When it comes to classic movies that have shaped the way we think about police action movies, William Friedkin's 1971 film The French Connection has to be at the top of the list. It's the first cop movie that tapped into the "war on drugs," and it changed how we saw law enforcement in films.
The French Connection, written by Ernest Tidyman and based on Robin Moore's 1969 book of the same name, follows NYPD detectives Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider) in their quest to catch wealthy French heroin smuggler Alain Charnier. While based on real-life detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, it's a fictionalized adaptation that makes some tweaks to the story and doesn't take any of its inspirations lightly.
In the early stages of the film, it establishes Doyle and Cloudy as flawed characters with a violent obsession with cracking the biggest drug ring in New York City. You can see that in the way they stalk and snuff out their targets, often at the expense of other people.
But it also demonstrates that these guys are not the good guys, and if you're going to work with someone like this you have to be prepared to be at least a little skeptical of what they're doing. And the way they brutalize the seemingly innocent in The French Connection is so shocking that you're never really sure whether they're bad guys or not, even when they seem to be doing a good job of trying to stop the crime.
What's so great about The french connection the higher the better is how it uses these elements to create a tension between the FBI and local law enforcement that feels so genuine and true. It's not a hyper-realistic depiction of surveillance, but it's an effective one, and that's a huge part of what makes The French Connection so compelling.
Another thing The French Connection does that's so great is it shows us how the drug trade works, and how much it relies on the cooperation of narcotics dealers. The narcotics dealers are the ones who give out the drugs, and it's very easy for them to be tricked by the police into giving them what they want. It's a big problem in America, and this movie does a fantastic job of showing you how the system works.
Those things are a lot of what the movie is all about, and it's a great example of how this sort of stuff can be used to build drama and keep the story moving at a fast pace. The movie is paced and shot so well, so that it's always exciting to watch because the action is so intense.
The French Connection is a masterpiece of style, and that's a huge part why it's so important to cop action movies today. It's an artful blend of editing, music, and landscape changes that all serve to propel the narrative at breakneck speeds.
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