Film Friday: The French Connection (1971)

Today we come to The French Connection. The French Connection is a fascinating film that has been recognized by many as one of the best films of the 1970's. Its hero, Popeye Doyle is also routinely voted as one of the top movie heroes, though I find that somewhat questionable. Interestingly, Doyle will become the model for all future cops. Let’s discuss.

Plot

The French Connection begins in France, where rich French criminal Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) is visiting the docks. Charnier runs the largest heroin smuggling ring in the world. He’s working on a plan to bring millions of dollars in heroin to the United States hidden inside the car of his friend Henri Devereaux, a French television personality. The idea is to hide the heroin inside the car's frame or lining. After the car gets shipped to the US, the car can be taken apart and the heroin removed. The heroin can then be passed along to various distributors.

Meanwhile, in New York City, we meet two cops: Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider). Doyle and Russo are on the narcotics squad and they go around the city busting pushers and users. In one early scene, we see them chase down a suspect with Doyle dressed as Santa. In another, Doyle and Russo shake down a bar full of black patrons, each of whom seems to be carrying drugs. Finally, we are shown that Doyle is very unpopular with the other detectives because he is blamed for the death of another cop. He and his superiors do not like each other either.

The two stories begin to merge when we are told by an undercover cop during the bar shakedown that all the drugs have dried up on the street. There is almost nothing to be bought or sold at the moment and no one has any idea when more is coming. Doyle and Russo pass this on to their commander, and go to a bar for the night. As they sit at the bar, they see a table packed with mobsters and attractive. Doyle's instincts tell him that there is something "wrong" with that table. He decides to investigate.

By investigating the people at the table, Doyle learns of a connection between the mobsters and lawyer Joel Weinstock, who acts as a go-between between the mob and Charnier. Indeed, Weinstock’s chemists checks a sample of the heroin for purity and advises that what is being bought is worth $32 million on the street. Following Weinstock leads Doyle to Charnier, who is trying to sell his heroin to the mob, who will distribute it.

What follows is a rather clever, interesting and at times tense battle between Doyle and Charnier, wherein Doyle tries to catch Charnier with the drugs, while Charnier tries to kill Doyle and then escape him.

What Made This Film A Classic

There is so much for which to commend this film. Doyle is a fascinating character. Charnier is a fascinating villain. This was one of the first films to look at the drug trade in a serious way and that made it rather interesting. The scheme used by Charnier is clever and makes for a good mystery toward the end of the film. The film is gritty rather than glossy, which gives it a fascinating ambiance. That ambiance is enhanced both by the setting being a decaying New York (indeed, the police station almost looks like something out of Mad Max) and the comparison between the cold, hard life of Doyle and Russo and the luxury in which Charnier surrounds himself. All of that makes for a great viewing experience.

What really made this movie standout, however, was Doyle. Doyle is an interesting character. On the one hand, he's a total jerk. He's abusive in a way that would not be tolerated today even by the worst police departments. We see this in particular in the bar shakedown scene where he threatens with violence and false allegations, where he leaves the appearance of having beaten a patron (who is actually an undercover cop – as an aside, we have already seen Doyle beat another suspect he arrests), and where he appears to steal either drugs or money from the people he shakes down. That makes him an abusive, corrupt cop and a truly unlikely hero.

It's possible too that he's racist, but it's more likely he hates everyone equally. He's a bad cop too in that he plays vague hunches and becomes obsessed with them to the point of needing to be ordered to abandon the hunch, he ignores orders and doesn't care at all about procedures, and he focuses on crimes the department isn't focusing on. None of his arrests would withstand legal scrutiny today, and it's even less likely they would have withstood the more liberal justice system of the 1970's. It is also suggested that these misbehaviors led to other officer(s) being hurt or killed, which seems to be why the other cops don't like him.

So why does the audience connect with this train wreck of a cop? Why has he become one of the favorite film heroes of all time? I suspect there's only one reason and it is the reason that makes this film work: Doyle is right. His instincts have led him straight to the biggest heroin deal in history and he's latched onto it like a pit bull to a BBQ-sauce-covered child. There is something about the guy everyone claims is wrong, but who is really right and who fights to prove that which attracts us as viewers. It comes from our love of the underdog, from our love of getting things right, and I think it comes from the fact that so many of us think we are right even as society tells us repeatedly that we are wrong. We want to believe that we know something THEY don't and Doyle represents us in that. He acts the way we wish we could, by flipping his middle finger at everyone else and doing what needs to be done.

