I didn't much care for The French Connection the first time I saw it, and on my second viewing, I still don't much care for it.
Five of the six movies I'm rewatching in this series are movies I really liked, mostly even loved, on my first viewing. The French Connection is the exception to that.
In fact, I'm so puzzled by its appeal that I had to remind myself as I was watching it that in addition to winning the best editing Oscar, it also won best picture.
What's my beef with this movie?
Let me start with a little background.
I frequently tell people that my favorite decade of filmmaking is the 1970s. I should probably be honest with myself and clarify that. The 1970s likely have the highest average quality of films, in that there were fewer concessions to studios being made than in any other decade, which allowed a host of new filmmakers -- some of those profiled in the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which gets its title from two movies that aren't from the 1970s -- to really show us what they had.
They fully honest answer to this question -- and I like to always be fully honest with you -- is that I prefer the 1980s, as this contains the most personal favorites that embedded themselves in my budding persona as a cinephile at just the right age to have the most enduring impact. However, there are a lot more shitty movies made in the 1980s than there were in the 1970s.
The flip side to the freedom the 1970s filmmakers enjoyed is that they were also held to a lower standard of accessibility. The French Connection is a film I find fairly inaccessible. It doesn't contain many of the standard gestures we get toward orienting the viewer that we see in newer films, and older films. We don't feel like we're properly introduced to the characters and it's like we've started in with them mid-conversation. That can be good, and I hope I don't need things to be spoon fed to me. But in the case of The French Connection, it doesn't work for me.
Oh we do get character moments with Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle. It isn't all procedural. There's the scene where he gets handcuffed to the bed, with his own handcuffs, by the woman with whom he's having a tryst. This guy is a mess and many of the other narrative beats will demonstrate that amply.
But maybe I feel like I should like Popeye Doyle more than I do, even as he's making egregious errors of judgment, failures of empathy, and even dropping racial slurs. If made as a prestige TV show in the 21st century, The French Connection would have figured out a way in to Doyle, to ingratiating us to him.
The actual French Connection does not do that. It just sends him through a series of plot-heavy foot chases, car chases, and often botched surveillances, which each have lesser and lesser impact the more of them there are.
I do think, however, that the editing in the film is pretty great. And I suspect one of the reasons Gerald B. Greenberg won the Oscar for William Friedkin's film is that he was helping usher in the new era of post-Hays Code gritty filmmaking that would go on to define the 1970s.
(Let's pause for a moment to acknowledge Greenberg's accomplishments. He was also nominated for no less than Apocalypse Now and Kramer vs. Kramer -- which were actually both in the same damn year -- and he worked five times with Brian De Palma.)
The thing I noticed in The French Connection, that I maybe haven't noticed in other films so far in this series, is the tendency to cut the action short just a beat earlier than you would expect. It lends an undeniable kineticism to the proceedings, and also a sense that this is a rough cut of this rough story. If you are a good cinephile, you shouldn't need polish, so this approach rewards your sophisticated sensibilities as a viewer of challenging art.
You see it in the foot chases. You see it in the car chases. (Oh yeah, this film is known for having one of the most famous car chases of all time, where Doyle speeds underneath an elevated train to get to the next stop before the train does.) You see it in the auction for abandoned cars at the impound lot. You see it in a scene where a sniper tries to take out Doyle and his partner, played by Roy Scheider. (I can't actually remember who was in that scene, but let's assume it was Hackman and Scheider.) You see it simply in a scene of Doyle scanning the streets with that furrowed brow and watchful eye he always has.
But just liking this basic technique and being able to clap myself on the back for appreciating what it's doing is not really enough to get me through The French Connection with more that a distanced, academic appreciation of it. I don't like it.
Would I like it better if they got the bad guys in the end? (They get some of them, but those ones all get off easy, and they don't get the Big Bad.) In other words, am I not as sophisticated as I think, and I need my protagonist to do more than create a ruckus wherever he goes, shooting wildly and indiscriminately, and one time killing an innocent person, a fact that doesn't seem to bother him very much? And once dropping the n-word?
(I don't like his hat, either. There, I said it.)
I don't know. Maybe?
I'll be back in September with my next previously unseen film, The Right Stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment