Word: friedkins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...moments such as these that Friedkin is able to provide some of the closest glimpses of the urban policeman's mental world ever to come out of the tradition of American cops and robbers movies. The French Connection is by no means an "anti-police" movie; it develops an admirably accurate perspective on the harshness of detective work--the long late hours waiting on winter streetcorners between every small arrest, and the very real threat of becoming the victim of a sniper, one of the occupational hazards of wearing a blue uniform in more than one American city. Working conditions...
...despite the temptations of idealizing hard work and violence into intrigue and spectacle, when the last drop of blood has drained from the seven bodies who got in the way of the big businessmen and the pursuers. Friedkin's adaptation of the case makes it clear the real driving forces behind them have been mere avarice and pride. The smugglers are only intent on making some dishonest bucks, and Detective Jimmy "Popeye". Doyle (who caught onto the case and kept it going on a determined hunch) wants only the prestige of a big bust...
...good guys after all, only ambitious guys. At best, there are guys who are doing their job and who want, there are guys who are doing their job and who want, out of natural pride, to do it well. That's the most you can say for Friedkin's narcotics cops. But it's the most you can say for most of us in this world, and for projecting that bland truth up onto the silver screen. Friedkin deserves at least mild congratulations...
...than any of the film's splashy shootings. When the detectives have all the information they can get, Doyle exacts a last, unnecessary ounce of submission by forcing him to confess to nonsense accusations by the threat of more beating. The nonsense-accusation sequence is a suspect-baiting device Friedkin picked up from Detective Eddie Egan, the cop on whom Doyle's character is based, who plays the narcotics division chief to Russo and Doyle (Gene Hackman) in Connection and who is soon to star in a film vehicle called Fuzz. The incident goes under the generic title "police harrassment...
...film accelerates into a string of crowd-pleasing scenes of spectacle and carnage. The most spectacular of them all is a race between an elevated train commandeered by the hired-gun of the French importer, and a car commandeered and furiously driven on the street below by Doyle. Friedkin tries very hard to make the chase both credible and creditably spectacular; the justification for Doyle's madman pursuit is carefully developed: he must stop an armed assassin and, (having just escaped several of that assassin's bullets himself) he is so professionally and personally concerned with catching the man that...