Now, there are a lot of reasons why this type of behavior, especially in a police officer, should offend and bother us all, but it doesn't seem to stop us. I think the key in creating this kind of thinking is that Doyle is right. If he had been wrong, I doubt he would be viewed as a hero by anyone. What’s more, I get the sense that society loves to philosophize about abusive cops, but is in reality happy to allow abuse so long as “the right people” are getting the abuse... which speaks volumes about humanity.

Interestingly, Doyle became the template for so many future movie cops. In fact, he became the only acceptable template for cops in modern films: the rebel who plays by his own set of rules and stares down his screaming captain to get the job done! You will see this character over and over in films like the Lethal Weapon franchise, and Doyle was the first. Guys like Steve McQueen in Bullitt played something similar, but never took it to the point of being openly hostile to his superiors. Hackman takes it to that extreme. His Doyle is a wrecking ball and he doesn't care.

At the same time, by the way, it must be noted that Doyle's character wouldn't be that interesting if Charnier wasn't an exceptional villain. Rich, powerful, ultra-smart and with ice water running through his veins, Charnier comes across as a worthy challenge for Doyle. Charnier isn't some cardboard character who will act stupidly at the wrong times to let Doyle win, nor will he devolve into insanity nor will he shoot his henchmen. He is the scariest of villains: extremely competent.

Thoughts?

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Film Friday: 2010 (1984)

With us touching upon the unique career of Roy Scheider, I thought it was appropriate to finally finish the Peter Hyams sci-fi trilogy: Capricorn One, Outland and now 2010. I view Outland as a masterpiece. Capricorn One is a good but not great and has been unfairly forgotten, especially against today’s dearth of worthwhile films. Then there is 2010. 2010 is simultaneously a strong, entertaining film and a complete and utter disappointment. Let’s discuss.

Plot

Here’s the background: 2010 is the supposed continuation of 2001. After killing his crew, the HAL 9000 brought the Discovery One into orbit around Jupiter. The US is planning to eventually go get it and find out why HAL went rogue.

As the story opens, Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) is approached by a Russian agent. The man advises Floyd that the Discovery’s orbit is decaying faster than expected and that HAL will be destroyed in a crash with Jupiter’s moon Io before the Americans can get there. He also tells Floyd that the Soviets are preparing to launch a flight to get to HAL first. The problem is that the Soviets lack the ability to restart the Discovery and get information out of HAL. That is why the agent has approached Floyd, because the Russians want Floyd to go with them.

Of course the trip almost doesn’t happen because tensions between the Soviets and the Americans are so high that war seems inevitable and no one wants to help the Soviets get to HAL. Ultimately, however, an agreement is reached and Floyd and two other Americans ride along on the Soviet ship, the Leonov.

As they approach Jupiter, Floyd is awoken early by the Russian crew. Telemetry from Jupiter’s moon Europa shows something incredible: the possibility of life. Unfortunately, tensions are running even higher at home and the Russians have been ordered not to cooperate with Floyd. They try to land a probe on Europa, but it gets destroyed.

Soon enough, the Leonov comes to the Discovery. The Americans board the Discovery and restart HAL. At that point, they start getting messages from Dave Bowman, the former pilot of the Discovery who vanished at the end of 2001, that they need to leave the area within a certain number of days. To do this, they will need to sacrifice the Discovery, using it as a booster rocket to get the Leonov into the right position to return to Earth. But can they trust HAL to sacrifice himself?

In the end, they get a message from God basically telling them, “Stay off my lawn.”

Entertaining Movie, but Major Disappointment

As a movie goes, 2010 is quite entertaining. You’ve got a good plotline, with the need to get to the Discovery before its orbit decays. They set up good tension between the two crews and do a good job of overcoming that tension. They add excellent additional tension with the question of whether or not they can trust HAL. The effects are well done and the space scenes are smart and heart stopping. They feel more honest to me than Gravity. The solution to the film is clever and the bit about God at the end makes for a nice ribbon on the film.

I do question why the Russians would agree to this on the terms they do, which let the Americans claim the Discovery and keep the Russians out at their whim, but it doesn’t really detract from the film. All in all, this is a good science fiction adventure and, while it’s certainly not Top 10 material, it is much better than most of what the studios turn out today.

Where the film goes wrong is as a sequel to 2001. It’s interesting. If this hadn’t been a sequel to 2001, I suspect the film would have been ignored. Without the mystery of HAL sitting at the center of this film, it just doesn’t feel like enough to draw people in. Yet, the film craps all over the legacy of 2001.

