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  • Writer's pictureprefepproharsi

The The French Connection





















































a5c7b9f00b Jimmy &quot;Popeye&quot; Doyle and Buddy Russo are Brooklyn-based NYPD narcotics detectives who often work undercover. They make a lot of arrests, but they are all of small time users, busting who which makes no dent in the NYC drug trade. While the two are out for drinks one night at a club, Popeye sees a table of people which to him doesn&#39;t seem right, the people who include an unknown &quot;big spender&quot; out of his league next to known organized drug criminals. Just for fun, they decide to tail the big spender and his girl. Beyond the couple&#39;s obvious suspicious activity, they find out that they are Sal and Angie Boca, small time crooks who own and operate a Brooklyn newsstand/luncheonette. Based on other evidence including information from one of their snitches of rumors of a major drug shipment entering New York, Popeye and Buddy get the official albeit reluctant OK from their superior to surveil Sal to find if he leads them to the incoming drug shipment, that surveillance including authorization for wiretaps. That surveillance does show that Sal is connected and that the probable persons selling the drugs are two Frenchmen having recently arrived in the city. It then becomes a game of cat and mouse as Sal and the two Frenchmen, Alain Charnier and his muscle Pierre Nicoli, are aware that they are being tailed, the two Frenchmen in particular who are willing to go to any lengths to protect their investment, estimated street worth of approximately $32 million. Popeye, Buddy and their third, Mulderig, who has an antagonistic relationship with Popeye due to Mulderig&#39;s belief that Popeye&#39;s police work led to the death of a colleague, have to learn when the lead is not the three men but the locale of the drugs themselves. Police partners Doyle and Russo put a candy store under surveillance based on a hunch that something fishy was going on. Eventually it turns out that the proprietors are involved in one of the biggest narcotics smuggling rings on either side of the Atlantic, and the cops go to work. One of the best films of the 70&#39;s The French Connection was very bold at the time. I used to work for the police and there&#39;s some officers you just know would be crooks if they weren&#39;t in the force. This is very much true of &#39;Popeye&#39; (Hackman) and to a lesser extent Russo (Scheider). A great script, brilliant performance from Hackman, ably supported by the rest of the cast, and excellent direction from Friedkin make this a standout movie. You can always recognise a great movie by how many people recognise quotes and the &quot;Do You pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?&quot; must be high on the list of memorable movie quotes. Dear William Friedkin, <br/><br/>The French Connection was a really gritty crime drama with the cops and drug sellers playing hide and seek in the backdrop of New York. <br/><br/>Gene Hackman is tough and menacing as the alcoholic and lecherous cop. Roy Scheider&#39;s sober cop is a perfect foil and sidekick for Hackman&#39;s Popeye. Fernado Rey&#39;s high life as a sophisticated drug supplier is placed parallel to the low life of the two cops but their stories do intersect once in a while. <br/><br/>The film looked a lot like a documentary. The visuals were stark and moody and there was hardly any light in many of the scenes. The editing was best described by you yourself, William. You said as an audience, you never knew what the next cut was going to be. The first running chase and Hackman&#39;s car chase of his potential assassin were both thrilling. Anurag Kashyap overdid it in Black Friday. This is my third favorite film directed by you, after The Exorcist and The Sorcerer. <br/><br/>Best Regards, Pimpin. <br/><br/>(8/10) Producer and screenwriter have added enough fictional flesh to provide director William Friedkin and his overall topnotch cast with plenty of material, and they make the most of it. The word &quot;frog&quot; is often used as a derogatory term for someone of French descent. When Popeye refers to Charnier as &quot;Frog One,&quot; he&#39;s trying to distinguish Charnier from his partner, Pierre Nicoli. It can also be a way to show Popeye&#39;s generally bigoted attitude. He&#39;s deliberately trying to confuse Willy into making a confession. Poughkeepsie is a small city about 80 miles north of New York on the Hudson River. Willy may have a drug connection up there that buys product from him and sells it in that region. His line, which is somewhere along the lines of &quot;when was the last time you picked your feet in Poughkeepsie&quot; is basically nonsense. Repeating it and variations of it including only Poughkeepsie or just when the person has last &quot;picked their feet&quot;, over and over in a threatening manner, is a tactic meant to bewilder the subject. While the criminal is desperately trying to figure out what this sentence is a code for, the interrogators intersperse the badgering with actual questions like &quot;who&#39;s your connection Willie, what&#39;s his name!?&quot; and &quot;is it Joe the barber?&quot; The totally confused criminal up against the wall, doesn&#39;t know what this Poughkeepsie thing is, but it sounds bad and he sure didn&#39;t do it. So to take the questioning away from this mysterious act the police think he&#39;s performed, that must be pretty terrible, Willie admits to what they really want to know out of fear. This tactic/phrase was actually developed by the character that Gene Hackman played, in real life (the movie is loosely based on a true story). Source: French Connection Commentary extra found in the DVD version of the movie. They more than likely bought Devereaux a new car exactly like the old one. Putting the car back together after spending several hours tearing it apart would have taken at least twice as long, plus there was the actual damage they caused to the interior while ripping out upholstery, carpeting &amp; other trim. From there it&#39;d be a simple matter of buying a new Lincoln, pulling out the rocker panels in that one &amp; stashing the heroin &amp; transferring the license plates to it.

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