Exciting car chases punctuate a brilliant `Connection'
By JOHN CRAWFORD
Scene Movie Critic
Hollywood doesn't know how to do good car chases anymore.
With the exception of the dizzying pursuits in Robert DeNiro's 1998 spy flick "Ronin," modern movie car chases are too often grating scenes full of senseless explosions, overdone special effects and bewildering MTV-style quick cuts, all accompanied by some loud and bad music.
Chases that are testosterone-boiling, octane-burning thrill rides, like the muscle-car showdown through the hills of San Francisco in the 1968 Steve McQueen film "Bullitt," seem to be a lost art.
The car-train pursuit in "The French Connection," a 1971 Oscar-winning police drama, is about as good as chases get.
Without relying on effects, explosions, gimmicks or heavy-metal music, it involves just a man, a fast car and a revving engine, not to mention a runaway elevated train barreling down the tracks above the city.
"Police emergency, I need your car," says Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (a gutsy and driven Gene Hackman), as he hijacks a vehicle and blasts through Brooklyn, zigzagging through traffic, flying blindly though intersections and crashing into cars and walls.
It's beautiful and exciting and it inspires a symphony of goose pimples — everything a good car chase should do.
The car-train chase is the centerpiece of a movie full of police pursuits, as two New York City cops, Doyle and Roy Scheider's Buddy Russo, tail suspects through streets, highways and subway stations.
The film is one big cat-and-mouse game as the two cops try to intercept a huge heroin shipment from France.
The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Hackman and Best Director for William Friedkin.
Director of the 1973 horror classic "The Exorcist," Friedkin is a standout 1970s filmmaker who has seemingly disappeared.
His work in the '90s includes the far-from-stellar "Blue Chips," starring that Marlon Brando of the basketball court, Shaquille O'Neal, and the recent and uneven "Rules of Engagement."
In "The French Connection," however, Friedkin presents a world that is real and brutal. It's full of dirty streets and seedy neighborhoods, places you wouldn't want to touch without washing your hands afterwards.
His protagonists are tough and flawed. They're good guys who don't always act good, heroes who don't always win and cops who don't always get their man.
The center of Friedkin's universe is Doyle, a rough and tumble mess of a police officer: he drinks and bickers, flirts with women, utters ethnic and racial epitaphs, slaps suspects and conducts alley interrogations. He advises his partner, "Don't trust anyone."
When shaking down suspected drug dealers, he taunts them, saying, "Want that hand broken?"
He's a character so hell-bent on justice that he careens down crowded city streets pursuing an out-of-control train, giving cinema one of its greatest car chases.
All Scene Stories for Thursday, April 27, 2000