2001 had a futuristic aesthetic. It took place at a time when humanity seemed more robotic and sterile. Fashions were futuristic. Their technology, while feeling dated to us today, felt futuristic and advanced when the film was made. Their technology was obviously superior to ours. The Earth was different too and there was little sense of dueling superpowers. To the contrary, the film seemed to suggest that humanity had moved beyond our conflicted world today and was ready for the next step in their evolution. 2010 was none of these things. 2010 takes place in a world that is virtually identical to the 1980’s in every way. From a technological, aesthetic and human evolution perspective, 2010 is an entirely different world than 2001, it is a world that feels a hundred years less advanced.

What’s more, the feel of the two movies is entirely different. 2001 was a contemplative, science fiction film that took its time to raise questions about the nature of humanity and where we were going as a species. It also suggested some higher guidance, but stopped well short of declaring a deity. To the contrary, it left you guessing as to who or what the obelisks were and who placed them where they were and what they really meant.

2010 is just a low-key action film. It mentions a couple of philosophical questions, but it never even bothers asking the questions those mentions imply, nor does it spend time developing those issues. It is the difference between being asked to contemplate the nature of silence and being told, “Gee, it’s quiet around here.” At no point does 2010 address human evolution, the nature of life, or really the afterlife. All it does in that regard is have God send a warning through a dead guy and then send a text message to Earth... “Stay off Europa beeeatches.”

To me, this is the real failure. I enjoy 2010 as an action adventure, but I wanted more. Being a sequel to one of the most contemplative films ever, you kind of expected either that the film would provide some answers or would ask a new set of questions. This one doesn’t. And the one answer it does provide, why HAL went all Hannibal Lecter on the crew just isn’t satisfying or even up to the level of what it was implied in 2001.

In 2001, we are given clues to HAL’s behavior, but no real answers. We see that HAL is arrogant, despite seeming emotionless. He notes that he cannot make mistakes... only humans make mistakes. He is cold-blooded and doesn’t think twice about murdering the crew. He doesn’t even give them a chance by killing half of them in their sleep. He seems to be a liar or lacks self-awareness or is perhaps insane at the end when he’s trying to tell Bowman that he’s “all right now.” He seems to cling to life, even though it shouldn’t matter to him one way or the other.

What does this all mean? I think it suggests that HAL has attained a level of sophistication in his programming where he has developed human flaws. Why? Well, that’s the interesting question. That is what 2010 needed to answer. But all 2010 offers by way of explanation is that HAL was given conflicting orders with the suggestion being that evil scientists programmed him to somethingsomething Ronald Reagan is evil mumblemumble somethingsomething. So when his orders to protect the crew and to complete the mission came into conflict, because he saw the crew as standing in the way of that (why he thought this is another key unexplained point), HAL resolved the conflict by murdering the crew. HAL is, in fact, the victim! Root causes root causes!!

Up yours. This is utter crap. First, the two key points to this explanation aren’t even explained. They are just glossed over: the evil military scientists did SOMETHING and HAL freaked because of SOMETHING! Secondly, and even worse, this explanation completely undoes the setup. This explanation turns all of HAL’s surprising and fascinating behavior into “the military programmed him to do that.” There is no longer any question about HAL evolving or what his conduct says about us... he vas just followik orders! That flies in the face of everything about 2001.

This film should have swung for the fences, but it never even thought about trying. That’s the shame here.

Thoughts?

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The Life And Times of Chief Martin Brody

Today is a bit of an odd one. I want to talk about the life of Chief Martin Brody from Jaws.

As a fan of film and television, I tend to follow the careers of actors that I like. In so doing, you typically see how the actor begins in roles that are poorly defined or strange and where they feel swallowed by the role. These are often bit parts of experimental films. As they grow they tend to zero in on certain types of roles that fit them well. Then they have their hit or string of hits as they reach their prime. Finally, they wind down by reverting to supporting roles or nostalgia roles.

Consider Robert De Niro, for example, who achieved fame in the very off-the-wall film Taxi Driver. He then slowly shifted to roles that involved cops or mobsters. In so doing, he had a string of great hits like Midnight Run and Goodfellas. He milked that for a while with a few notable standouts like Ronin. Then he started sliding down the backside of his career, playing parodies of the roles that made him famous, in films like Analyze This and the really depressing nostalgia film The Family.

But there is one actor who took a different course. This actor took roles that let us trace his career as if he were the same person on film and his films document his life: Roy Scheider.

