The French Connection
I don't have a good reason for never having seen The
French Connection.
In fact, I don't even have a bad reason for not having seen it. It's one of
those movies that regularly turns up on all-time-best lists. It stars actors I
like in a genre I like. Everyone I know likes it. I just never got around to
it, just as I've never gotten around to plenty of other classic films that I'd
name here if I wanted the comments section to fill up with posts beginning,
"What do you mean, you've never seen ___________?" (Okay, here are three: The
Apu Trilogy.
Would someone put them out on DVD already?)
If I have a reason at all, it comes from another
movie by French Connection director William Friedkin: The Exorcist, a movie I've seen quite
a few times and never really liked. Though I'll gladly concede it's technically
accomplished, I've always seen it as a horror film that's all shock and no
subtext. Linda Blair's possession by a demon is just that and only that:
possession by a demon. On subsequent viewings, I've come to appreciate the
crisis of faith experienced by Jason Miller's priest, but it still feels too
muted to matter. If you don't believe in demon possession—and who
in this day and age does?—it can seem too literal to be effective.
I've always found Rosemary's Baby far more unsettling.
I've also had the misfortune of seeing the
Friedkin films that nobody likes while missing out on those that people do.
Scott, Noel, and Nathan have all recommended Sorcerer and To Live And Die In
L.A. I
haven't seen those. But I have seen Rules Of Engagement, Jade, and the largely misnamed Good Times,
Friedkin's directorial debut starring Sonny and Cher. And, for some reason,
George Sanders.
But enough about those Friedkin films. Let's move
on to The French Connection, which I liked. And let's start at the beginning.
Don Ellis' jarring score accompanies a credits sequence that takes less than a
minute to take care of business before dropping viewers in the middle of the
action in the French port of Marseilles, where an undercover French cop eats a
slice of pizza as he watches some gangsters. He won't last much longer. But
when we see Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle doing the same thing on the other side
of the Atlantic, it's almost as if he didn't die at all.