Saturday, December 13, 2008

#93: The French Connection (1971)



Guess what folks? Nobody wins the drug war.

The characters are pretty cool and there are a few memorable scenes, like Santa making a bust at the beginning, as well as the maniacal chase of an L train by a car on a crowded 2-lane New York street. We also get a lot of early 70's dead time with wide amateur-photographer shots of men walking and other men watching them from afar, with no soundtrack music to speak of.

Gene Hackman and Roy "Jaws" Scheider do a good job playing a couple of rough cops in New York, in a good story. However, most of the filmmaking felt pretty pedestrian 70's almost 40 years after the fact.

I like it, I get it, but if the movie wasn't about drug trafficking, it wouldn't have made this list. It actually fell 23 spots over the past 10 years, showing evidence that culturally we're perhaps getting oversaturated with movies about drugs, so that the revelations of 1971 are no longer stunning. Watch it or don't.

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