The French Connection (1971)

"Where do you want it?"

The term “gritty thriller” gets bandied around a lot in the film world. Modern gritty thrillers usually refer to a film which blitzkriegs the senses with subplots, high-speed brutality, and shaky docu-cam that’s just a little too stylish to be truly realistic. The overall feel of the modern gritty thriller is by and large something akin to how it must feel to get punched in the head for the entire length of a rollercoaster ride: disorienting, exhilarating and breathless.

That’s the first thing that you’re likely to notice when re-watching The French Connection: it’s a gritty thriller that retains that rollercoaster element and gripping power, but it just feels different.

It certainly looks different. The shaky camera is vérité rather than mockumentary, the screen dripping with sex and jazz in its vibrant and colourful compositions and dynamic, efficient cinematography. For every arty jump-cut there’s a good old-fashioned postcard vista shot. It’s old Hollywood meets French New Wave, and it immediately imbues the film with a vibe all it’s own; a retro cool peppered with sparks of grit – a drug bar, here, a homeless addict in the background there – that feels like it was sewn into the film.

The plot is as tight as a drum too. Unlike modern thrillers, where the rollercoaster always seems to be rushing down the slope, director William Friedkin and writer Ernest Tidyman build up the suspense before the big drop. Gunfights are sparse, and so is violence. Incident happens at points that are both engagingly random and cinematically convenient, like the assassination attempt in the third act that leads to a superbly climactic chase, that isn’t the actual climax of the film.

When something happens in The French Connection, it feels a lot more vital and important than it would have were the action being thrown at you every five seconds. Less emphatic, more cinematic.

That’s not to say that it falls into the usual ’70s trap of assuming that long silences build suspense. On the contrary, this film nips along at a nice pace from plot point to plot point without becoming the least bit boring. Part of this is the fact that the plot isn’t submerged in event and exposition – it’s just tough smart guys doing tough smart things. But another, larger part of it, is that the plot feeds into the most enjoyable element of The French Connection – the characters. Or perhaps more accurately, the main character.

Unlike, say, the Bourne franchise, where the protagonist is shrouded in mystery and thus becomes more a sort of action machine rather than a human character, Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle is given time to breathe and grow, aided by Shaft scribe Tidyman’s inventive script.

When we first meet Doyle, he’s wearing a Santa suit and beating information out of a crook in the famous “picking your feet in Poughkeepsie” scene. The character is soon revealed to pretty much be a white-collar fascist wet-dream version of John Shaft, Gene Hackman’s performance equal parts rage, sex, humour and gruff charisma. On the surface he’s the hard-drinking, girl-chasing tough guy detective from a million similar movies, but in his interplay with Roy Scheider’s nicely understated Buddy Russo and the switch from crazed enforcer to conspirator in the drug bust scene (“Where do you want it?”) belies a character as charming and likeable as he is macho. At first, anyway…

It’s these characters’ approach to the plot and to their job that’s most engaging. As they wander through Friedkin’s sexy, jazzy Brooklyn to the percussive, sporadic sound of Don Ellis’s classic ’70s suspense score, Doyle and Russo refrain from the usual exposition filled espionage that thriller protagonists like to employ, preferring to crack the case with hunches, punches, and plenty of hilarious prickery.

In fact, the whole thing is grounded by a vein of humour that is all the funnier within the gritty, exposed underbelly setting of the story. Doyle’s cartoonish cat-and-mouse with the main villain on the subway is pitch-perfect, Hackman’s frustration ratcheting up notch after funny notch until the final kicking and cussing blow-off.

But the humour is more than just another element that sets it apart from the usual thriller crowd. It is in fact a really classy piece of misdirection. While you’re enjoying Doyle and Russo’s tough guy posturing, the hip vibe and the gorgeous visuals, the plot creeps up from behind, reasserting itself with a dark, knowing twist that completely alters the status quo of the entire film, for everyone but Doyle.

The ending really is a masterstroke. It doesn’t so much keep you guessing who the bad guy is, but implies that, ultimately, being the bad guy is more often than not out of our control.

And that is the most gritty and thrilling element of The French Connection; for all its sexy cool and novel-like love of convenient coincidence, it’s its use of the uncertainty of real life that provides the biggest thrill.

A true classic.