The French Connection Hello

 

When it comes to New Hollywood movies, there are a few that stand out above the rest. These include A Clockwork Orange, The Last Picture Show and Klute. There's also a trio of best-picture winners that came out in 1971, including Dirty Harry, The French Connection and Sunday Bloody Sunday.

The French Connection Hello

Released in 1971, the film set a new standard for crime films with its tough and gritty New York style. Its depiction of one of the world's biggest drug busts earned it eight Academy Award nominations and five wins, including Best Picture, Directing, Actor, and Adapted Screenplay.

The story is loosely based on a 1969 book by Robin Moore, and it focuses on narcotics detectives Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Cloudy Russo (Roy Scheider) who work together to bust big drug dealers in the streets of New York City. They're paired up with Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), who has $32 million worth of heroin tucked away in a car that he plans to smuggle across the ocean.

But despite the fact that it's often considered a The french connection kissed masterpiece, there are some things about The French Connection Hello that make it feel more like a low-rent police procedural than something that would have inspired the kind of praise the film earned at the time.

A lot of The French Connection Hello features long stretches of scenes without any dialogue at all, making it seem more like a silent movie than a Hollywood thriller. Some of these sequences even take place in another language, and you don't need subtitles to understand them.

Is this a sign that the filmmaker meant to evoke realism?

There are times when the film is so bleak that you feel as though you're being given a glimpse into the dark underbelly of modern America. It's a very hard film to watch, and it's not for everyone.

Some of the most ominous and tense moments in the film involve police brutality against people that appear to be innocent or not even part of the criminal network involved. It's not always clear how far the characters are willing to go, but it's a very scary thing to watch.

It's a film that shows cops as basically incompetent and not very good at their jobs. They're not supercops who do things outside the rules to get ahead, but they're just incompetent.

That's a pretty interesting point, because it suggests that maybe Friedkin's portrayal of policing wasn't quite as slick as we might assume. In a sense, this could be seen as a more straightforward version of the nihilistic themes of The Exorcist, and it's worth taking a closer look at what exactly that might mean for the movie's lasting impact.

I'm sure this isn't a message that is necessarily going to resonate with a modern audience, but it's an interesting one to think about. There's a lot of talk about how we should be more respectful of the men and women who fight for our safety, but The French Connection Hello isn't really a movie that takes that position. In fact, it's a movie that makes you question whether a person should be on the force in the first place.