Low level criminal Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) is entertaining guests and flashing cash at the bar which lights a fire under Popeye who inevitably drags Cloudy along for the ride. They get their man who tells them something big is going down and a tired, bandaged Cloudy is brought out for a drink by Popeye. Near the start of the film the two partners are chasing a drug pusher – Hackman is dressed as Santa Claus for context – and Cloudy is slashed with a knife during the chase. No chase means Popeye and Cloudy are out of a purpose in life. Cutting the problem out at the root means there’s no work. Popeye and, to a lesser extent, Cloudy don’t really care about stopping crime. When all you’ve got standing in the way of this wave of crime are cops like Popeye and Cloudy there’s basically no hope.
The city is full of hustlers, pimps, bent cops and smugglers looking to pump this already rotting city’s veins full of smack.
French connection movie cracked#
Steam gushes from every drain and vent set into the cracked concrete and filthy asphalt in The French Connection. Throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s the city of New York was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, suffered a wave of sanitation worker strikes and the realities of its crumbling infrastructure were more apparent than ever. New York in the 70s has been mythologised by filmmakers like Friedkin, Martin Scorsese and Walter Hill but there’s a grain of dirty truth to these stories of gangs, PTSD-afflicted ‘Nam vets and crooked cops. That’s what I feel like I need after watching The French Connection so grimy is its setting, story and characters. In ancient Roman baths slaves would use a scraping tool called a strigil to scrape the sweat, oil and dirt from their masters’ backs.
French connection movie driver#
Taxi Driver is one, Gone Baby Gone and Naked are others. There are certain films that are so dirty in presentation, aesthetic and theme that, after you watch them, you feel the need to step into a scalding hot shower and scrub. As the case heats up, Popeye and Cloudy come under pressure from their superiors, the Feds and their own obsessive desire to catch the crooks. Charnier plans to smuggle $32 million worth of heroin into New York in the car of the unsuspecting Henri Devereaux (Frédéric de Pasquale), a French TV personality and Charnier’s friend. But in the cinema of today that’s dominated by straight-laced supermen and wise-cracking “anti-heroes” perhaps we need the likes of Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo more than we think.ĭetectives Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider) are on the trail of notorious French heroin smuggler Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) in New York City. Gone are the days when a film like William Friedkin’s The French Connection could sweep the Oscars and dominate the 1971 box office.
French connection movie movie#
Where once it was the tentpole of mainstream adult cinema, now it is relegated to the odd indie movie rarely seen outside of festivals, the occasional Steven Soderbergh picture or, most commonly, in the form of an 8-10 episode miniseries. The mid-budget crime thriller barely exists anymore.
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