In 1971, 20th
Century-Fox scored a huge commercial and critical hit with The French Connection,
a hard-boiled thriller about the largest heroin bust in New York City’s history. Directed by William
Friedkin and starring Gene Hackman as Det. Eddie “Popeye†Doyle, the picture
presented a gritty, but idealized portrait of the police at work. In 1972,
wanting to capitalize on the picture’s success, Fox decided to produce a
sequel, a continuation of Doyle’s pursuit of Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), the
French drug lord who eludes capture at the end of Friedkin’s film. The studio decided to have the picture
shot in Marseilles, a port city in the south of France where
heroin production thrived in the early Seventies. Friedkin, however, was
uninterested in working on a sequel and so the chiefs at Fox approached John
Frankenheimer, who had lived in France
and spoke the language fluently. Although Frankenheimer had enjoyed a great
deal of success in the Sixties with pictures like The Manchurian Candidate, Seven
Days in May and Grand Prix,
nearly a decade had passed since he’d scored a box office hit. The opportunity
to work on a high-budget picture of this sort aroused his interest and he
accepted the offer.
The original script for French Connection II was prepared by
Robert Dillon, whose previous credits included, most notably, Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.  Once production commenced in the summer of
1974, however, Frankenheimer decided that he needed to have his script
re-worked. For the job, he recruited the novelist Pete Hamill, who’d actually known
Eddie Egan, the New York City
police detective upon whom Hackman’s character Popeye Doyle was based. In 2006,
Hamill recalled his involvement in the project:
[When Frankenheimer] called me from Marseilles, asking me to help, I said I would
try to get there within two days. "Why not one?" he said, and laughed
nervously. I never asked why he called me. Someone hand-delivered a script to
my place in New York
and I read it on the plane.
      John, at that
time, had a major problem. He had already shot nine days of the existing script.
He had developed a reputation for going over budget, so had no flexibility. He
couldn't re-shoot what was already in the can.
      That gave me a
problem too, since I had to write around the existing pieces, which, as always,
had been shot out of order. It was like working on a jigsaw puzzle. The basic
problem was that Hackman, a great movie actor, had nothing to act. And the
reason for that was that Roy Scheider was not in the sequel, and Hackman had
nobody to bounce his lines off. He would never talk to a French cop the way he
talked to Scheider in the Billy Friedkin original.
       ….My
first work was on the following day's pages, trying to make the character sound
like Popeye Doyle….Within a day-and-a-half  (with naps in between) I had
written enough for them to keep shooting for six or seven days….Hackman was
ecstatic. He had something to act!
French Connection II begins shortly after the first film ends, with Doyle arriving in France on April
Fool’s Day. As the only person who can identify Charnier, Doyle has been sent
by his supervisors to assist the Marseilles
police as they search for the elusive kingpin. Vulgar and loud, Doyle alienates
himself quickly from his counterparts in Marseilles,
a group of “narcs†led by the level-headed Henri Barthelmy (Bernard Fresson).
Annoyed by Barthelmy’s cautious approach to law enforcement, Doyle soon sets
out on his own. In his porkpie hat and Hawaiian shirts, he cuts a clownish
figure on the foreign city’s streets and he is quickly spotted and subsequently
abducted by Charnier’s men. Imprisoning him in a slum hotel for three weeks,
Charnier injects Doyle with heroin, with the hope that this will loosen his
lips. The tactic breaks the detective, transforming him into a helpless addict.
But it doesn’t yield any helpful information and Charnier returns the captive
to the police. As he explains to Doyle, just before he frees him: “We
take you back, Doyle, to your friends. They are looking for you everywhere and
making it difficult for me to operate.â€Â
Renewal invariably follows
demoralization in many of Frankenheimer’s pictures and the same happens here.
Forced by Barthelmy to quit his addiction “cold turkey,†Doyle suffers
horribly, bursting into tears at one point. But he makes it through and sets
out on his own to locate the hotel where he was kept prisoner. Once he finds
it, he sets the building on fire and snags one of Charnier’s men. The goon
provides information which eventually leads Doyle and his French counterparts
to the lab where Charnier’s people process heroin. Charnier rushes off, though,
as the police close in, just as he did in the first movie. But Doyle, weak and
limping, runs after him and a chase commences through the congested city,
ending when the detective spots his adversary sailing out of the harbor on a
yacht. Drawing his gun from the holster he wears on his ankle, Doyle fires two
shots into Charnier’s chest, presumably killing him. But Frankenheimer closes
the movie at this point, denying his viewers a denouement of any sort, leaving
open the possibility that the pursuit may continue in the future.
