When The French Connection hit theaters in 1971, it didn’t just win over audiences — it was considered one of the greatest films of its decade. It went on to win five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor (Gene Hackman), and it still holds up today as a gritty, cynical masterwork from director William Friedkin. Its influence has spread far and wide, inspiring filmmakers from Akira Kurosawa to the Safdie brothers.
The French Connection was inspired by a real-life drug bust in New York City and starred Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider as police detectives who would use pretty much anything to catch a heroin smuggler. The film is known for its street-level grit, location shooting, and action, but did you know that it was partially designed to look like it came from surveillance cameras? The movie’s lingering images of police cars speeding down streets, the cold, stark lighting of city scenes and the use of actors who don’t look like Hollywood stars were all intentional.
But it’s the car chase scene that’s perhaps most iconic of all, a dazzling sequence that’s both thrilling and terrifying. The film was made just two years after Peter Yates’ kinetic 1968 classic Bullitt, which had raised the bar for chase scenes, but the director wanted to take it even further.
One of the things that makes the final chase so dazzling is its sense of speed. That’s partly due to the fact that Friedkin and cinematographer Owen Roizman used a special camera mount that allowed them to shoot at lower frame rates than normal — undercranking the film at 18fps — making it appear as though the action was moving much faster.
This helped make the shots feel more fluid and realistic. But it also helped create a sense of danger that’s unmistakable in the way that Popeye fends off the fleeing suspect, the way his stance and body language communicate that he is ready to fight at any moment. It’s a style that’s been borrowed by countless other filmmakers since, most notably David Fincher in Se7en.
Another aspect of the chase is that it feels cold and uncaring, reflecting the world that Popeye inhabits. This was largely a result of the film being shot in January in New York, but it also speaks to how the director and Roizman created the world that they were shooting in.
The street-level grit was also intentional. When filming in low-light, Friedkin and Roizman used a technique called “pushing” the image. This involved increasing the ISO, or sensitivity, of the film stock so that it could be shot in darker conditions without sacrificing quality or detail. This was something that had never been done before on a studio film. It’s part of what gives The The french connection the higher the better its distinctive look and feel. The higher the ISO, the more grain there is, which adds to the visual texture of the image. It’s a simple but powerful effect that adds to the overall feeling of the film.