The French Connection (1971) on Netflix
Alain Charnier runs a heroin syndicate in Marseille and hides a shipment in an unsuspecting friend's car for New York. Brooklyn detectives Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle and Buddy Russo work the case.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.6/10152,499 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Alain Charnier's network arranges for 89 percent pure heroin worth $32 million to travel from France to the United States, concealed in the car of his friend Henri Devereaux, a television personality making the voyage by ship. In Brooklyn, narcotics detectives Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle and Buddy "Cloudy" Russo keep watch on a bar that drug traffickers use and spot Salvatore "Sal" Boca and his wife Angie with mobsters. Following the couple connects them to Joel Weinstock, who puts money into narcotics deals. Popeye learns a heroin shipment is about to arrive, and the detectives win permission from their supervisor to wiretap the Bocas' phones. Federal agents Bill Mulderig and Clyde Klein join the surveillance.
Cast
- Ann Rebbotas Marie Charnier
- Harold Garyas Weinstock
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The French Connection (1971)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The casting of Fernando Rey as Alain Charnier resulted from mistaken identity: Friedkin had been impressed by Francisco Rabal in Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour but did not know his name, so his casting director contacted Rey, another Spanish actor from Buñuel's films; Rabal was finally reached but spoke neither French nor English, so Rey was kept.
- Friedkin strongly opposed Gene Hackman as the lead, first considering Paul Newman (too expensive), then Jackie Gleason, Peter Boyle and the columnist Jimmy Breslin, who had never acted; the studio considered Gleason box-office poison after Gigot flopped, Boyle declined over the film's violence, and Breslin refused to get behind the wheel.
- Director of photography Owen Roizman wrote in American Cinematographer in 1972 that the camera was undercranked to 18 frames per second to enhance the sense of speed, and some shots involved stunt drivers whose timing errors caused accidental collisions that were left in the film.
- Alain Charnier is based on Jean Jehan, who was later arrested in Paris for drug trafficking but not extradited because France does not extradite its citizens, while Sal Boca is based on Pasquale "Patsy" Fuca and Angie Boca on Patsy's wife Barbara, who later wrote a book with Robin Moore.
- In 2023 media publications discovered that a version of the film on digital platforms such as Apple TV and the Criterion Channel had been altered to excise a scene containing racial slurs, and fans and cineasts compared the censorship to vandalism and called it out for hiding historical context.
- For a 2009 reissue on Blu-ray, Friedkin altered the film's color timing to give it a "colder" look; cinematographer Owen Roizman, who was not consulted about the changes, called the new transfer "atrocious", and in 2012 a new transfer both men supervised corrected it.
- Henri Devereaux, who takes the fall for importing the film's drug-laden Lincoln into New York, is based on Jacques Angelvin, a television actor sentenced to three to six years in a federal penitentiary who served about four before returning to France and turning to real estate.
