) as they are following some leads on a French drug shipment. The main guy in charge of this French operation is Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) but he also works with Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) and hitman Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi).

First I'll write about that car chase. I was stunned to find out it's really a car chasing a train. I'd tried not to read up on this aspect a lot so that the whole chase would come as a surprise but normally when I think "car chase" in a movie I think between two cars. In a way, having there not be two cars really hurts the overall suspense. It's not skillful driver versus skillful driver or police chasing after a getaway driver like other movies - it's just a guy driving through a crowded city as he tries to follow a train. Now, sure, there does exist a great aspect of suspense as the city is just so jam-packed with people and stuff, so the tension does build pretty well during the chase and everything is expertly filmed and all that. But for me, can I honestly say it's better than the Gone in 60 Seconds one? Or the one in Death Proof? Or even the one in License to Kill? I can't. And a big reason for that is because it's just fundamentally not as suspenseful to me unless it's two cars (well we can also include trucks for ones like that in License to Kill) in a car chase.

There is another great suspense scene in the film though and that's as Doyle is chasing after Charnier. The guys don't ever talk to each other but through some sneaky movements and just general intuition, Charnier learns that Doyle is tailing him. Then he begins toying with him as he goes in and out of the subway car leading to a fantastic escape in the last possible second. Sadly, the shock of this scene was somewhat ruined for me since it was included in the trailer, but the building tension still was able to make it really good.

One bad thing about Charnier in The French Connection is that he never comes across as a truly menacing bad guy. Sure, there's quite a few times where he's doing drug deals and stuff on the screen but I never felt like he posed a big threat that was worth getting a wire tap nor calling in the federal agents. Maybe that was just me being spoiled from watching The Wire recently. Basically, The French Connection reminded me a lot of The Wire. Obviously though, The Wire has much more time to build up characters and so they seem more real. Also, the time constraints of a real police force are more taken into account for a twelve hour television season whereas for a movie everything has to be rushed and solved in under two hours. What I'm getting at here though is that Charnier just doesn't have all the necessary build up to make him seem formidable. There's the great moment I described above but when I step back and look at the whole film he just doesn't have the clout that I associate to other big drug dealers in other movies (George Jung and Tony Montana to name two). The few scenes he's in only go so far to establish his character.

One minor thing I really liked that the film did is how it sets up all the lesser characters. As Doyle and Russo are scouting out the group of people there's some really cool cuts to the dialogue that establish who everyone is, how they found out what position they have in the drug business, what ties they have to known drug dealers, and other miscellaneous information. It's just a short little montage but it sets everyone up in their role for the rest of the movie and it's really easy to follow which is a huge plus when you have a lot of foreign actors that aren't as recognizable to an American viewer like myself.

Overall, I gave this film a 6/10. The French Connection actually disappointed me on a lot of fronts - it wasn't the expert police drama I was expecting nor did it have the greatest car chase in cinema like so many claim. Really though it was still a quality film just not a really really good one from my perspective.