FRENCH CONNECTION II Blu-ray

With Billy Friedkin knee deep in Israel laboring over a masterpiece nobody would even see, and with financial and critical success necessitating a sequel, someone new would have to come in and direct French Connection II. Only, the director they chose was far from the new blood they had previously sought when they chose Friedkin. The producers went with John Frankenheimer, one of the underrated “action verite”, as I like to dub him, directors of the sixties. Ticking up classics like The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds, he was the proven talent that eccentric Friedkin wasn’t. Would that mean, then, that French Connection II would deliver on an old, reliable, predestined formula? Absolutely not!


The high concept for the sequel is this time bringing New York cop to French drug ring. Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) is still chasing Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), only this time the location is different. Popeye quickly learns that the France police force is just as corrupt and mismanaged as his own, although en francais he can’t just beat down his man. There are politics. Brutal, constricting politics. Before he even gets a taste of that, though, he’s getting a taste of a more dangerous dead end.


Alain is well aware of Doyle’s presence on his turf, and sensing Doyle’s threat to his drug cartel, Alain decides to fight fire with fire. He kidnaps Doyle, and instead of killing him, gets him hooked on drugs. Seriously. Once Doyle become reliant on the needle, they start pulling away long enough to make the withdrawals really count. After all the merde Doyle stirred up in New York, they are going to make sure he never toys with their operation again.


Eventually Doyle escapes, thanks to the hands of the France police force, and we know what that means. Chase sequence after chase sequence, right? Doyle shouting bigotry while the camera zigzags in and out of choreographed cat and mouse games. The stuff taught action is made of. No. Instead, Frankenheimer goes internal on Doyle. Determined to make drug addiction more than just a prime mover in terms of plot, Frankenheimer puts it front and center to show the devastation it can bring on even the most resistant of users.


We get scene after scene of Doyle going in and out of sanity, drooling, pleading and absolutely miserable for the bulk of the film. As far as sequels go, it’s one of the biggest U-turns in cinematic history, but considering the first film played by an entirely new rule book to begin with, why can’t Frankenheimer’s?


Well, even when Friedkin’s was getting overly ambitious, it always at least defaulted to entertainment. Frankenheimer’s film, although certainly noble and daring, gets overly comfortable in languishing with its lead. The addiction commentary gets stale after awhile, especially considering the bulk of the second act is spent in a dank room. The first film was all about the energy of the city, all those chases on foot and the thrill of the chase. Here Doyle is chasing drugs with alcohol, and while it’s certainly a striking change of pace, it starts to burn out long before Doyle ever does.


The film may not flourish when it comes to action, but accolades must be given to Hackman and his dedication to character. This ain’t a pretty role, especially considering it was the original film that won him the Oscar, but Hackman descends face first into all the shadows of his character. His performance during the withdrawal scenes are rife with emotional energy, as if he’s pulling right from the dark pits of his memory to blurt out the stuff he’s saying. It’s a bare performance, and considering Frankenheimer lingers there rather than on the action, a much richer performance than even Hackman’s work in the original. Hackman rightfully got a Golden Globe nomination for this, just like he did with the surprisingly Oscar-snubbed The Conversation a year prior. As a film French Connection II may not come together quite as a satisfactory whole, but as a performance, Hackman’s has never been better.

presentation...


Like the previous film this Blu-ray disc is presented 1.85:1 1080p widescreen. Friedkin went to great lengths to color time his Oscar-winner to perfection, and considering Frankenheimer left us in 2002, this film gets far less lavish treatment. The overall image is a great deal softer than the original film – not nearly as flattering as it should be. It’s grainy, and even the colors just don’t seem to show like they did in the first film. Drab is more the word to describe this pretty pithy transfer.


There’s a DTS-HD 5.1 audio track, but it ain’t reference quality, that’s for sure. Pure and simple, it’s a glorified mono track, just like the first film. The mono track is included here for comparison, and really, there isn’t much difference. Dialogue is at least all audible, and Don Ellis’ score again sounds just as shrill as ever.


extras...

