The death of the actor Gene Hackman at the age of 95 has left behind a whole raft of iconic and legendary roles, from Clyde Barrow’s brother (in Bonnie and Clyde) to supervillain Lex Luthor. Yet for many, the part that will never be beaten is that of Detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle, the abrasive, misanthropic protagonist of William Friedkin’s 1971 crime classic The French Connection. His character is introduced as the scuzziest Santa Claus imaginable, ringing his bells outside a bar in Brooklyn, before chasing and gleefully beating up a knife-wielding drug dealer.
It is one of the most economical and effective character introductions in cinema, combining visceral thrills with an element of black comedy, and showed that Hackman was perhaps the only actor who could have pulled off such a difficult part.
Yet it was also a sign of how things were being done differently here that Friedkin ordered Hackman to punch the actor playing the drug dealer, Alan Weeks, for real, over and over again, calling for multiple takes. “I felt horrible,” Hackman later recalled, understandably enough, although Weeks took the beating in good part and went along with it.
Hackman was not the first choice for what became his signature role, surprisingly. Paul Newman and Steve McQueen – both A-list and traditionally good-looking actors – turned down the role in Ernest Tidyman’s script, perhaps because the $1.5 million budget that the studio 20th Century Fox had set for the film would have meant that they were unaffordable anyway.
Gene Hackman was perhaps the only actor who could have pulled off such a difficult part.
After McQueen refused, on the grounds that he had recently played a similar role in the film Bullitt that had been made by The French Connection’s producer Philip D’Antoni, the film’s director William Friedkin considered everyone from the comedian and singer Jackie Gleason to, slightly unbelievably, the investigative New York journalist Jimmy Breslin, who had ample knowledge of the seamier side of urban life, but absolutely no acting experience.
In the end, Friedkin – himself a young, inexperienced filmmaker who approached his big break with the air of a man with something to prove – cast two relatively unknown actors in the lead roles of two dedicated narcotics detectives in pursuit of a French heroin smuggler.
For ‘Popeye’ Doyle and his colleague Buddy ‘Cloudy’ Russo, Friedkin cast Hackman, who was best known and previously Oscar-nominated for his role as Warren Beatty’s brother Buck in Bonnie and Clyde, and Roy Scheider, a jobbing New York actor about to have his breakthrough in another crime drama, Klute. In the role of the antagonist, Alain Charnier, he cast one of Luis Buñuel’s favorite actors Fernando Rey.
In an amusing moment of serendipity, Friedkin had intended to cast another Buñuel actor, Francisco Rabal, and so when Rey appeared in New York for his audition it was to his embarrassed surprise. Nonetheless, Rey could speak both French and English and Rabal could speak neither, and so he was hired.
Friedkin turned his leading men into convincing detectives by sending them out on the streets. As he later said: “I had both Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider ride around with Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, the real cops their characters were based on. They mimicked what they saw, which is what I wanted. I had seen all that behavior months before, and they were seeing it fresh before they did the film.”
Hackman was not the first choice for what became his signature role.
Hackman was initially taken aback by the character of Popeye as written, believing that he was coarse and objectionable, but Friedkin persuaded him that there was a core of nobility to him instead; as he said, “He thought the guy was really racist, but I didn’t. I thought it was an act that he was doing to survive in the street.”
As for his own preparation, he met with the veteran director Howard Hawks, who bluntly told him that his previous films had been “lousy”, but gave him a tip that would define the film. “Make a good [car] chase. Make one better than anyone’s done.”
Certainly, the film had to be put together almost as an improvised endeavor. Friedkin later contemptuously said “there was no script, really”, and damned Tidyman with faint praise: “We think he has the potential to be a better than average thriller writer”. The director had recently seen Costa-Gavras’s political drama Z, and was influenced both by its grittiness and its documentary-like realism. “It was a fiction film but it was made like it was actually happening,” he explained, “like the camera didn’t know what was going to happen next.”
Filming – as usual, on Friedkin’s pictures – was chaotic. Although 20th Century Fox, according to an interview that he gave NBC, “wanted to fire me every day”, the film was sufficiently low-budget to escape much attention. “There was no pushback,” he said. “They had no idea of how to do it differently. They didn’t pay much attention to the dailies. The French Connection was not a film that they were gambling on.”
William Friedkin turned his leading men into convincing detectives by sending them out on the streets.
Its director was on the New York streets, filming his largely improvised screenplay as if it was a low-budget documentary, and Hackman was giving the performance of a lifetime, testing audience sympathies to their limit.
He was perpetually angry on set, in large part because, in his director’s words: “Although I was 10 years younger than Gene, I became like his father, and he hated his father.” At one point, overcome with distaste for the film and his character, he even tried to walk off set, before being persuaded that the picture would be his big break.
