The French Connection (film)

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For other uses, see The French Connection.

The French Connection is a 1971 Hollywood film directed by William Friedkin. The film was adapted by Ernest Tidyman from the non-fiction book by Robin Moore.

The film tells the story of two New York City policemen who are trying to intercept a heroin shipment coming in from France. It is based on the actual, infamous "French Connection" trafficking scheme. It stars Gene Hackman (as porkpie hat-wearing New York City police detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle), Roy Scheider (as his partner Sonny), and Fernando Rey. It also features Eddie Egan and Sonny "Cloudy" Grosso, the real-life police detectives on whom Hackman's and Scheider's characters were based.

It was the first R-rated movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture since the introduction of the MPAA film rating system. It also won Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role, (Gene Hackman), Best Director, Best Film Editing, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. It was nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Roy Scheider), Best Cinematography and Best Sound.

In 2005 the film was added to the list of films preserved in the United States National Film Registry.

Contents

1 Casting challenges
2 Additional details
3 Related projects
4 Trivia
5 References and footnotes
6 External links

Casting challenges

Though the cast ultimately proved to be one of the film's greatest strengths, Friedkin had problems with casting choices from the start. He was strongly opposed to the choice of Hackman for the lead, and actually first considered Jackie Gleason and a New York columnist, Jimmy Breslin, who had never acted before.Friedkin recounts his casting opinions in Making the Connection: The Untold Stories (2001). Extra feature on 2001 "Five Star Collection" edition of DVD release. However, Gleason, at that time, was considered box-office poison by the studio after Gigot had flopped, and Breslin refused to get behind the wheel of a car, which was required of Popeye's character for an integral car chase scene. Steve McQueen was also considered, but he did not want to do another cop film.

The casting of Rey as the main French heroin smuggler, Alain Charnier (irreverently referred to throughout the film as "Frog One"), resulted from mistaken identity. Friedkin had asked his casting director to get a Spanish actor he had seen in the French film, Belle de Jour, who was actually Francisco Rabal, but Friedkin did not know his name. Rey was instead contacted but did not speak a word of French. However, after Rabal was finally reached, they discovered he spoke neither French nor English, and Rey was kept in the film.This story is recounted in Making the Connection, supra.

Additional details

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The film is often cited as containing one of the greatest car chase sequences in movie history.See, e.g., [Top 10 car chase movies], MSNBC. The chase involved Popeye securing a civilian's car and then obsessively chasing the out-of-control elevated train, on which a hitman was trying to escape. The scene was filmed in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn roughly running down the old B subway line which ran on an elevated track down 86th Street.The train that is running on the elevated line during the chase scene in the film is actually an N train. Many of the shots in the scene were "real," in that Hackman actually drove the car at high speeds through uncontrolled traffic and red lights, (legendary stunt driver Bill Hickman (who also had a small role in the film as FBI agent Mulderig) handled nearly the rest, and outlined the entire chase with Friedkin and D'antoni) with Friedkin running a camera from the backseat while wrapped in a carpet for protection. The production team received no prior permission from the city for such a dangerous stunt, but they had the creative consulting and clout provided to them by Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, (which allowed normal protocol for location shooting like permits and scheduling to be defunct) and the only precaution taken was to place a "gumdrop" police siren on the car's roof and blare the horn. Other shots involved stunt drivers who were supposed to barely miss hitting the speeding car, but due to errors in timing accidental collisions occurred and were left in the final film.This account of the shooting is described in Making the Connection, supra.

Spoilers end here.

The movie established the careers of both Friedkin and Hackman, and was instrumental in ushering in an era of neo-realist directors in Hollywood during the early 1970s. In an audio commentary track recorded by Friedkin for the Collector's Edition DVD release of the film, Friedkin notes that the film's documentary-like realism was the direct result of the influence of having seen Z, a French film.

Related projects

The French Connection was followed in 1975 by a less-acclaimed sequel, French Connection II. In 1986, a television movie, Popeye Doyle, starring Ed O'Neill in the title role, was also produced.

Friedkin later attempted to outdo the "Connection" chase scene with the infamous backwards car chase on a freeway in To Live and Die in L.A..

In the summer of 2004, a television show named NY-70 filmed a pilot episode that was based directly on The French Connection. The pilot stared Bobby Cannavale and Donnie Wahlberg, and was filmed entirely in Harlem.[] at TV.com

Trivia

The film's car chase scenes were parodied in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers.

References and footnotes

External links

[Under the Influence: William Friedkin and The French Connection], DGA Magazine.

Academy Award for Best Picture: Winners (1961-1980)

[Complete List] | [ Winners (1927–1940)] | [ Winners (1941–1960)] | [ Winners (1981–2000)] | [ Winners (2001– )]

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