More than half a century after William Friedkin’s revolutionary action film stunned viewers, Geoffrey Macnab looks at how the rogue cop at its centre manages to be so perversely sympathetic.
As they wax nostalgic about the good old days of the 1960s when they could freely arrest, bully and harass anyone they wanted, without having to go to the inconvenience of reading suspects their rights, they look and sound exactly like Hollywood’s favoured version of big city detectives.
Friedkin is quoted in Easy Riders Raging Bulls (Peter Biskind’s book about Hollywood in the 1970s) as having been inspired to make The French Connection by a remark from legendary filmmaker Howard Hawks.
Every time I made a film like that, with a lotta good guys against bad guys, it had a lotta success,” Hawks told Friedkin.
Friedkin wanted The French Connection to be a film his uncle, who worked in a delicatessen in Chicago, could understand.
