Rating: B
Dir: William Friedkin
Star: Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, Roy Scheider, Tony Lo Bianco
The year 1971 may have been when the movies achieved peak “Hard men meting out tough justice.” It was a year which not only gave us this; we also got Dirty Harry and, on the other side of the pond, Get Carter. A new breed of hero, for a new, cynical era, setting the tone for a decade which would see Watergate, the fall of Vietnam and rolling blackouts. The gritty, almost documentary style utilized here by Friedkin (with a large nod to Jean-Pierre Melville and Costa-Gavras) has remained nearly obligatory in police thrillers ever since. This might work against the film to some extent, because it formalized what now can tiptoe close to cliché.
You can see the influence in things like Traffic, spinning its yarn from a number of different strands of perspective, around the world. French smuggler Alain Charnier (Rey) is working on a plan to bring sixty kilos of heroin into New York, where the supply has dried up. Cops Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Hackman) and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Schneider) stumble across the edge of the plot, in Salvatore “Sal” Boca (Lo Bianco), and begin following the threads. However, Charmier realizes he is under surveillance, and moves to neutralize the threat to his transaction. This leads to the movie’s most famous sequence, where Doyle, in his car, chases a shooter who is escaping on a subway train. It is justifiably renowned, because it offers a masterclass in telling a story without dialogue.
It’s also startling, because this takes place in an era where a cop could shoot a scumbag in the back, without mass civil disobedience breaking out. Here, no-one so much as mentions it. Some have called Doyle racist: I disagree, since for this to be true, he’d have to treat white criminals better than the black ones. Similarly, the ending sees an arguably more problematic shooting by Doyle, and a terse final title card tells us he and his partner were merely reassigned. Truly the seventies were another time. Hackman won an Oscar for his portrayal of Doyle, and he’s a relentless attack dog of a cop who really gets his cardio in (the actor was in his forties; like most of Gene’s characters, Doyle plays older).
Nobody else makes quite the same impression. Russo, for example, is left trailing in his partner’s wake, and Rey is little more than a machine for delivering drugs. It’s all about Doyle, and pointedly, we don’t know anything about his existence outside the force. This is no ScandiCrime, with a cop juggling work and home life – for that would require Popeye to have a home life. Instead, he’s a fitting hero for the New York of the time, a festering cesspool of bombed-out blocks in which fires randomly burn. The weakest part may be an ending which is both abrupt and anticlimactic. It doesn’t diminish the impact or influence of everything we have seen to this point.