I recently got back from extended travels to face a backlog of queries from Colorado friends and neighbors regarding the belated start of my 16mm backyard cinema program. Using FaceBook I asked if people had a preference for either Preston Sturges, Richard Fleischer, or Billy Wilder. The latter got a big shout-out, and then I promptly ignored all feedback (not to mention my own question) and, instead, screened William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971). One viewer asked me “Why The French Connection?” I was tempted to simply answer “Why not? It’s my party, and I’ll peel rubber if I want to.” But the longer response was the one I employed when introducing the film to the first audience of my summer film program. It went something like this:

The ferry from Provincetown to Boston was behind schedule. This compromised my chances of catching the Lucky Star bus I needed to catch going to NYC. My original plan was to walk from the harbor to the bus station, which would have taken about 30 minutes. The bus was leaving in seven minutes. So I ran up to a taxi driver and asked him how much it would cost to drive me to the bus station. He said $25. I shook my head. He said $20. I asked how long it would take. He said 10 minutes. I looked at him and said, “I’ll pay you $20 if you get me there in five.” He pushed me in the cab and said “let’s go!” Be careful what you ask for. He actually got me there in six minutes, but it was among the most horrifying six minutes of my life. He drove through every red light in our way and wove through traffic like, you guessed it, Gene Hackman chasing a NYC train. He got me there and made it possible for me to eventually board my desired China Town train without ever, thankfully, having to terrorize any pedestrians, much less one pushing a baby-stroller.

A note about NYC; after two-weeks spent visiting Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, everything that makes NYC great really popped for me. That crazy, grimy, hustle-bustle of unruly, noisy, moving, melting-pot of humanity felt like a welcome-back parade, made all the more colorful for its contrast to its more disciplined European neighbors. So even as I settled back in to my comfortable life on the decidedly mellow foothills here in the Rockies, the buzz from the Big Apple was still setting off sparks on my inner electrodes.

As I scanned through the 16mm films to choose from for my first outdoor screening in the backyard, is it any wonder that my finger never went more than a third of the way down the alphabetical list of titles and stopped at The French Connection? But it wasn’t just about the Boston taxi driver, or my recent visit to NYC still being fresh in mind… there was a third and far more compelling reason to launch my 16mm film series with this particular film. In this age of high-def and state-of-the-art, home-entertainment systems, I need to make sure my choice can live up to the competition. In the case of The French Connection that was most certainly the case, because the Blu-Ray is mired in controversy. I’ll let Joshua Zyber from the High-Def Digest tell you why:

The new color timing is so radically invasive that it sparked a war of words between Friedkin and the film’s cinematographer Owen Roizman, who said of the Blu-ray, “I wasn’t consulted. I was appalled by it. I don’t know what Billy was thinking. It’s not the film that I shot, and I certainly want to wash my hands of having had anything to do with this transfer, which I feel is atrocious.” …

The effect of all this is that The French Connection now looks like one of those old black & white movies that Ted Turner colorized in the ’80s. It’s a cartoonish facsimile of the movie. The colors are filled with chroma noise and frequently bleed. Flesh tones often have a sickly purple hue for no good reason. Friedkin also jacked up the contrast while he was at it. Whites bloom and shadow detail is crushed. And because the color layer was defocused, that means that part of the image is literally out of focus. In the color timing featurette, Friedkin proudly demonstrates before-and-after comparisons of the original negative against his “corrected” version, and you can watch half the detail in the picture vanish as soon as he flips the switch. The combination of boosted contrast and defocusing also gives many parts of the image, especially facial features, a strange glow.

Now let’s move on to the guts of what makes The French Connection interesting. Yeah, it’s based on a true story about a record-breaking 1961 drug bust by NYPD officers Eddie Egan and Sonnie Grosso (both of whom were technical consultants on the film), but those details are secondary to the topography of a certain time and place, along with the editing that pushes us through it.

While Steve McQueen fans might still single out Bullitt (1968) for its car chase, there can be no denying that The French Connection set a new benchmark for the harrowing chase-sequence that is now the routine bread-and-butter of many thrillers. I’m not so interested in the fact that that it won slew of Oscars or that it launched Hackman’s career. I’m more interested in the fact that Roizman chose lenses that flattened objects so as to make them appear closer than they really were, that it was shot in real traffic, some scenes cribbed without permits with operators hiding their equipment using grainy film stock that was selected to give things a cinéma vérité feel, and that wheelchairs were used instead of dolly tracks along with much more handheld camera work than was normal for a studio film of that time (this being blessedly reserved in comparison to today’s spastic A.D.D.-fueled filmmakers). The French Connection had a gritty and visceral immediacy influenced, in part, by Costa-Gavras’ Z (1969), and its attention to detail in regards to crumbling and seedy neighborhoods lend it a feeling of authenticity. Shot for under 2 million, it grossed over 50 million and is credited with being the first commercially successful film to come out of the American New Wave.

I will also add that the original mono track sounds more natural than the various gussied up versions you can find on either the DVD or Blu-Ray, and it was already a bit muddy on purpose to add to the doc-like feel of the film. A grainy, gritty, mono affair? Oui! And a decent 16mm print will deliver on that with far more authenticity than some high-def aberration. A few scratches on the film only adding to the experience. And that, my friends, is why The French Connection is a perfect choice to launch an outdoor 16mm series.