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17. The French Connection - The Chase

“Police emergency. I need your car.”

The signature sequence of William Friedkin’s 1971 procedural-to-end-all-procedurals begins with a little bit of foreshadowing - a shot of an elevated train. The entire premise of this chase is based on the fact that it lives in the shadow of Bullitt. Friedkin had been given a mandate to outdo that film’s seminal car chase, at that point only three years old. After walking for 55 blocks through New York with his producer, Philip D’Antoni, it occurred to him their edge could be the city’s elevated train system. What the Bullitt chase is to San Francisco (hills and open spaces), the French Connection chase is to New York (flat and enclosed), and that opening-shot train makes all the difference.

Before we even get to the train, Friedkin begins crafting a masterpiece of action. The sniper shot that kills a woman pushing her baby in a stroller right next to our anti-hero, Popeye Doyle, comes out of nowhere. These days, we’re used to the mundane visual (somebody buying groceries, for example) being the prelude to Something Bad happening, and in a sense, this is no different. Doyle has just been kicked off the case and now he’s walking home. Why are we watching that if Shit isn’t about to Go Down? (Seriously, can you watch a passenger’s-eye-view shot a driver anymore and NOT expect a semi to plow into them?)

And yet the shot still surprises us, and launches us into one of the best cinéma-vérité-style action sequences ever conceived. Part of the effectiveness of this style stems from how it suggests that anyone could go out and shoot this. That had you been there, with a camera in your hand, this is the footage you would have got. In other words, You. Are. There.

The reason it feels like they just grabbed a bunch of cameras and shot this shit is because they just grabbed a bunch of cameras and shot this shit. No planning. No permits. Just do it. The guerrilla-style filmmaking that would become a hallmark of 90’s independent cinema was the Best Picture big-studio filmmaking of 1971. Narc, among other films, would inherit this intensity - note that #22 also uses heavy breathing as a soundtrack. But the execution of that guerrilla stye, however, gets very sketchy, very quickly.

To this day, Friedkin and company freely admit that they sent a stunt driver (the same one from Bullitt, actually) down 26 blocks of uncontrolled New York traffic with nothing but a fake siren on the roof to encourage people to get out of the way. At 90 mph. And did I mention they didn’t warn anybody?

Today, Friedkin describes the choice as the act of a “callow heedless youth” and concludes that he would not make the same choice now. At best, it’s irresponsible and at worst it’s criminally negligent. There was an accident (besides several stunt cars getting banged up) in which the unsuspecting vehicle only got grazed. But it could very easily have been one of those stories of a tragic on-set death you hear about in Hollywood lore given a split second one way or the other.

(I could go on to scold Friedkin for some of the shit he pulled on the set of The Exorcist, but here I am praising his action sequence, so I’m kind of conflicted here.)

Putting aside, for a moment, the question of the end justifying the means (it doesn’t), in terms of accomplishing the goal of outdoing Bullitt, I think Friedkin more than pulls it off. Frankly, I wasn’t that impressed by the Bullitt chase to begin with, so I am a little predisposed to give plaudits elsewhere. But this sequence scoops up the intensity that I felt was lacking in Bullitt.

And as reprehensible as the surrounding circumstances are, the simple act of placing that camera on the grill of that car puts this sequence light years ahead of most chases that came before. The lack of music is another point in the sequence’s favor. (Note to future filmmakers: Vast epics like Ben-Hur and gritty thrillers like The French Connection both know when not to use music, so the genre doesn’t necessarily dictate the score, or lack thereof.)

Once again going back to the old revealing-character-through-action chestnut, here it’s Doyle’s obsessiveness that’s on display. He will do anything, including endagering innocent lives, to get his man. And by man, I mean shot. And by Doyle, I mean Friedkin. All right. I’ll stop now.

A note on performance: In a car chase, an actor has very little to work with to emote. Hands at ten and two, mister! So he or she pretty much has to rely on their face. Hackman’s face works wonders here in this department, and Friedkin’s smart enough to cut to it aplenty. Doyle’s becomes the visage of all road rage.

Finally, Friedkin concludes the sequence with one of the most 70’s anti-hero endings to an action scene you could hope for: The good guy shoots the bad guy in the back in an act of cold-blooded murder. Nice.

Missing the beginning and end, but you get the point…

See also: Roger Moore chases down an assassin on the streets of Paris in A View to a Kill, Bruce Willis and Sam Jackson cab it through Central Park to beat a train in Die Hard: With a Vengeance, pretty much any car chase in Ronin.

Next: You better have more than a gun if you’re gonna take on Jet Li. Or, like, three guns, actually.