The French Connection (1971)'s comments

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badblokebob

It's a shame the top-rated comment here is primarily about how bad the 2009 Blu-ray is, for two reasons. 1) the problem was never anything to do with grain, which should be there, but the weird revisionist colour timing Friedkin cooked up. And 2) they reissued it in 2012 with a corrected transfer that looks fantastic. No need to stick with DVD when there's such a good Blu-ray available.

3 years 9 months ago

Earring72

REmains one of the best movies of the 70ies......police drama....with high marks for everyone. Still holds up

3 years 9 months ago

dantheman89

Don't listen to the haters - if your standard is "Fast and the Furious" you'll be bored by this. "The french connection" is orders of magnitude better.

It's a thriller that make you (at least me) sit on the edge of your seat. No giant explosions, no fantasy hour-long shoot-outs with millions of bullets missing people. In that regard I think it's a fairly realistic movie.
As far as I can tell it's pretty realistic on the whole. The way the cops behaved towards minorities (not cool - but fits with the time), the way the sets looked. Granted I wasn't around in NYC in the 70s but it does do a great job transporting you back then.

Both Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider are interesting characters, Direction and Cinematography are awesome - overall A+ movie

4 years 5 months ago

BigAwesomeBLT

For the first half an hour I had very little idea what was going on.

Drags a little and you have to get used to some of the language they got away with in the early seventies. Also, there is A LOT of stakeout and following people around quietly for long stretches of the film.

Otherwise a good movie, will be checking out the sequel.

8 years 10 months ago

Zeltaebar

The French Connection is little more than surveilance work. We share in the policemen's many long scenes of following, looking at and chasing a selection of unremarkable criminals. We don't get to know any of the characters and there is nothing original about the plot. Well, at least not these days when such movie fare has been repeated to death - and mostly done far better. The subway chase sequence is well shot, but there is nothing else of interest here. Perhaps the most undeserved winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture I've ever seen.

9 years 2 months ago

mmobeso

90% of the movie is the cops chasing the bad guys so if you love the chase you're gonna love this movie!

9 years 4 months ago

nicolaskrizan

good even without the car chase – in the book

http://beyond1001movies.wordpress.com/2014/10/18/backtrack-the-french-connection-1971/

9 years 6 months ago

Joker of Gotham

Not such a memorable movie to me, although I really like the vigilance scenes and the performance of the two cops.
3.5/5

9 years 6 months ago

Siskoid

Based on true events and people, this cinema vérité classic juggles procedural and action beats and gives Gene Hackman in particular the chance to play the ultimate cop on the edge, very much the Captain Ahab of crime drama. It's also, I found, a film about people following other people. Not so much a chase movie - though they did try to outdo Bullitt at some point - as it is a tail movie. There's a great tailing sequence between Hackman's Popeye Doyle and supposedly-French villain Alain Charnier (Spaniard Fernando Rey has a terrible accent, I'm sorry), and later, the iconic car-train chase sequence, with more besides. It all ends ambiguously, a tribute to both true events and a particular 70s bleakness.

10 years 3 months ago