#93 ‘The French Connection’
Heroin, Handguns, and the Heroic Legacy of the Racist Cop Who Gets Results
The French Connection (1971) is a gritty, adrenaline-soaked procedural soaked in the grainy realism of early ’70s urban decay. It’s the godfather of modern cop thrillers, the film that made car chases into cinematic gospel, and the one that launched Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle—a man so committed to law and order he’ll blow up half of Brooklyn to stop a guy with a baguette. It’s brilliant, it’s brutal, and it’s built entirely on the fantasy that being a terrible human being is acceptable if you occasionally tackle a drug dealer into a trash can.
Hackman’s Doyle is a walking snarl in a porkpie hat: racist, violent, and charming in the way only white men in 1970s crime films are allowed to be. He’s not a complicated antihero—he’s just a bad cop with good instincts and a license to dehumanize. The film presents his flaws like flavor: sure, he’s a bigot, but look how good he is at shaking down bars and harassing suspects. He’s what happens when the system decides results matter more than humanity, and audiences have been cheering for him ever since.
The plot—if you care—is a cat-and-mouse game between New York narcotics detectives and a slick, sophisticated French heroin smuggler. It’s an exercise in surveillance, tension, and mid-century masculinity, where the biggest thrill isn’t catching the bad guy—it’s the feeling that you might be the only one in the room who understands how the game works. And if someone has to get slapped, shot, or racially profiled in the process? Occupational hazard.
The famous car chase—Doyle gunning it under an elevated train while nearly killing half the city—is pure chaos ballet, filmed with a real sense of danger because, fun fact: it was dangerous. William Friedkin directs with documentary grit and zero sentimentality. There’s no score to tell you how to feel, just screeching tires and Doyle’s jaw clenched like it owes him money. It’s an iconic sequence, but also a metaphor: a cop endangering everyone around him in pursuit of a criminal he's not entirely sure he can even identify.
And what of the women? Oh, sweet summer child. There are barely any. A girlfriend glimpsed. A woman in a car. A waitress, maybe? This is a film where femininity exists only in the margins, and morality is defined exclusively by who gets to carry a badge. The French villain (Fernando Rey) is elegant, inscrutable, and silent enough to feel mysterious. The Americans are loud, brutal, and driven by a moral compass made entirely out of broken glass and whiskey fumes.
The final moments of the film—ambiguous, bleak, unresolved—pretend to critique the whole mess, but by then it’s too late. The French Connection has already elevated Popeye Doyle into the pantheon of American movie cops: the ends-justify-the-means icon who always gets his man, even if he shoots the wrong one along the way.
3.5 out of 5 cold subway stakeouts
(One for Friedkin’s furious direction. One for Hackman’s feral charisma. One for the chase that redefined the genre. Half a star for the cinematography that made winter in New York feel like a war zone. The missing stars? Cuffed to the idea that maybe, just maybe, being good at your job doesn’t excuse being the kind of man who plants drugs, tramples rights, and never once questions his place in the food chain.)
