Epic car race (NO CGI!). But what is it with the pink blood? Whenever I see someone shot, I feel like they had a food coloring battle... never noticed that before....

This was my first watch of "The French Connection". It wasn't entirely what I expected. It was less grand than I anticipated as it focused on a drug deal and a pair of cops fighting for respectability. Gene Hackman absolutely owns this film. His character "Popeye" Doyle is a powder keg and an extremely driven individual. Roy Schieder's "Cloudy" Russo isn't as front and center but is vital to controlling Popeye's violence. William Friedkin directs this. I don't know if I'm a Friedkin fan. I love "The Exorcist" and thought his later film "Bug" was appealingly weird. The way that he inter-cuts Popeye's surveillance of the suspects is so well done that I found myself trying to peer around corners and through the crowds. The crime dramas of the 1970's are mostly appealing to me. The way that they capture that particular moment in time seems equal to the film-making from any other era. One of the things that I was astonished by was how totally awful New York looks. It's a filthy, dirty, grimy place. No matter where Popeye and Cloudy went, the dirt of the city was sure to surround them. I'd heard many good things about the car chase. It's wild but since it's more of a one car pursuit of a train, it didn't have the impact I'd thought it would. Maybe my anticipation was too high. Now for the ending. It was a letdown. I wasn't disappointed to find out the individual fates of the characters. It was the technique used that bummed me out. Maybe this will be fine with most, but I think I might have preferred a more open ended conclusion.

Like flooring a Camaro on ice, the 70s muscle feel is unbeatable but it's a little all over the place.

That car chase scene really is great. That's all I really knew about this going in and it lived up to my expectations. Gene Hackman is really good too.

[Disney+, Non censured version] Possibly the best precedent for many of the police films and tv shows that have been made in the following decades. The dirty spaces, the long chases along the streets of New York, the relationships between the police and the mafias, and that great confrontation between two great actors, Gene Hackman and Fernando Rey, with the permission of Roy Scheider, are part of the history of cinema. But above all, the portrait of those characters who, on both sides of the law, play dirty, are racist and violent. And that realistic tone of invisible lighting that captures the essence of the confrontation between crime and the law in the middle of the jungle of a hostile city is still surprising.