Review: French Connection II (1975)
If you’re familiar with the famously downer ending of The French Connection, you might wonder how William Friedkin ever made a sequel to that New Hollywood classic. Well, he didn’t, but John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds) did and it’s a pretty good film, even if its existence seems to undo some of the brilliance of the ending of the last film (even in the 1970s, Hollywood couldn’t help itself from uncoiling coiled up endings).
Frankenheimer brings Gene Hackman back as Popeye Doyle and this time sends him to Marseilles, France in search of the first film’s chief villain: Fernando Rey’s Alain Charnier aka Frog One. Popeye is still a magnificent asshole in French Connection II, but he’s a professionally humbled one when we meet him here. He’s tasked with a French handler, Barthélémy (Bernard Fresson), who thinks he’s an American fool. He’s given a bad desk outside the washroom and not allowed to do any real detective work, so he pisses away his time wandering around Marseilles trying to pick up girls and getting drunk at local bars.
Hackman is hilarious in these scenes, playing every bit the boorish American tourist. He yells at Frenchmen in English, getting louder when they don’t understand, only slowing down and repeating his requests more obnoxiously as if that will help them comprehend his words better. At one point, he asks out some girls and fails to comprehend that they’re waiting for their boyfriends. Moments later, he orders a drink and buys the bartender one, who chooses an absinth. Then he orders another round for them both, and then another, and before long he’s finally found a companion, but one who’s plastered and who he had to pay for—it’s easy to infer that the only way Popeye could get a woman is in a similar manner.
When Popeye does join in a bust up and chases down a perp, he ends up picking a CI (confidential informant) that the French police immediately release back into the crowd to get killed by the mob. Popeye is hopeless here, helpless, feels like he’s wasting time, and that’s the point. He doesn’t know that the French police are using him as bait, waiting for Charnier’s men to snatch him so they can trace him and use him as a means to reveal Charnier’s whereabouts.
Of course, such a gambit has consequences and leads to the film’s most famous sequence where Charnier gets Popeye forcibly addicted to heroin. Popeye barely resists in these scenes, his physical defeat seemingly linked to his ego being quashed by Charnier outsmarting him and luring him into a trap. It’s fascinating to watch such a long, focused progression dedicated to drug addiction in a film like this, and doubly so when the French cops find Popeye again and we get long scenes of Popeye going cold turkey and slowly sobering up.
If you’re a fan of Hackman cutting loose, you have to watch French Connection II, if only for these scenes of him blubbering, telling private secrets to the French officer and begging for help. Hackman may have excelled at playing egotists, but he was fairly egoless as an actor, not caring how pathetic and helpless he looks on screen. Popeye is truly pathetic here, and the scenes are excruciating, firstly because of how brutal they are to Popeye, secondly because of how long they are for you as a viewer. Once you cross into 10 minutes of Popeye freaking out, you start to wonder why Frankenheimer is so fixated on keeping on with this approach. It’s novelty as much as anything.
Once Popeye is released, the movie gets more conventional, and Frankenheimer starts to showcase more of his directorial trademarks. The transition from Friedkin to Frankenheimer is clarifying in some ways, but not in others. French Connection II shares its predecessor’s penchant for griminess. The streets of Marseilles in this film are filthy. The cinematographer Claude Renoir (nephew of Jean) shoots the movie in a fairly unembellished manner. His visual approach does little to stylize the city or the characters.
But Frankenheimer does operate his set pieces in a more calculated manner than Friedkin. They don’t seem to happen naturally, but are rather built more deliberately. They’re still good, but they don’t surprise you in the manner they do in the original, as if bursting out of the happenstance of a real city. There’s a cool gunfight in a flooding sea dock and a final foot chase with striking first-person inserts.
The ending builds to a satisfying, crisp conclusion, but perhaps therein lies the film’s ultimate weakness: it’s satisfying. The French Connection is anything but satisfying. The stiflement of Popeye is the entire point. Popeye is certainly tested in French Connection II, but he’s not stifled. The original film is overwhelmed by the sadness of reality; French Connection II plays with reality, but doesn’t feel ultimately beholden to it. The French Connection is a stone cold classic. French Connection II is a solid sequel that didn’t need to exist.
7 out of 10
French Connection II (1975, USA)
Directed by John Frankenheimer; written by Alexander Jacobs, Robert Dillon, and Laurie Dillon, based on a story by Robert Dillon and Laurie Dillon, based on The French Connection by William Friedkin; starring Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, Bernard Fresson.
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