One of his resentful colleagues, nettled at the chief's indulgence of Doyle, furiously remarks that these hunches of Doyle's once got a good cop killed. For example, the precise explanation for his nickname would be an opportunity for some gentle backstory comedy, and meet the all-important need for him to be a sympathetic character. In one scene, Doyle and Russo take their suspect and give him a brutal working over in one of New York's vacant lots – a feature of the era – burnt out waste-grounds, sometimes large, that Tom Wolfe in his 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities called urban "gloamings" and which Malcolm Gladwell, in the chapter on broken-window theories in his 2000 book The Tipping Point, said were the key breeding grounds for crime.Ī modern Hollywood action thriller like this would need to show redemption for Doyle. The modern audience nervously asks itself: where is the black police chief to balance this? The black judge? Or maybe a black cop whose tough integrity and professionalism Doyle can come, finally, apologetically, to respect? Nowhere. And when Popeye gets back to the station house, he drops the N bomb.
Popeye and Russo storm into a black bar and harangue and slap around the customers, demanding answers.
#FRENCH CONNECTION MOVIE MOVIE#
In the opening reel, the movie socks us with another scene that could never happen in 2011, or not without a multitude of ironising tics to deflect its potential for offence. A poster for The French Connection now would have the faces of Hackman and his partner Russo (Roy Scheider) sweatily to the fore, with a gun or two, and the automobiles in the background. It is a distinctive image, but eccentric, asymmetric, and utterly anti-heroic: the hero? The guy indistinctly in the background? And he's shooting someone in the back? Surely not! It's the sort of image that would never get used as a film poster today. For a start, there is that poster image taken from the climax of the famous subway v car chase – Doyle shoots someone in the back as the man reaches the stop of a staircase, and his grimacing victim flings his arms out at the moment of death. To watch The French Connection now is to experience the shock of the old: a lost world of the city, and a lost style of film-making. (Is that kit genuine? Or did Friedkin dream it up?) "Eighty-nine percent pure junk," the Chemist finally pronounces, "if the rest is like this, you'll be dealing on this load for two years." He uses a complex chemical kit including a thermometer in which the mercury rises with the purity. This is a smart-mouthed, bespectacled individual whose job is to test the drugs before they buy, and is by implication paid from the wares themselves. The gangsters employ a "Chemist" – a small role comparable to the gun-dealing "Easy Andy" from Scorsese's Taxi Driver. What an experience it is to see it again, a movie whose vivid evocation of New York bears comparison to Scorsese but which I now realise I remember chiefly from one single scene.
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