Rating: NNNN
THE FRENCH CONNECTION (William Friedkin, 1971) is a pioneering work in what the late Pauline Kael dubbed “the cinema du zap,” which is to say the neo-brutalist school of American action cinema that arose in the 70s and is still with us today. Gene Hackman stars as Popeye Doyle, a New York narcotics detective who, with Roy Scheider, pursues the people who import heroin into the U.S. from Marseilles. The scale of the action itself will not impress anyone who’s sat through festivals of destruction like Terminator 2, but Friedkin’s work has a certain hammering force — the car/subway/foot chase remains one of the great moments of that art. Hackman, who became a star and won an Academy Award for this performance, gets the maximum mileage out of his plain-as-a-potato face and working-class swagger. Buuel veteran Fernando Rey plays the silky villain, and the scene where Hackman stands in the rain eating cold pizza while Rey noshes on gourmet chow sets the class prejudices of the Hollywood actioner for the next three decades. Shame the Bloor didn’t double-book it with Friedkin’s much underrated 80s policier, To Live And Die In L.A. NNNN (Bloor Cinema, Wednesday, September 26)