Friedkin refused to do more than one take if he could avoid it. “I’m much more interested in spontaneity than in perfection,” he explained. “I have no interest in going for perfection. All that is is wasting time. If I get that in the scene, that’s the take, and that’s it.” And he knew New York was a vicious, violent place: “I was living on Park Avenue at the time, and 10 or 15 minutes away from me were all these shootings and people shooting up in the streets…nothing about the city was embellished in the film.”
Nonetheless, the film’s piece-de-resistance and most famous scene, in which Popeye pursues a hitman by car while the criminal is on New York’s elevated railway, tested Friedkin’s improvised, loose sensibility to its limits. As he admitted, “I had no permits to do the chase scene. None…we had to pay the guy from the transit department $40,000 to shoot on the elevated train. I broke all the rules, I put myself in danger, I put the lives of others in danger, and I really didn’t care. I just felt that nothing was going to go wrong, and, by the grace of God, it didn’t.”
Its filming proved to be a seat-of-the-pants production’s most tempestuous event. The stunt driver hired, Bill Hickman, had been provoked by Friedkin taunting him that he wasn’t up to much. “I’ll tell you what,” Hickman replied, “I’ll show you some driving if you get in the car with me.” He then drove at a reckless 90 mph across 26 blocks, creating footage that ended up being used in the finished film.
Friedkin himself operated the camera, which was mounted on the front of the car, while sitting next to Hickman. He later argued that this was because he was single, and the other cameramen had families, so if anything happened it was better that he died than they did. The only indication that anyone should get out of the way of this pair of madmen was a police siren on top of the car.
Yet this was a film, not a documentary, and so other shots of Hackman, himself imperiled by Friedkin’s wild and crazy style, had to be shot, too; the sequence ended up taking five weeks to film, and then was the part of the picture that was the hardest to edit. Friedkin was adamant that it should be the centerpiece of his movie. “The other thing to remember about this chase is the old admonition by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great American writer, that action is character,” he would say. “What a person does and how they do it is what and who they are, and this chase embodies the character of Popeye Doyle.”
The result was not just one of cinema’s most memorable car chases, a visceral, you-are-there action scene that was all the more effective for its sense that something could go wrong at any point. And it did. Doyle’s near-miss with a woman and her baby carriage was one of the few staged stunts. Collisions with unsuspecting cars can be seen in the finished film, and at least one hapless motorist had to be compensated by the production team. Every car chase previously put on screen seemed tame in comparison.
Friedkin had heeded Hawks’s advice, and then some. It also led to some good-natured rivalry with Bullitt star McQueen, who would loudly greet the film-maker at parties by saying: “Here’s the man who made the second-best chase in movie history!” Later in life, Friedkin made noises about regretting his attitude: “I had no reservations about doing it then, because I was a callow, heedless youth. But I wouldn’t do anything like this now”. But when Mission: Impossible film-maker Christopher McQuarrie asked him how he would have shot it differently, he replied: “I wouldn’t change a frame.”
Almost unbelievably given Friedkin’s cavalier attitude towards safety, the film was eventually completed, and almost immediately buried. As he later said: “In many places, like 42nd Street in New York, [Fox] released it as a double feature, and they had no belief in it whatsoever.”
Yet, in his words, it took off like a rocket, helped by exemplary reviews that praised Hackman’s performance, Friedkin’s kinetic direction and his use of New York locations to create a police procedural that both entertained and challenged. It was nominated for eight Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Director for Friedkin and Best Actor for Hackman, and grossed a mighty $75 million at the box office.
Friedkin disassociated himself entirely from the sequel, imaginatively entitled French Connection II, and wrote to its director John Frankenheimer to beg him not to take on the project. He later dismissed it: “What they did afterward with French Connection II had no interest for me at all. It just capitalized on the title.”
But it is actually a successful and accomplished thriller, with another excellent Hackman performance – testament to the foundations laid by Friedkin’s original. The scene in which Popeye, forcibly addicted to heroin by gangsters, must painfully go cold turkey is one of the finest things that Hackman ever did on screen – no mean feat for this peerless actor.
Popeye Doyle is a character who would not fit into many mainstream films today. (He is a more natural choice for a show like The Wire or The Sopranos.) Profane, violent and frequently misguided in his actions – even his hunches as a detective are wrong as often as they are right – he’s an anti-hero who is often hard to like or root for, and if the audience does so, it is only because the villains are so much worse.
Yet it is a testament to Hackman’s brilliance as an actor that we feel sympathy for this particular old devil. Whenever Doyle’s abrasive yet strangely vulnerable face shows up on screen, we are instantly jerked to the edge of our seats, uncertain but perpetually fascinated by what, precisely, he’ll do next. And that is surely the mark of a great actor.
Alexander Larman is the books editor at The Spectator World and author of The Crown in Crisis
