The French Connection (1971)

DIRECTOR(S): William Friedkin SCREENPLAY: Ernest Tidyman CAST: Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, Roy Scheider, Tony Lo Blanco, Marcel Bozzufi, Bill Hickman

William Friedkin's 1971 classic The French Connection is a film about spaces, a work that uses, unlike Dog Day Afternoon, New York City as a constant setting to frame the movements of detective Jimmy Doyle (Gene Hackman) as he tracks French drug traffickers across the city. Friedkin's film is not a rigorous psychological study of character; rather, it is a relatively straightforward police film that masterfully uses its mise-en-scene to evoke environment and atmosphere, an ambiance that is always present regardless of setting.

It's Doyle and Russo's (Scheider) city, and it's no coincidence that the best scenes in the film are when French traffickers--foreigners to the city, as far as the two detectives are concerned--attempt to escape the detectives' gaze. Friedkin's camera is always playing with space, manipulating shapes and camera movements to evoke closeness of setting and character. It's winter in New York, and Friedkin evokes the city's gray colors and weak sunlight. The most famous sequence in the film, the chase scene in which Hackman chases one of the drug traffickers (Marcel Bozzufi, the famous killer in Costa Gavras' Z), is remarkable for its pacing but also the tension that arises out of its background setting--the way, for instance, the claustrophobia of the Subway manifests itself in hand-held shots, or the way Hackman looks up at Bozzufi as he attempts to assassinate him from a New York building. The film's brilliance is here, in the tension between setting and narrative. The French Connection is, after all, nothing if not an essential New York movie.