French Connection II was previously released on DVD as part of a two-pack with the first film. Now that it’s flying solo on Blu-ray, Fox has thankfully added a number of interesting extras. The best of which is a newly produced documentary on the career of John Frankenheimer, the 27-minute “Frankenheimer in Focus”. It features a fine recollections by such filmmakers as William Friedkin, Actor Bruce Dern and Editor Tom Rolf, in addition to his family.


Frankenheimer himself is very articulate, and he very much narrates the piece from clips from older interviews. The resulting piece really helps show the kind of groundbreaking directness that Frankenheimer brought to the action film and to cinema as a whole. Specific films are highlighted, including how the ending to Black Sunday was totally compromised, and it’s overall a treat for this late director. Frankenheimer had previously recorded a commentary for the 2002 DVD, and it’s here in its entirety as well. Again, well spoken, and he really provides a lot of information about his approach to the film and the way they all pulled it off. For prospective filmmakers, this is a must listen.


Surprisingly, the next commentary with Producer Robert Rosen and Gene Hackman is also a very revealing window into the filmmaking process. Hackman sort of mumbles his way through most of the parts (still in character?), but it’s Rosen who really remembers the production in fine detail, and his anecdotes, like how they used hidden cameras for most of the busy street exteriors, are fascinating.


The previous conversation with Gene Hackman from the original film extras is continued here, and while shorter, is still a great watch and a nice primer to the essence of the film. It’s Hackman against a black screen, but he’s vocal about his initial hesitation on making a sequel, and his interest in acting out the scenes of withdrawal. Good stuff.


The disc is rounded off with some trailers, galleries and another isolated score. This track is even more sparse than that of the original, and not as experimentally interesting, either. Still, a nice addition, proving once again that Fox is determined to use Blu-ray for more than just pumping out new transfers.

wrapping it up...


You won’t necessarily be feeling withdrawals from the first film watching this sequel, and that’s thanks to Frankenheimer’s dedication to character in letting Hackman take his Popeye Doyle into a deep, dark abyss. The only problem, though, is that the story goes down there with him and hardly recovers, resulting in a slow, morose travelogue that just doesn’t have the same impact of the original. It’s certainly different, though. The image is a good upgrade from the DVD, but not near the beaut that the remastering of The French Connection was. The extras, while not as decked out as the original, offer a few fine hours of film history and serve as a nice epilogue to Frankenheimer’s career. If Requiem for a Dream made you want to run through fields of daisies, then French Connection II is for you.

overall... Content: B- Video: B- Audio: C- Extras: B+ Final Grade: C

THE FRENCH CONNECTION Blu-ray Review

Before there was Paul Thomas Anderson, David Gordon Green or even Stephen Spielberg there was Hollywood’s first true wunderkind director of the American New Wave, William Friedkin. He got his first gig in the chair at age 21 directing for television. A stint on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” followed, and within a few more years he had a vast repertoire of commercial projects like Sonny & Cher’s Good Times and Britt Ekland’s The Night They Raided Minsky’s. He also started to carve an artistic niche for himself with a competent adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party and the watershed in queer cinema, The Boys in the Band. It was with his next film that he’d bring together both commercial success and critical praise to become the youngest man to ever win best director. That is until it was found out that he was actually four years older than he said he was. The film, of course, was The French Connection.


No matter the merit of Friedkin’s best picture winner, it’s the phenomenal rise and fall of one of Hollywood’s hottest heads that remains the most interesting story. How his The Exorcist follow-up, and smaller-scale Heaven’s Gate, Sorcerer, flopped after years of delays. How he pissed off the entire gay community (when ten years prior they were embracing The Boys in the Band) by turning Al Pacino into a sadomasochistic closet case in the fascinatingly ambiguous Cruising. How he then descended into light drivel like the Deal of the Century and The Brink’s Job. How he actually kind of redeemed himself with the taught, ambitious amalgam of all his directorial themes, To Live and Die in L.A. and then how he pissed it all away once more with shit like Rampage and The Guardian. And then finally, how he decided to start boning Paramount Picture’s CEO, Sherry Lansing, in order to actually get his films distributed, of which there’d be four, including the Shaq-ified Blue Chips.