Scheider, aka Detective Buddy “Cloudy” Russo began his life working with Popeye “Gene Hackman” Doyle in The French Connection. But the mean streets of New York were too much for him and after his failed attempt to arrest and convict Alain Charnier, a wealthy French heroine smuggler, he decides to change his name to Martin Brody and moves to Amity, Massachusetts to become their police chief. But a run in with a giant shark, and it’s angry kin, teach Russo that living on an island is not for him.

So Russo changes his name again, to Frank Murphy and he becomes a helicopter pilot for the LAPD. But where Russo goes, controversy follows and Russo soon finds himself destroying a multimillion dollar attack helicopter and exposing a Federal government plot to stir up problems in the barrio so they can shoot the ensuing rioters.

Shunned by his fellow officers and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, Russo decides to become a scientist. And going by the name Dr. Heywood Floyd, an anagram of “Hey, It’s Russo!”, he ends up hitching a ride aboard a Russian spaceship for Jupiter, where he kills the Hal 9000, finds God and dumps a giant baby in our orbit.

Finally, he takes a job as the captain of a submarine, where he goes by the name Capt. Nathan Bridger, before failing in that and becoming the head of the Italian mob... Don Falcone. And thus, the circle of life is kind of strangely complete.

Actually, if you hack off the last couple, it really does seem like it could all be the same man. What does this mean? I have no idea. What was the point of this article? Uh. I don’t know that either, but I liked Roy and I do find this interesting. Roy is the only actor where it feels like the main movies of his career take place in the same universe with him being the same character.... The French Connection, Jaws, Jaws 2, Blue Thunder and to a lesser extent 2010.

Interesting or no?

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Film Friday: Blue Thunder (1983)

Have you ever run into a movie that is just stupid on so many levels and yet the film still rocks? No, I’m not talking about Captain America 2, I’ll talk about that next week. I’m talking about Blue Thunder, a movie that I just can’t resist. And do you know what it is that makes Blue Thunder so great? I have no idea. Let’s see if we can figure it out.

Plot

Blue Thunder is the story of Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) who got sick of fighting sharks in Amity, changed his name to Frank Murphy and decided to become a divorced police helicopter pilot for the LAPD’s Astro Division. Roy plays things fast and loose and is constantly in trouble. In fact, he’s just been called in again for a psych evaluation because a great many people suspect he’s crazy because he suffers from PTSD from Vietnam.

As our story begins, Roy gets introduced to his new partner, Officer Lymangood (Daniel Stern). Roy takes Lymangood around town and shows him the sights, which include a motorcycle cop having an affair and a model who strips naked and dances in front of her window and is apparently deaf to helicopters inches outside her window. Her neighbors are not and Roy and Lymangood get in trouble. They get in extra trouble too because while they were peeping, a city councilwoman was killed in an apparent rape attempt a few blocks away. Roy, however, suspects it wasn’t really an attempted rape because there was an abandoned car in the area that disappeared. Makes sense, right?

Anyhoo, Roy and his partner are chosen to be the test pilots for a new program the federal government is testing in Los Angeles. Under this program, the cops will be armed with one kick ass helicopter called “Blue Thunder,” which will patrol the skies of the city. This thing has a canon on the front which shoots very precisely, except when it doesn’t, and the feds admit that they want to use the chopper for “crowd control from the air” during the upcoming Olympic games. Roy smugly tells them that “crowd control from the air” didn’t work so well in Vietnam.

It soon turns out that the feds are working with Malcolm McDowell, a Brit, who commanded Roy in Vietnam and wanted to have him up on charges for refusing to commit war crimes. Malcolm warns the feds that Roy is “totally unsuitable” for their purposes, but then tells them not to ask for his removal from the program. Instead, Malcolm tries to kill Roy... but fails.

Roy then goes on his first patrol with Blue Thunder. Fortunately for him, the feds are having a midnight meeting with their brigade of killers while Roy is in the air and they speak openly about wanting to use Blue Thunder for crowd control. Oh, and they talk about killing Roy. Roy makes a video of the meeting using Blue Thunder’s recording equipment. At the same time, Roy discovers that the supposed rape of the council woman is connected to Blue Thunder because Blue Thunder is part of something called “Project Thor,” and the “rapist” dropped a note at the scene which included the word THOR.

Roy decides to steal Blue Thunder and take the video to the press. The rest of the movie is a sort of three-dimensional chase scene where Roy is chased by choppers and F-14s while protecting his girlfriend’s car from the pursuing police.

