Word: hackman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Actor Gene Hackman and a crew of narcotics agents and drug pushers out of Central Casting are currently in Marseille filming The French Connection II, a sequel to the award-winning 1971 dope flick. But as any real narc could tell them, this time they have the wrong location. For the moment at least, the French connection has been largely broken, along with the heroin-processing laboratories on the Cote d'Azur and the Corsican drug rings that ran them. The new center for the European heroin trade is, of all places, the jewel-box city of Amsterdam...
Even such able performers as Gene Hackman and Liv Ullmann cannot bring off a rescue effort without a little help from the writer and the director. Writer Norman has contented himself with providing a painfully straightforward story line, to which Director Troell has pinned a number of handsome album shots that appear to have been left over from his earlier The Emigrants and The New Land. There was a certain stately glory to those works, a sense that Troell's pioneers were big enough to deserve the great country he seemed to perceive with a fresh eye. In Zandy...
...made fair copy. (The film was extracted from L.H. Whittemore's book about the pair's exploits in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn in the late '60s.) On screen, though, their heroics look lame. We expect our cops to be either a good deal meaner (Hackman in The French Connection, Scheider in The Seven-Ups) or at least stronger fantasy projections of unwavering strength and authority, like Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry. Greenberg and Hantz here are neither real enough nor friends. romantic enough...
Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) has a pathological passion for his own privacy. That has its vocational advantages, of course-"the best bugger on the West Coast" ought to be as anonymous as possible. Beyond this, though, Caul's insulation is a way of sealing himself off from his own guilt. There is blood already on his expert hands. An earlier surveillance operation resulted in the murder of an accountant, his wife and kids. Harry begins to see their specters in his new assignment: to record an apparently innocuous conversation between a young woman (Cindy Williams) and a man (Frederic...
...film is meticulously cast. Special note should be taken of John Cazale, who is so subtle and adept as Caul's foggy assistant that he seems once again (he was the brother Fredo in The Godfather) to be among the best young character actors. For Hackman, Caul presents a substantial challenge. It is a largely interiorized role in contrast to the action parts on which he has recently built his career. He responds with the most sustained screen performance he has done. "Jay Cocks