All that and I’m still missing a bunch, like how he’d form the short-lived The Directors Company with Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich. Each of those two directors would direct arguably their best films under the production company (Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon and Coppola’s The Conversation), but Friedkin would fail to finish a picture before it closed shop later on in 1974. Then there are all the temper tantrums, infidelity, egomania and bullishness documented in Peter Biskind’s take-it-or-leave-it Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Tough to imagine a guy who today looks like an overweight William Fichtner crossed with a pitbull was in the seventies getting women left right and center pregnant and aborted. Such is the life of one of the most fascinating figures of Hollywood royalty.


But, uh, yeah, The French Connection. Great flick. Watching it again today, it’s uncertain what the Academy actually saw in the Oscar-winning story, since it’s essentially one long string of chase scenes and spy choreography, but as a testament to pure, unbridled filmic energy, The French Connection stands all its own. Owen Roizman’s grainy, kinetic and rough cinematography would singlehandedly create the gritty aesthetic employed by virtually every other actioner to follow and Gene Hackman’s racist, sexist, cocky but somehow endearing Popeye Doyle would set the mold for the anti-hero of the seventies. Less a film than a coalesce of effective and memorable moments, The French Connection is the kind of film Friedkin always wanted to make, for as he’s said before “For me, the greatest thrill in the world, the only thrill, is getting 20 seconds on the screen that really gases you.”


In The French Connection there are more spontaneous eruptions of this said gas than even Jack Black’s The Klumps parody, "Fatties Fart II" in Tropic Thunder. The bit with Hackman and Frenando Ray back and forth on the New York subway. Doyle’s first big bust in the all-black bar. The stripping of an entire car in a search for cocaine. Doyle’s famous wave when he finally gets his man. The gunshot lost in a Tarkovskian backdrop of urban decay. And of course, the chase scene to end all chase scenes, culminating in the cowardly shot to the back that would end up the film’s poster. These bits owe nothing to story, but are instead a testament to what Friedkin could do with visual space when he brought his A game. Two years ago he showed that he still kind of had it when he managed to turn the one-room stage play of Bug into a visual kaleidoscope that would effectively address all our paranoias about government surveillance post-9/11.


Sure, the guy’s got an ego more extroverted than Kevin Bacon’s penis in the nineties, but I’ve got to say it – when Friedkin’s not phoning it in for his wife, he’s good. Damn good. Friedkin’s made better, more fully realized pictures like To Live and Die in L.A. and his unfairly ignored nihilistic masterpiece, Sorcerer, but what a fine firecracker of energy The French Connection was and still continues to be. Forget spewing pea soup, calling out Satan and pissing on the carpet – with The French Connection Billy Friedkin found a way to make even the most mundane of regular human exchange interesting, and that’s cause célèbre.

presentation...

The French Connection has always been notoriously grimy, but this new HD is still nonetheless Blutiful. In the color timing process, which is fascinatingly documented in the supplements, Billy Friedkin tried out a special technique to achieve a harder, desaturated look. The effect is one of effective, creamy pastels, which really lends well to the cold, decrepit New York aesthetic that is predominant throughout the film. The grain still dances around more than Busby Berkley, but the colors finally come through with a calculated detail never before seen from the film on video. The New York aesthetic for the film is mostly browns, but it’s those blue cars or those sudden bursts of bright red blood that still possess the shock that they should. The sharpness is totally there, too, with many moments nearly window clear despite the fluttering grain. Fox has thankfully avoided trying to digitally soften the grain or to artificially enhance edge detail. Like Dark Sky’s Blu-ray transfer of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this is a gritty film that still looks like a gritty film, and it’s movies like these, where all the random grain requires the higher bitrates afforded by Blu-ray, that really showcase the strengths of this new format.