Why Blue Thunder Rocks!

Hmm. Ok. Let me start by admitting that this movie is nonsense. It is packed with key points that are flat out stupid and seriously flawed. Consider these issues:

● Roy is a troublemaker and is viewed as crazy enough to need psychological evaluation. Yet strangely, he gets chosen to be the lead pilot in this impressive new program with its ultra-expensive new chopper? Who made that decision?

● Roy determines that the council woman wasn’t raped because he saw an abandoned vehicle in the area and it later vanished. He assumes this means it was a professional hit. But, um, why? Why would a professional drive a beater but a rapist wouldn’t?

● At the scene of the rape/assassination, they find a paper with the word THOR written on it. This is the name of the government’s secret project. Why would a competent hit man carry around such a paper? Also, Roy later connects this to prove that the council woman was assassinated. This is meant to vindicate Roy, only Roy was just guessing about the rape and his crime was peeping instead of working, not guessing wrong about the rape.

● How can the naked dancer not hear a helicopter right outside her window? Those things aren’t silent. And again, why would Roy get this plum Blue Thunder assignment after getting caught messing around on the job?

● Malcolm McDowell was in Vietnam? Really? He’s British.

● If Malcolm and the feds thought Roy was unsuitable, presumably because he won’t stop insulting Malcolm and complaining that the program is immoral, then you would think it would be easy for them to pick a different pilot. Why risk putting him on the project? And why not put a federal observer in the chopper instead of Roy’s buddy?

● Why are the feds holding a meeting at night? Why are they meeting with their assassins?

● Finally, the reason we (and Roy) are supposedly outraged by Blue Thunder, i.e. the thing that motivates the entire movie, is that Roy discovers that the government wants to use it to quell riots at the Olympics. And supposedly it is Roy’s discovery of this which causes him to steal and destroy Blue Thunder. But the feds actually tell this to Roy right at the beginning when he tells us that “crowd control from the air” didn’t work so well in Vietnam. In other words, they are up front with him the whole time, and everyone just acts like this is still a secret.

What’s more, what riots? There aren’t any in the film and America hadn’t seen riots in nearly 20 years at that point. Also, as an aside, nothing of the sort actually happened in Vietnam as the US military never got involved in riots or crowd control.

Arg. What a load of stupidity! So you have a guy who is given a key assignment no sane person would ever give him. He is given that assignment by the bad guys who then decide to kill him when they discover that he’s been assigned to their project... a project for which they no doubt had the power to select the pilots. He freaks out about something he already knew an hour earlier in the film, after watching the stupidest meeting ever between the bad guys and their hired killers, and a running shootout begins.

This is a stupid film.

And yet... it’s fricken awesome. Yes, it is.

What I love about this film is that it is an unapologetic action film. All the stuff above is basically just flavor that you aren’t supposed to think about. McDowell works, despite being British, because he’s an odious villain. Roy gets the assignment because we like Roy. We like his personality. We trust the actor, even if we would never trust the character, and that trust washes away the character’s flaws for us. Moreover, he’s anti-establishment enough to be the rebel this movie needs, and his kind of crazy is risk-taking, which is what makes it believable that he has extraordinary skills.

So as bizarre as it may sound, the unbelievably of this film is precisely what makes it believable.

Beyond that, shooting this thing was an amazing technical challenge. For example, to get many of the air shots, Director John Badham (Saturday Night Fever, War Games) actually placed stuntmen with cameras on the outside of helicopters to get the right shots. That makes some of the flying scenes second to none. Check out this photo...

The writing is superior too in that the film does an amazing job of ratcheting up the tension in every scene. And the payoff is very strong because the film skillfully builds the hero (Roy) and villain (McDowell) as equals, which makes Roy’s victory all the stronger, not to mention that Roy must do what we are told is impossible to win. Compare that with modern films where the villains turn out to be mindless cowards or nut jobs. None of that is true with McDowell, who is skilled and rotten. And that creates real tension in the final challenge.

Ultimately, what sells this film however is the presence of Roy Scheider... and the helicopter. Almost every screen minute is dominated by Roy. Fortunately, there is just something about Roy that makes you like him. Roy is loyal, courageous and morally right. He is the underdog. He is the everyman who is crapped on by everyone else, but keeps rising above by giving as good as he gets. And he blows things up. And do you know what else? The helicopter is fricken cool!

What more could you want?

Check this one out if you haven’t. You’ll like it.

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