‘The French Connection’: THR’s 1971 Review

On Oct. 9, 1971, 20th-Fox unveiled William Friedkin’s The French Connection in theaters. The Gene Hackman thriller went on to land 8 nominations at the 44th Academy Awards, claiming five wins including for best actor, director, writing, editing and picture. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review, headlined “Fox’s ‘French Connection is a first-rate thriller,” is below:

The French Connection has already been open for three weeks in New York, where it is reported to be doing land-office business. It’s easy to see why. The picture is a first-rate thriller about the investigation and crackdown of a heroin-smuggling operation, set mostly in New York, and scripted by Ernest Tidyman from the Robin Moore book. And the director, William Friedkin, knew what he was about. Almost from the beginning, you can feel your stomach muscles tightening because you’re afraid of missing something, and as the movie goes along, you can sense the audience sliding forward in their seats, straining to catch every detail.

It’s an astonishingly well-edited film, with a spectacular chase sequence in which Marcel Bozzuffi, the screen’s newest man-you-love-to-hate (he was the homosexual murderer in Z), is in an elevated train with his pistol at the conductor’s head while Gene Hackman, as a police detective, chases him by car from below, careening at top speed around pedestrians and track supports and other cars. (Philip D’Antoni, the producer, also produced Bullitt.) And it’s filled with sharp, funny bits of business in the action and dialogue: Bozzuffi tearing a piece of bread from a loaf clutched by a man he’s just shot in the face; Fernando Rey, the mastermind behind the connection, fishing in the bay behind his home in Marseilles; the inflection that Hackman gives to the word “cute.”

The film is most impressive, however, for the fact that Friedkin, after The Birthday Party and The Boys in the Band and the predominately backstage The Night They Raided Minsky‘s, has finally gotten outdoors not simply for surface dazzle, as in Minsky’s, but to give depth and texture to his story. In recent years, New York has become such a familiar location in American movies that I think it’s safe to say that, even for non-New Yorkers, the New York back grounds lately have hardly been notice able. But Friedkin and his cinematographer, Owen Roizman, have suc ceeded in integrating the action and the backgrounds, often wittily, as in a sequence when Bozzuffi and Rey dine in high style while outside the restaurant, staking them out, Hackman gnaws on a limp slab of pizza.

The score by Don Ellis is shrewdly and sparely used, and the movie is uniformly well-acted, by a cast that also includes Roy Scheider, Tony LoBianco, and Harold Gary. The character of Det. “Popeye” Doyle is less The French Connection‘s protagonist than its chief participant, and so Gene Hackman is still denied a true star role; but Hackman is rousingly good in it. Hackman, who was so fine as Clyde’s brother in Bonnie and Clyde and as the ski coach in Downhill Racer and as the son in I Never Sang for My Father, has quietly be come one of the most memorable actors in our movies. Now if they could only find a leading lady for him. — Craig Fisher, originally published on Oct. 29, 1971.