Sound wise, the 5.1 DTS-HD audio included here doesn’t sound all that much better than the included mono mix. Don Ellis’ memorable orchestral score still hits all the right notes, but sound strangely constrained in this not-really 5.1 remix. The majority of the film is played out to more realistic ambiance of urban New Yawk, but even then this track fails to expand the soundspace outside of the front channels. There is hardly any separation from left to right, and virtually no use of the rears. Essentially this sounds just like a mono mix from 1970, which I guess it should and really that’s all that we should be asking for. Still, if you’re going to spring for DTS…use it.

extras...

The French Connection was one of the first big benefactors of Fox’s sadly shortlived Five-Star DVD series that saw interactive, multi-disc treatments for top-tier titans in their catalog like M*A*S*H, Die Hard, Cleopatra and, uh, Independence Day. That release saw two-discs complete with extras like a feature length commentary with Gene Hackman and the now deceased Roy Scheider, another with Friedkin, deleted scenes, and a couple lengthy documentaries. Determined to prove its worth other than for a lavish picture restoration, this Blu-ray disc retains all those great extras and a bunch more. Notable inclusions are an introduction by Friedkin, an isolated score and a trivia track on disc one, and on disc two (yeah, two blu-ray discs!) a whole bunch of new short featurettes. The best of the bunch is “Anatomy of a Chase”, where Friedkin and Producer Phil D’Antoni go back and revisit all the locations for the film’s infamous chase scene, with Friedkin verbally acting it all out complete with comparisons of the locations from old to new. There are some nice bits where he mentions how some of the thrills were manipulated, and how others came on unsafely by accident. In his determination to entertain, the 73-year old Friedkin even runs up those notorious stairs where Doyle made his most iconic of kills.


The other new extras include an interview with Gene Hackman on his Popeye Doyle character, who addresses his “Never trust a Nigger” line and much of his admiration for Friedkin’s process. Then there’s the aforementioned color timing with Friedkin where he speaks about trying to recreate the Moby Dick pastel Technicolor look. More than just extras about the cast and crew themselves, there is also a quality “Rogue Cop: The Noir Connection” where several familiar film historians deconstruct The French Connection and compare and contrast it with the popular noirs that helped define the genre decades before Friedkin’s film burst on the scene. “Scene of the Crime” was filmed the same day as Friedkin did his “Anatomy of a Chase”, and this is again another nice revisiting of the Brooklyn bridge and how that infamous traffic jam was achieved. Of note, we also meet the cop whom Friedkin based his controversial Al Pacino character in Cruising.


Friedkin makes the most of his day of filming by also meeting up with technical consultant and actor in The French Connection, Sonny Grosso, to revisit the true story behind the film. They both recollect of all the characters that permeate the film and how they are both similar and different than the actual characters. There’s also a surprisingly interesting look at Don Ellis’ score, where a music historian describes Ellis’ groundbreaking approach to music – how he specifically got a four key trumpet produced so he could explore the quarter tones that were always underexplored in music. It’s these tones that help give the film the unsettling, shrill and moving music that has become such an identifiable part of the film.


It’s a lot of content to mull over, and considering the variety of each individual supplement, it doesn’t get much better than this. My one gripe, and this seems to be the trend these days, is the axing of the trailers that were originally included on the DVDs. Trailers are an art form in themselves, and I wish companies wouldn’t cut corners to avoid any royalties by removing them from the film to which they should be so intricately connected.

wrapping it up...


While Friedkin’s ego may prove more timeless, The French Connection still endures as one hell of a collection of rousing action scenes and skillful director moments. The grainy visuals really pop with the addition of high definition, even if the sound still sounds same ‘ol. Fox went over and above with their two discs of extras, nearly doubling the content of the already packed Five-Star edition DVD from a few years prior, and packing it with extra after extra of great content. This should now be the final word on the connection francais, and with Warner’s excellent edition of Cruising from a few years prior, that leaves only Sorcerer of Friedkin’s classical period up for high definition remastering. Universal, if you’re holding it back for fear of stroking Friedkin’s self-love hard on, then at least do it for Roy Scheider. Hell, do it for Tangerine Dream. Just do it.

overall... Content: A Video: A- Audio: B Extras: A Final Grade: A