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The French Connection poster

44th Academy Awards · 1972

The French Connection

1971 · 1h 44m · R · Action, Crime, Thriller

Directed byCooked up by William Friedkin

“Doyle is bad news—but a good cop.”

“Popeye Doyle vs. a whole elevated train. Car chase GOAT 🚗💨”

Tap to rateRate the vibes

The storyThe lore 📖

Tough narcotics detective 'Popeye' Doyle is in hot pursuit of a suave French drug dealer who may be the key to a huge heroin-smuggling operation.

Popeye Doyle is a rough-around-the-edges New York detective who's convinced a smooth French criminal is smuggling a huge drug shipment into the city 🚔. He and his partner spend days on stakeouts and tailing suspects. Then comes one of the most intense car chases in movie history, with Doyle racing an elevated train. Catching the bad guys in 4K, fr fr.

What critics & audiences sayThe receipts 🧾

Tomatometer 97% Fresh #10 of 98 winners
IMDb 7.6 153K votes #63 of 98 winners
Metacritic 94 / 100 #13 of 93 winners
TMDB 7.5 / 10

Famous linesLines living rent free

Now I'm gonna bust your ass for those three bags and I'm gonna nail you for picking your feet in Poughkeepsie.
— Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman)
All right, Popeye's here! Get your hands on your heads, get off the bar, and get on the wall!
— Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman)

Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle: I know it! I can feel it, I'm dead certain.

Bill Mulderig: Last time you were dead certain we had a dead cop.

This is Doyle. I'm sittin' on Frog One.
— Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman)
Boca's scared. He sees policemen in his soup.
— Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey)
Absolute dynamite. Eighty-nine percent pure junk. Best I've ever seen.
— Howard

Quotes via Wikiquote

Filming locationsWhere they shot it 📍

Fun factsFacts that go hard 🤓

  1. Fernando Rey was cast by mistake: William Friedkin wanted the Spanish actor Francisco Rabal from Belle de Jour but didn't know his name, so the casting director called Rey instead, and Rey kept the part because Rabal spoke neither French nor English.Wikipedia · Casting
  2. To heighten the sense of speed in the famous car chase, the bumper-mounted camera was undercranked to 18 frames per second, and some near-miss stunts turned into real accidental collisions that were left in the film.Wikipedia · Car chase
  3. Friedkin resisted casting Gene Hackman and considered others first, including columnist Jimmy Breslin, who had never acted and refused to drive a car, and Peter Boyle, who turned it down over the film's violence.Wikipedia · Casting
  4. William Friedkin said the film's documentary-like realism came directly from seeing Costa-Gavras's Z, which showed him a fiction feature could be shot as if the camera didn't know what would happen next.Wikipedia · Production
  5. Police advisers objected to Popeye Doyle shooting a suspect in the back at the end of the chase, but Friedkin kept it, saying the real Eddie Egan, who was on set, would have done exactly that.Wikipedia · Car chase
  6. Henri Devereaux is based on real French TV actor Jacques Angelvin, who was arrested for importing a heroin-laden car and served about four years in a U.S. federal prison before going into real estate in France.Wikipedia · Comparison to actual people and events
  7. The film was among the earliest to show the World Trade Center: the completed North Tower and partially built South Tower appear behind the shipyard scenes.Wikipedia · Production
  8. Friedkin cut the chase sequence to the rhythm of Santana's 'Black Magic Woman', even though the song never appears in the film.Wikipedia · Car chase
  9. The film was made at Fox for just $1.8 million, $300,000 over budget, after National General Pictures dropped the project.Wikipedia · Production
  10. In 2023, viewers discovered that a version on digital platforms such as Apple TV and the Criterion Channel had quietly cut a scene containing racial slurs, prompting backlash from fans who likened it to vandalism.Wikipedia · Home media releases
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