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The French Connection is All About the Chase
You go get ’em, guys
It must be hard to be a man. I have watched and written about eight AFI Top 100 films so far, counting back from 100, and they have all been about the challenges men face in a world that is nevertheless designed entirely to support their comfort and success. Film #93, The French Connection (1971) is no exception.
The one part I enjoyed watching was the iconic chase scene in which a car tries to outrace an above-ground train toward the end of the movie. Show me a YouTube clip of that and call it a day. It was the only part that felt cinematic after the slog of the rest of the film leading up to it. Even then, I cared so little about the painfully macho, totally one-dimensional narcotics cop Jimmy Doyle that I found it really hard to care about whether he succeeded, failed or got flattened by a Krispy Kreme truck. Which he didn’t, but I would have been okay with that.
The other 90% of this film is just watching Doyle and his partner Buddy Russo attempt to covertly follow some drug trafficking suspects around New York City. And they don’t do it well. Doyle pauses to study window displays as if that is a normal thing for a busy New Yorker to do. He stares into a restaurant from across the street for the length of an entire leisurely meal. He gets on and off the subway as his target seems to be changing his mind about whether to take that train or not. It was embarrassingly obvious the guy had caught on that he was being tailed, but Doyle had to keep doing it or lose the suspect. And he lost the suspect anyway. It was tedious and had the intrigue and suspense of a bad surveillance training video.
I think I am expected to root for these dickhead cops to catch the bad guys, but they are bad, too. They harass a bar full of black patrons, they beat up and intimidate a suspect who runs, and based on some dialog with their boss it sounds like they haven’t had a lot of success in their jobs on the narcotics beat. I assume this is a way of establishing them as underdogs, but to me they seemed more like bullies who needed to assert their manhood all over everything in their path.
The stakes didn’t even feel high enough for me to look past all of this and root for the success of the investigation. It was an improbable premise…
