William Friedkin is going to explain himself to us if it takes him all night. His latest telegram from his subconscious is an article in the Guardian to which he has signed his name, ostensibly on the subject of the release of The French Connection on Blu-ray. "The myth of the incorruptible lawman persisted until policing scandals started multiplying [in the late 1960s]. The age of innocence was over with the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Vietnam War, so that after Watergate in 1972, people would believe anything about corruption in all walks of life." According to Friedkin, "Those of us who made films in the 70s were not following the zeitgeist: we shaped it. We no longer believed in a man on a white horse. We knew he was flawed because we were flawed." This all has such a nice ring to it that you kind of hate to point out that everything Friedkin writes seems to be canceled out by his next sentence. Either he "shaped" the zeitgeist instead of "following it", which would seem to indicate that he was out ahead of the curve, or The French Connection, with its racist, trigger-happy supercop antihero Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), was a reflection of attitudes that people had already formed from reading the newspaper. When discussing what set Connection apart back in the day, one factor that Friedkin doesn't bring up is Costa-Gavras's Z, the 1969 political thriller that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and whose slam-bang style, with its percussive editing, was heavily influential on Friedkin's picture. Friedkin was very open about his debt to Costa-Gavras back when he must have thought that it was real artistic for a commercial Hollywood director to know enough about European movies to copy his moves from one.

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