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Film · 1971 · Crime thriller
The French Connection
Directed by William Friedkin
1971
★ 7.6 editorial score
It made the car chase in Bullitt look choreographed: this one was shot without permits, at ninety miles an hour, through real Brooklyn traffic that nobody had cleared.
“Perhaps most striking of all is the leisured, unhurried pace of The French Connection. It is fully one hour before gunshots are fired. There are many scenes in which Doyle simply cruises around New York, searching, brooding; these, to me, evoke the city as powerfully as Mean Streets or Taxi Driver...And the ghostly, ambient honk of car horns, sometimes fluttering a little on the soundtrack, say 1971 like nothing else.”
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