When watching five-time Oscar winner, The French Connection, which won for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Editing and Best Writing, one becomes convinced that 1971 must have been a pretty bad year for movies. This feeling plays into my prejudices about the whole 1966-1975 era, of course but, looking at the films that year with more than 4,000 votes on IMDB, I’m pretty convinced about my take and my taste.

It’s not that The French Connection is bad. It boasts a breakout performance by Gene Hackman, no-nonsense editing by William Friedkin, a terrific second act car/el-train chase, and a rather bold, avant-garde score by Don Ellis—the latter of which may or may not be a plus for you personally. Still, one wonders if the film’s award success isn’t related to a paucity of other films to give awards to.

This movie’s got an acute case of the ’70s. I’m sure that’s what a lot of people (critics, especially) love about it. It’s aggressively pointless in its denouement, with the bad guys mostly going free or lightly punished, with the heaviest punishment going to the least guilty guy. The dogged detected ultimately kills someone nominally on his side in attempt to get the Big Bad, who gets away.

This is 1971 enough to make you have flashbacks to Woodstock. And it’s just as a dumb a conceit as “the good guy gets the bad guy in the end”. Consider:

The second act chase scene is bravura, as an obsessed Popeye commandeers a car and drives it like a maniac under the el-train, resulting in minimally three deaths (as the perp on the train shoots two people and causes a heart-attack to evade capture), untold property damage, and then shoots the perp in the back to keep him from getting away.

This is a great scene, but it’s as nonsense as the “good guy wins” trope most people like in their police procedurals. First, it’s literally impossible. Like, in the league of Keanu Reeves managing to keep a bus above 50mph on Southern California freeways. Second, having what is hands down the best part of the movie at the end of Act 2, makes the film a snake-that-ate-an-elephant, narratively. (Flat on both ends and bulging in the middle.)

I mean, that’s fine, although it feels anticlimactic (because it literally is). I just object to the elevation of this style for its “realism”. Of course, at the time it had the added benefit of being novel in a lot of ways—and that aspect of it is completely lost now. A zoomer girl in the lobby said “I hated that movie,” while conceding some aspects were quite good. The Boy rather astutely said he’d seen it copied so many times, it was hard to judge on its own merits. He wasn’t exactly blown away.

Now, technically, this is all great stuff, and it will make you mourn for lost filmmaking skill and technology. There’s a color palette to the film, particularly the police station, which has an odd old-school technicolor film quality. When we go to Popeye’s crappy cinder block apartment house, we also get an antiquated palette that contrasts sharply with the grittiness of the setting, as if Buddy (Roy Scheider) is going to burst in on William Powell and Myrna Loy swilling Schlitz in their underwear.

Popeye is supposed to be an anti-hero, but he barely registers as that. He uses that one word white people can’t use today, but 1971 ain’t 2026. He got a cop killed once, but we don’t know the context, and he just straight up shoots (accidentally) a guy he doesn’t much like, but this seems more due to sloppy police tactics. Popeye is too reckless to not rush into a building to catch his guy, but it doesn’t explain why two other cops follow him in and surprise him.

There are a lot of things we accept in police procedurals, like all stories, because we want the story and we’re not overly interested in reality. And I think the main thing I bristle at here is that this is all done in service of the ugly reality of 1971.

Box office is murky. Some sources have “Billy Jack” as the number one film of the year, but I think those ideas are based on rolling it’s unreasonably successful 1973 re-release into its original 1971 opening. Other big BO films in 1971 were Fiddler on the Roof and Diamonds Are Forever—Sean Connery’s return as James Bond. It was a big year for Clint Eastwood, who directed his first film Play Misty For Me and starred in the mis-marketed Southern Gothic classic The Beguiled.

But Eastwood’s real breakthrough that year was none other than Dirty Harry. Both “loose cannon” films, Harry eschews the bleak realism of a police force completely unable to stem the tide of immorality the cultural revolution brought for a possibly more realistic idea that it’s not so much that the police are overwhelmed as they are hidebound by politics.

Popeye’s supposed to be an anti-hero. Harry’s supposed to be an actual villain. Neither idea comes across, really, because Hackman and Eastwood are incredibly likable. Harry never shoots or so much as endangers an innocent civilian. On the other hand, he literally tortures Andrew Robinson’s maniac killer, and this puts us as the audience in a much more uncomfortable place than Popeye’s relatable workplace goofs. (Heh.)

The critics preferred French Connection to Dirty Harry, and the 1971 woke mob protested Harry at the Oscars, for which it was not nominated.

Currently, both are sitting at 7.7 on IMDB, but in 1971, Connection beat Harry at the box office. I’ll probably re-watch Harry before I re-watch this, tho’.

BLAKE TRIVIA: We saw the French answer to this, The Connection, and I pointed out then that a whole dramatic arc with the police chief’s wife leaving him wouldn’t be seen in the American version. And I’m just giving myself credit for having known this without ever having seen it.