French Connection II

John Frankenheimer may be the best Director that modern Movie Lovers have never heard of. He was always ahead of His time and never compromising. This Movie is surely uncompromising. It took a well known Best Actor Performance from a Best Picture Winner and the Character, Popeye Doyle, and stripped Him of the already barely likable persona of a tough, one dimensional Cop and laid Him open for all to see. It was not a pretty picture.

Neither is French Connection II. It will have you squirming and the Second Act detox is not for anyone with expectation of a slick Action Movie. This is a gritty, dirty, unpleasant Character Study that is compelling Cinema, but not Viewer Friendly. It was taking that Seventies realism just one step further.

It has enough Action and energy to make it as a Thriller but it never lets you forget the painful pursuit of Doyle's obsession with removing H from the Street and the even deeper pain of removing it from your body. This makes this compelling and completely coarse Cinema that makes you pay the price for your Entertainment. Not the best Box-Office formula but it is the stuff of Artistic Angst.

The French Connection and its sequel are the Grandfather to such classics as To Live and Die in L.A., Copland, and Narc, and the anti-thesis of all of those 80's flops either far too "Hollywood" or far too "by the book". Hackman is still the "knock down, drag out", shoot first ask later 2-fisted narc that doesn't know what Miranda means that he was in part I, but with a change of scenery that takes him across the pond. The terrain has changed, but the raw unadulterated character acting of Hackman still makes it one hell of a roller coaster ride.

Rife with dirty cops, drug smugglers, and French thugs, this movies direction and writing reminds instantly that it is part of the production catalyst that would later see series like The Shield have such success in prime time TV. The 70's rarely pulled punches when it came to top billed cop movies, starting with Dirty Harry, the original French Connection and then snowballing into classics like Serpico. The French Connection II is no exception. This movie won't disappoint any fan of either the original, or anyone that wanted to see for themselves Gene Hackman carrying a lead action role almost through the screen.

Shipping Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle across the Atlantic to France, where he meets up with political exile director John Frankenheimer, does give this freestanding sequel to The French Connection a certain autonomy, even if the filmmakers ultimately end up sacrificing suspense and urgency along the way. The plot again revolves around heroin-smuggling led by drug kingpin Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), but this picture only really comes alive and starts feeling authentic once it delves into Doyle's budding heroin addiction following a kidnapping. The film's best scene has Gene Hackman firing on all cylinders - drunk and in heroin-withdrawal, he alternately lashes out on and leans on his French colleague Henri Barthélémy (Bernard Fresson), and there's a riveting authenticity to Hackman's work in this and contiguous segments. And it certainly makes "Popeye" and also the film's rather predictable finale more relevant in the process.

I am Robin Moore, the author of The French Connection. I was paid the film rights for The French Connection, was on the set during the filming and at the Oscars when the award was presented.

When I was writing the French Connection Sonny Grosso and Eddie Eagan came down to Jamaica to my Blue Lagoon. While they were there Barry Sadler and his wife, Lavonia, joined us. Barry and I had written The Ballad of The Green Berets a few years previously.

I enjoyed The French Connection II, however, I spent a lot of time trying to get paid, but never succeeded. Sad. After the French Connection II came out a lawyer in NY got me to sign the rights to The French Connection over to his law firm so I wouldn't be able to get any money from anything that came after The French Connection. We writers are always getting burnt by the film industry!

I last saw Sonny Grosso in NY a couple of years ago. I took the two emergency cops (the ones who raised the flag at The World Trade Centre) to meet Sonny and they gave him a copy of their DVD.

ROBIN MOORE...

Robin Moore...

Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) travels to Marseilles to find Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), the drug smuggler who eluded him in New York.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two and a half out of four stars and said that "if Frankenheimer and his screenplay don't do justice to the character (of Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle), they at least do justice to the genre, and this is better than most of the many cop movies that followed." Is this the classic the original was? Of course not. But you have to give them credit for trying, and not just passing it off as a weak sequel. They kept Hackman, they brought in a big director like Frankenheimer. This was not something just to make a few bucks. And while it may not be the same level of "classic", it still has what most viewers want: some action, some chase scenes... and a devious subplot of a drug cop getting hooked on heroin!