Never trust anyone!
Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle is a worn detective who is seeing an unusually large amount of drugs enter into the streets of New York City. Knowing that the large amount seems to heavy for small time pushers, he and his partner Buddy Russo intend on finding out where the trafficking is coming from. After roughing up a few people, getting some details and pretty much begging their sergeant to take their drug issue further than usual, they catch a break. Finding out that there is french connection to all this makes the case tougher, but the payout better.
I admit that I’ve never seen this movie prior to its Blu-ray release. I always saw it in the video store, even remember seeing it on Beta. Gene Hackman’s portrayal of a no-nonsense cop, a true-life cop, is nothing short than tough as nails. He brings the fire, he brings the worn look and he brings the tough style. I can understand why he won an Academy Award for this role. Hell, they should have just given him the award for the amount of running he had to do in those shoes. In all seriousness, this movie really did probably hit home for a lot of big American cities across the country. For urban heavy areas, there was a huge drug problem cropping up that was spreading fast. Most people probably didn’t see it coming, and the police in some areas probably just wrote it off as a spotty (at best) crop of small-time drug dealers. More than likely the drugs were making it from outside the country beyond America’s borders and then sitting there. It has always been known that the mafia pushed drugs into communities in the early 60s and especially into the 70s. This story is powerful because it’s true and it took one man to uncover this overseas connection and stump trafficking (not permanently regretfully, but for a short amount of time). Quite an amazing story.
Now, the movie itself did have some set backs that are minor, but still noticeable. First and foremost, the music just made me want to turn the receiver down to zero and switch on subtitles. This has to be one of the worst music tracks; thankfully there wasn’t much of it. It didn’t fit the film, it was quite forced and I know that better music existed back in 1971 than this (see 2001 for details). It really was a bit of distraction. That is pretty much my only complaint on the film.
I have to give some kudos to the director, William Friedkin, who apparently pushed Hackman to his limits (I had no idea there was such a thing). He not only made the actor become a bigot and a track star with his role, but he also required Hackman to drive a car during an above ground subway chase scene that had Hackman wreck multiple times. That is some old school directing. It worked out well in the end, though I’m not sure if Hackman’s spine is okay.
At the end of the day though, you’ve got yourself a very powreful movie that is scary because it was real.
Connecting with Blu-ray
20th Century Fox did a great job of converting old 1971 film to HD. They probably did the best they could do, as it isn’t the best conversion I’ve seen. There are still some artifacts left over (graininess) from the transfer, which shows very well on a 51″ screen. Still, it looked a lot less worn than its DVD counterpart and a lot sharper than any other version of The French Connection that you would see. The audio, sans the music, sounded great. Coming out of 7.1 Dolby speakers it really did the movie justice. Too bad there wasn’t a chance to turn off the music during the film. Silence would have made more sense.
As for features, get ready because it’s loaded:
– William Friedkin Intro
– Commentary from William Friedkin, Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider (don’t you miss him? I do.)
– Trivia Track
– Isolated Score Track
– Deleted Scenes
– Anatomy of a Chase
– Hackman on Doyle
– Friedkin and Grosso Remember the Real French Connection
– Scene of the Crime
– Color Timing The French Connection
– Cop Jazz: The Music of Don Ellis
– Rogue Cop: The Noir Connection
– BBC Documentary: The Poughkeepsie Shuffle
– Making the Connection: The Untold Stories of The French Connection
I can’t say this isn’t a top-notch set of features, it truly is. It has been a while since I’ve seen a studio give such love to the special features section. This requires two Blu-ray discs to fit all of these onto it. That is some love and it’s a solid set of features too. You’re certainly not thrown garbage. You get a large amount of information about how they made it, who was involved and you get some great featurettes on the real case.
Excellent stuff.