In 1971, the tense, stringy French Connection screeched into theaters. It was a film that changed the look and feel of police procedurals on movie screens, and it ushered in an era of heart-pounding realism. The movie’s best known for its legendary car chase sequence, but the film is so much more than that. It created the cliche of the streetwise detective who leads with his gut and pisses off other cops, and it brought a whole new sense of brutality to Hollywood’s crime movies.
The film was written by Ernest Tidyman (Shaft), based on the 1969 true crime book The French Connection: A True Account of Cops, Narcotics, and International Conspiracy by Robin Moore. It starred Gene Hackman as Det. Popeye Doyle and Roy Scheider as his partner Buddy “Cloudy” Russo, with Fernando Rey and Tony LoBianco in supporting roles. It also launched the career of composer Don Ellis, a jazz musician who pioneered experimental time signatures and harmonies in his big band, and whose music was often used to score film noirs of that era.
It was an instant hit, and it spawned the equally successful sequel French Connection II, directed by John Frankenheimer. While it doesn’t have the swagger of its predecessor, it’s still a solid movie and well worth seeing.
This film’s success is due in large part to its brutal realism and the sheer excitement of its plot. The story takes place in New York City in 1971 as narcotics detectives Popeye Doyle and Cloudy Russo are hot on the trail of an urbane master criminal who’s smuggling 60 kilos of heroin from France into the United States in rocker panels of an LTD. The two bloodhounds try their hardest to catch him, but he outwits them at nearly every turn.
Brutal realism and a heart-pounding story combine to make this film one of the most exciting of all time. It’s an era-defining movie, and its influence can be seen in everything from the way films are shot to the style of police procedural television shows today.
The movie’s pacing is fast, and it never slows down to take its audience for granted. Even the mundane details of the movie – the dirty sidewalks, the messy apartments – are meant to be hyperreal. And the film’s soundtrack, performed by Don Ellis, is a brilliant blend of spooky tension and cutting-edge jazz, all underpinned by a tense sense of urgency. This first-ever release showcases Ellis’s complete score for the movie, supplemented by 20 minutes of deleted passages that add more narrative strength and a more unified tone to the entire picture. It’s a truly remarkable work, and it compares favorably to the cutting-edge ’70s crime scores of Jerry Goldsmith, Lalo Schifrin, and Quincy Jones.
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