The Camerawork In The French Connection Is Outstanding, The Characters Less So

Praise must be given to The French Connection for its boldly bleak ending. This 1971 feature from director William Friedkin has a gangbuster conclusion that dares to allow key plot points to go unresolved, for good to not triumph over evil and for our lead character to be sucked into his own mental abyss.  It's a daring way to close out the proceedings and its mighty well-executed, however, such a capper does not remove all the shortcomings previously seen in The French Connection, which ends up being a movie that's more successful in terms of camerawork than it is at character work.

Like a number of other movies from the 1970's (Taxi Driver especially), The French Connection is concerned with crime that's running rampant through the streets of this famous city. Two detectives, Jimmy Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider), are trying to do their part in combatting this wave of crime by investigating an incoming drug deal, one that's being led by Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). From the opening scene when we see these two beating up an unarmed person they want to divulge information, it's made clear that Doyle and Russo are not bending some rules in their crusade for law and order, they themselves are monsters searching for ways to take down other monsters.

The idea of people like private detectives who are supposed to search for the righteous truth actually being troubled dark figures is far from a new concept in American cinema, it's the entire cornerstone of the Noir genre and recent pieces of art like the first season of True Detective probed this concept in fascinating ways. Unlike the best Noir features or that season of True Detective though, The French Connection doesn't really bother to flesh out its troubled detective protagonists at all and that's crucial if you wanna wade into storytelling territory as well-trodden as this. For instance, I couldn't really tell you all the nuances found in the character of Jimmy Doyle, he's a pretty simply defined personality that isn't all that interesting to watch while Roy Scheider as Buddy Russo.mostly just stands in the background and watch Gene Hackman deliver dialogue.

Without concrete personalities to explore, scenes in The French Connection intended to explore the darker side of law enforcement by focusing on just the characters of Jimmy Doyle and Buddy Russo tend to fall flat. There's just too little in the way of specific details in these characters to make this umpteenth exploration of this thematic concept stand out. They're imperfect people who frequently do repulsive things and that's it, there's no more exploration of these two leads than that to be found here. However, while The French Connection's lacks in characterization and thematic underpinnings, it does manage to excel on a visual level, particularly in camerawork. Whenever this film just lets quiet scenes of Doyle & Russo tailing suspects take over, The French Connection becomes riveting because of the way director William Friedkin beautifully conveys through masterful staging how these two characters are trying to blend into a larger crowd of people without losing their suspect in the process.

Such scenes feel like heavy influences on how similar sequences in Steven Spielberg's 2005 espionage thriller Munich were shot and the level of craftsmanship in the way The French Connection visually captures Doyle & Russo tracking suspects makes it easy to see why they were able to be influential enough to impact a master filmmaker like Spielberg thirty years after they were created. Even better than those quiet suspenseful sequences is an extended train/car chase, which concerns Doyle (in an automobile) chasing after a crook who has hijacked a train. This whole segment of The French Connection is a total tour de force in terms of camerawork and editing, particularly in the way it conveys the idea that the crook Doyle is after has no control over the scenario he's trapped in.

This criminal is just adhering to his basic survival instincts and doing whatever he can to stay alive and that character motivation comes through in how intentionally jarring the editing and camerawork are. Through these elements, the viewer will be jolted into a new perspective, angle or element of conflict without even a second of warning and it makes for a harrowing sequence that left me breathless. Much of the second act and almost all of the third act of The French Connection are comprised of these kinds of top-notch suspense sequences that truly are exceptional, but oh if only its lead characters and the way it navigates bleak themes could have been equally memorable.