Name: 3 Things 'The French Connection' Teaches Us About Filmmaking
Uploaded: 2023-06-02T16:45:12.000Z
Duration: 22 min 42 s
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Smack dab in the middle of the Hollywood Renaissance, William Friedkin's 1971 police thriller

titled The French Connection captures the gritty reality of a true crime story like

Adverbs of degree

few films can. Over the years, detective films have certainly not been in short supply. Today,

we take an in-depth look at what The French Connection teaches us about filmmaking to

see if we can figure out why it always seems to tower above the rest.

The French Connection was adapted from a non-fiction novel that recounts a real narcotics case

that took place between 1960 and 1962 in New York City. The film was released on October

9th, 1971 to great acclaim and ended up winning Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing,

Best Actor, Best Director, and was the first R-rated movie to win Best Picture at the Academy

Awards (wiki). The story follows detectives Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle and Buddy 'Cloudy'

Russo as they try to find a large heroin supply being snuck into New York City from France.

The characters Popeye and Cloudy were played by Gene Hackman and Roy Sheider respectively

and they were based on real detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso who actually have small

roles in the film. Grosso plays Klein and Egan, with a speaking part, plays Lieutenant Simonson.

After leaving the police force, both Grosso and Egan went on to have careers in the entertainment

industry—Grosso became a technical advisor and a film and television producer for everything

from Night Heat to even Pee-wee's Playhouse. He also continued to act in small roles including

a police officer in The Godfather and Detective Blasio in Friedkin's 1980 film Cruising.

Eddie Egan became a sort of celebrity because of his fearless brazen attitude and his extremely

large amount of arrests and acted in several movies and TV shows during the 70s and 80s.

Sonny Grosso: “The French Connection meant: there were street connections, there were

Spanish connections, there were Black connections, there were Italian connections; the ultimate

connection in the drug world was the French connection.”

The characters in The French Connection are introduced in a very exciting, eloquent, and

economic way. William Friedkin was quoted saying, “I have a theory about thrillers.

If you open with a murder in the first two minutes, the audience will hang around for

15 minutes of exposition without getting bored,” (Film Quarterly) which is utilized here, but

our heroes are also introduced in an exciting way. The first time we see Popeye and Cloudy,

they are about to make a bust. We don't see their home life, getting ready for work,

or hanging out at the police station—we are immediately thrust into the action. They

are cops; the film is about busting drug dealers, so why not introduce them busting a drug dealer?

This goes for the introduction of all of the main characters—the classy French antagonist

classes it up, the killer kills, and the cops bust.

Action films often start out with an action setpiece of some sort with little weighing

on the plot, but what The French Connection does is offer up just a short foot chase for

action. This is brilliantly done because it isn't meant to be sheer spectacle. What

it does is it gives us a chance to see how well Popeye and Cloudy work together and sets

up the interesting details of the job as well as the little quirks they both have.

Every single choice that is made in this opening sequence sets up the characters including

everything from dialogue to wardrobe and setting. The first time we see Popeye, he is dressed

as Santa Claus—it shows us that he is a little 'out-there,' but it also shows

us that he is willing to do whatever it takes to get his man (including running around dressed

as Santa) and the image of Popeye chasing a drug dealer down the street in the Santa

outfit is a memorable way of doing that. You won't see any other officer in the film

What follows is a short interrogation scene in an empty lot, which was actually the location

of the real Sonny Grosso's childhood home. In the screenplay, this scene takes place

inside Popeye's car, but this was changed to a much more intriguing location that is

in keeping with the gritty presentation of New York City. It almost conjures images of

bombed out buildings in Europe during World War II. This scene could just as easily taken

place down at the precinct in an interrogation room, but instead it is on the street, which

shows us that Popeye and Cloudy are more comfortable out on the streets of the city. They aren't

eager to get back to the safety of the precinct. They are unafraid of the jungle that is New

York City. And we'll see how this mentality affects their decisions throughout the rest

The production hired the writer of Shaft who adapted the screenplay for a small amount

of money. The script also contained fairly different dialogue in this scene except, of

Friedkin: “The Roy Scheider character, Buddy Russo, would always ask the suspect specific

questions about specific things while the Eddie Egan or the Popeye Doyle character would

ask him non-sequiturs like if he ever sat down on the edge of the bed and picked his

feet. And so the suspect was caught in the middle between these two techniques. He was

more afraid to answer Doyle's nonsensical questions than Russo's questions that made

sense because he didn't know really how much trouble he was in.”

Hackman: “I heard Eddie do the 'do you pick your feet in Poughkeepsie' thing a

number of times when we were out in the streets in Harlem and all over the place. And I never

understood it and people on the street to this day come up to me and ask me if I pick

Friedkin: “'Pick your feet in Poughkeepsie' was a phrase Eddie Egan used on almost every

suspect he ever  interrogated just to unsettle them. It's just a non-sequitur to unsettle someone,

but it's asked very straight and forcefully and it's a very hard question to answer,

as you might imagine. And so it would cause the suspect to freeze up and wonder if he

had, in fact, done something in Poughkeepsie that he should be arrested for.”

However, the one who was really unsettled in this scene was Hackman who had a lot of

trouble roughing up the actor playing the dope peddler. The scene was shot in the first

week of production and they did 22 takes, but it wasn't working.

Hackman: “And so, I did, I went to him and said, 'I don't think I can do this.'

And to his credit, or maybe because he was in a bind, he decided not to let me go and

I will be eternally grateful that he didn't because it was certainly the start of my career.”

They went ahead and kept shooting the rest of the film and came back and shot this scene

much later when Hackman was in the right mindset to go through with the scene.

Scheider: “I mean, for instance, the first scene in the film, when we're chasing Alan

Weeks and we're slapping the hell out of him in that alley, well, that was the first

day of shooting and Gene and I were not very good. We weren't very convincing. We just

didn't have the fluidity and the speed and the routine of a 'good cop, bad cop'

We didn't have it down yet. So Billy said, 'alright, look, we'll scrap this. We'll

come back at the end of the movie and we'll do this. We came back and we did it in an

afternoon. It was a piece of cake, but by that time, we felt like cops.”

This seems like good advice. Much of a film hinges on the character introductions and

it might be a good idea to shoot the first scenes later in the production—especially

if it an intense scene—so that the actors have had more time to better get into the

This scene introduces Popeye's anger and really relies on Hackman's ability to convey

the motivation Popeye has to catch the bad guys and get the information he needs to make

Friedkin: “I knew that he hated his father, so in order to produce anger in him, the anger

that was necessary for the character, I became like a harsh father. And so, the point of

that story is that, with every actor, the director works like a psychologist.”

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3 Things 'The French Connection' Teaches Us About Filmmaking

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