It’s hard to imagine it now, but there are only two types of cop movie: pre and post-The French Connection. That’s how big it is. At the time, in 1971, it dominated the box office and the Academy Awards alike. It brought an abrasive documentary-style realism to a genre that had been dominated by slick film noir coppers. William Friedkin, its director — a former documentary-maker in thrall — to the hand-held innovations of New Wave tyros such as Jean-Luc Godard, dragged his gun-toting heroes out on to the streets and into the cold blue unblinking light of a New York winter.

The plot, of course, was proudly generic. It described a kingpin dope dealer from Marseilles called Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) who planned to smuggle $32 million of heroin into New York in a Lincoln Continental. And yet it’s what Friedkin does with the plot that’s masterful —and that is, very little. Instead of the thrilling scoops and leads of traditional police movies, he simply drops us right next to those hard-working narcotics officers Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) as they trudge through the minutiae of uninspiring detective work. This includes lots of stake-outs, the occasional era-defining car chase (see the second act car-versus-elevated-subway chase through rush-hour Brooklyn) and the birth of the modern police procedural.

However, it’s Doyle himself who is the revelation. An often repugnant protagonist, he terrorises the city’s underclass, throwing punches and the “N-word” at will, like some dark and demented avenger. “Doyle is bad news!” read the movie’s tagline at the time, “But a good cop!” This maverick cop persona has since become a movie cliché. But, if anything, The French Connection can remind us of a time when it was a startlingly original creation, and someone such as Doyle could push the concept of “hero” to breaking point.

18, 104 minutes

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