French Connection

There is a studied ambivalence towards ideals in The French Connection, never strong enough to undercut the conventional cops and crooks concerns of this "thriller," but nonetheless arresting in the social perspective it allows. Retelling the essentials of an actual case of heroin smuggling from France into New York. William Friedkin's film concentrates on the facts and mechanics of narcotics detective work, and the intense, long-term efforts of two cops to trace $32 million in heroin and to pinch the underworld business associates making the transaction.

And despite the temptations of idealizing hard work and violence into intrigue and spectacle, when the last drop of blood has drained from the seven bodies who got in the way of the big businessmen and the pursuers. Friedkin's adaptation of the case makes it clear the real driving forces behind them have been mere avarice and pride. The smugglers are only intent on making some dishonest bucks, and Detective Jimmy "Popeye". Doyle (who caught onto the case and kept it going on a determined hunch) wants only the prestige of a big bust.

There are no good guys after all, only ambitious guys. At best, there are guys who are doing their job and who want, there are guys who are doing their job and who want, out of natural pride, to do it well. That's the most you can say for Friedkin's narcotics cops. But it's the most you can say for most of us in this world, and for projecting that bland truth up onto the silver screen. Friedkin deserves at least mild congratulations.

The French Connection doesn't neglect to mention the real losers in this world without good guys: the ones who suffer in the poverty of New York's black-Latin neighborhoods, suffer a little less when they can afford to buy a high-priced fix of the businessmen's mass-marketed wares, and suffer a lot more when the narcotics detectives descend on them on their way to making the big bust, beating them for whatever information they can supply and sending them up for possession of controlled drugs.

Spotting a black junkie in a Bedford-Stuyvesant bar, Doyle and his partner Buddy Russo run him to the ground, kick him while he's down, and beat his face raw in order to find out who his small-time connection is.

The junkie breaks free, pulls a knife, and nicks Russo before they can take it away from him. Though it's an old game for all of them, the beating is more physically wrenching than any of the film's splashy shootings. When the detectives have all the information they can get, Doyle exacts a last, unnecessary ounce of submission by forcing him to confess to nonsense accusations by the threat of more beating. The nonsense-accusation sequence is a suspect-baiting device Friedkin picked up from Detective Eddie Egan, the cop on whom Doyle's character is based, who plays the narcotics division chief to Russo and Doyle (Gene Hackman) in Connection and who is soon to star in a film vehicle called Fuzz. The incident goes under the generic title "police harrassment" and is, no doubt, only a generalized adaptation from many such episodes in Egan's career.

Back at the precinct station, Russo shrugs to Doyle "I didn't know he had a knife."

"Never trust a nigger," Doyle warns him.

"He could've been white," Russo reminds.

"Never trust anyone."

It is in moments such as these that Friedkin is able to provide some of the closest glimpses of the urban policeman's mental world ever to come out of the tradition of American cops and robbers movies. The French Connection is by no means an "anti-police" movie; it develops an admirably accurate perspective on the harshness of detective work--the long late hours waiting on winter streetcorners between every small arrest, and the very real threat of becoming the victim of a sniper, one of the occupational hazards of wearing a blue uniform in more than one American city. Working conditions like these explain some of the jaundiced outlook and enforced brutishness that are the psychological precursors to a lot of police brutality.

Unfortunately, the underlying process of social demystification of police, the hard-drug world, and the lives of drug importers, break down as the chase gets hotter, and the pace of the film accelerates into a string of crowd-pleasing scenes of spectacle and carnage. The most spectacular of them all is a race between an elevated train commandeered by the hired-gun of the French importer, and a car commandeered and furiously driven on the street below by Doyle. Friedkin tries very hard to make the chase both credible and creditably spectacular; the justification for Doyle's madman pursuit is carefully developed: he must stop an armed assassin and, (having just escaped several of that assassin's bullets himself) he is so professionally and personally concerned with catching the man that for the public good he's willing to risk the lives of an avenue-full of passersby. It doesn't quite work; Doyle collides with cars and walls too many times before he gets his man (with a bullet in the back) to maintain the realistic tone. In fact, the filming of the chase required several cars of the same model for Doyle to drive.

Out of his experience in television, Friedkin has developed a functional style of filming, one calculated to catch the moods of New York without being particularly ingenious, or at all artificial. The things Friedkin catches are as simple as the late-afternoon February sun, shining at a flat angle through the cold, dirty, Brooklyn air and glinting off the storefront windows along an avenue: a kind of photography that takes not so much technical virtuosity as the prescience to find the right moment and the competence to catch it.

When it opened several months ago, Connection was a surprise success; its backers didn't foresee the potential market for an American police film made without an "angle"--without the heroic tough-guy romanticization of the early detective stereotype, without the Jack Webb variant ("it's a dull, tough job but I wouldn't have it any other way, and only the facts please, Ma'am,") and without the exploitation-potential of a hero-villain with an especially pathological personality. Working in the realm of the possible (if not quite the typical) Friedkin has disciplined his actors to imitate real policemen and other essentially dull but real people--rather than having them assume the imagined mannerisms of a scriptwriter's brain-child. In American film it's a new style of acting, demanding the selflessness of a technician rather than the self-consciousness of an aspiring star. The result is neither especially sensitive characterization nor revelatory film. But a hard look at a few realities of one much misunderstood kind of life in this country, taken with a minimum of analytical equivocation, is more than enough to pin anyone back in his seat for a couple of hours.