 French Connection II is an
often harrowing examination of the dangers that result when people flout the
law for personal gain. Charnier, of course, may be the most offensive example
of this criminal self-centeredness. A bon vivant, he uses the money he earns
from his drugs business to make his life exceedingly comfortable, spending it
on fine clothes, hunting trips and beautiful women. His success, however, rests
upon a willingness to exploit human weakness, a great sin in itself. Yet, as
Frankenheimer shows us, it also has a terrible, imitative effect, breeding a
culture of addicts and thieves who, like Charnier, seize upon the weak. Such is
the case with an old woman in the hotel, who steals Doyle’s watch. The problem
not only transcends gender, age and nationality, but occupation, too. A sleazy
U.S. Army general (Ed Lauter) is one of Charnier’s collaborators.
Though Doyle has no apparent
interest in financial gain, he is similarly guilty of flouting the law for
private reasons, sidestepping civil liberties and human rights when they
interfere with his pursuit. To some degree, this brutal approach is effective,
leading him and Barthelmy to Charnier’s heroin. But it is also ugly. Early in
the film, for instance, Doyle amuses himself as he explains to a suspect:
I’m going to work on your arms. I’ll
set ’em over a curb. And I’m going to use them for a trampoline. I’m going to
jump up and down on them. Right? Then your kneecaps. One. Two. Kneecaps.
Oatmeal. I’m going to make oatmeal out of your…kneecaps. And when I get done
with you, you are going to put me right in Charnier’s lap.
Like the first French Connection,
Frankenheimer’s picture is a “police procedural,†a film that traces the
efforts of law enforcement officials as they conduct an investigation. In the
middle of this movie, however, the director breaks from the genre’s most
important convention by halting the detective hero’s pursuit, confining him
first to the cell-like room of the hotel and then the basement jail of the
Marseille police station. Some critics have maligned this turn in the
narrative. Roger Ebert, in his 1975 review, complained that it brings “the
movie to a standstill. The plot, the pursuit, the quarry, are all forgotten
during Hackman’s one-man show, and it’s a flaw the movie doesn’t overcome.â€
These sequences do slow the story’s pace a bit, but they nevertheless
serve an important thematic function. In many of Frankenheimer’s films, extreme
suffering gives rise to important changes in his protagonists’ personalities.
For Doyle, the dialectal torture of addiction and withdrawal restores the drive
and commitment that characterized his pursuit of Charnier in the first film.
During the first third of French Connection II, that is, Doyle is
distracted and ineffectual, spending much of his time drinking, carousing and
picking fights with the people who can help him. But following the experience
with heroin, he returns to the dirty Marseilles
streets single-minded, not only avoiding drink and women, but working closely
with Barthelmy. He may or may not capture Charnier—we aren’t allowed to
know—but he certainly scores his revenge, besting him with the two bullets he
fires into his chest.Â
Though French Connection II is one of
the bleakest pictures Frankenheimer made, it is also one of the most thrilling,
thanks to spectacular sequences like the burning of the slum hotel and the
final chase, when Doyle runs after Charnier along the Marseilles harbor. The director realized that
the exaggerated quality of these scenes could arouse disbelief and thus he
tried to make them seem as authentic as possible. He explains on the commentary
he recorded for the film’s DVD release:
The key to doing a movie like this is to make every incident,
every moment of the movie as real and believable as you can. Once you, the
audience, feel betrayed by me, once you feel out of the movie, once you
feel, ‘Oh these are only actors and this
is fake and this doesn’t look right,’ then the movie’s over for you, then
everything that happens after that doesn’t work. But if I can keep you involved
and keep you believing this looks rights this looks real, then I’m doing my
job. And that goes for the costumes, that goes for the sets, that goes for the
extra that’s way in the back of the room. One little thing that’s not right can
turn you off the whole movie.
When French Connection II opened
in the spring of 1975, the reviews it received were generally favorable and its
performance at the box office was strong. The
New York Times’ Vincent Canby, for instance, wrote:
"The concerns of “French Connection IIâ€
are not much different from those of
old Saturday-afternoon movie serials that used to place their supermen in jeopardy and then
figure ways of getting them out. The difference is in  the quality of the supermen and in
their predicaments.Popeye
is a colorful and interesting — though hardly noble — character, and when the Marseilles drug people
kidnap him, forcibly create a heroin habit in him, and then release him, you
have a very special kind of jeopardy that the film and Mr. Hackman exploit most
effectively. The perverse intensity and the anguish in these sequences recall some
of Mr. Frankenheimer's best work in “The Manchurian Candidateâ€.
Â
Stephen B. Armstrong teaches writing at Dixie State College in St. George, Utah.
He is the author of Pictures About Extremes: The Films of John Frankenheimer
(McFarland, 2008).Click here to order from Amazon.