The French Connection 1971 Movie Scene Gene Hackman as Jimmy Popeye Doyle holding his gun during the final fight

The French Connection [1971] – A True Classic Still Kicking Ass

September 18, 2025

Well, well, well, I guess we’re really doing this, aren’t we? I mean, I guess I’m really doing this and why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I review one of the most popular and influential movies of the seventies? At least that way, when you’re browsing Subversive Rabbit looking for good movies to watch, this gem will pop out. And even if you’ve seen it before, it’s always worth another watch. The French Connection is a tight neo-noir thriller based on true events and starring Gene Hackman as Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle. Jimmy is a hardboiled New York cop on the trail of a dangerous French drug trafficker. So, a game of cat and mouse is about to begin.

The French Connection might not blow your mind in 2025. You have to be into this type of movie to like it. You have to be willing to fully immerse yourself in the story, the time period, and the locations for it to work its magic. Otherwise, you might find it a bit underwhelming and simplistic. Especially when you consider what kind of crime thrillers you have now at your disposal. The big chase scene everybody is talking about might not be all that’s cracked up to be. Moreover, the slower pacing, a lot of contrived scenes, and the anti-climactic finale might even force you to say that the movie is bad. And that’s okay. To me, this was just an average thriller until I started craving raw old school neo-noir thrillers.

As its title suggests, the movie The French Connection is about the very real drug trafficking route that has been in use since the 1930s. The heroin, manufactured in Indochina, was transported to France via Turkey eventually ending up on the North American market. For more than 40 years, this was the main source of heroin on this vast market. Robin Moore wrote a book about the efforts to dismantle this operation titled The French Connection: The World’s Most Crucial Narcotics Investigation. And the movie uses it as the basis for its story. Of course, some events, locations, and characters are fictional. Hackman’s Popeye is actually Eddie Egan, Scheider’s Buddy is Sonny Grosso and Fernando Rey’s Alain Charnier is Jean Jehan.

Both Egan and Grosso were consultants during the production. They even took Hackman and Scheider out on patrol with them for about a month. Moreover, NYPD was willing to go to great lengths to help Friedkin. A lot of the extras are real NYPD officers while the infamous chase scene was shot without permits from the city, using the expertise of the NYPD tactical force. If you’re wondering did they really dress up as Santa Claus to bust dealers, the answer is yes, yes they did. We saw the same tactic used by Tommy Lee Jones in U.S. Marshals. With that out of the way, we can finally start looking into this masterpiece of tension and authenticity properly.

This was William Friedkin’s first big hit and he would go on to direct a lot of great movies. Everybody knows about The Exorcist or To Live and Die in L.A. but what about Sorcerer, Cruising, or Killer Joe? As you can notice, Friedkin is one of my favorite directors. He cites Costa Gavras’s Z as a strong influence on The French Connection. The raw, almost documentary-style filming approach he took creates an engaging atmosphere. An engaging and authentic atmosphere. Not to mention the fact that after all this time we can fully immerse ourselves in these iconic locations. Too bad we didn’t spend more time in Marseille.

I have nothing against New York City, on the contrary, but Marseille was just so damn exotic. At least we have a shitload of great French neo-noir thrillers so there’s that. Once we find ourselves in New York, Brooklyn to be precise, we witness Popeye’s and his partner’s now-unorthodox policing methods. I think they were trying to draw parallels between busting small-time dealers and chasing the top smugglers. However, this is just one of several moments in the movie that have not aged well. You could even argue that The French Connection has pretty strong racist undertones at times. Hell, they even drop an N-word at one point.

We can chalk this off to authentic character development and not get bogged down further in this contentious issue. After all, Popeye is this obsessive, almost crazy, tough and brashly racist son-of-a-bitch cop determined to get the bad guys no matter what. And just to be clear I strongly object to the alternations made to the movie after Disney acquired Fox, namely the removal of the N-word. We should be able to watch it in its original form, no matter what it contains. Speaking of things that didn’t age too well, “Picking your feet in Poughkeepsie” was a bit annoying. Although this could be due to the sheer number of times I’ve watched this movie.

After all, this is the precise reason why the real cop Eddie Egan kept using this sentence, to throw off and confuse his suspects. What doesn’t get old is the classic surveillance police work our detectives will be doing. You can see how this type of operation was carried out back then. Just two years later, Serpico smashes through the web of corruption and lies with its authenticity. It’s a much better choice than the abysmal French Connection II. Especially if you want to see the gritty side of New York.