The Screengrab : bullitt

“The French Connection” Influenced Everything

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The Blu-ray edition of The French Connection is due next month, so director William Friedkin is making the rounds, talking up the film and reminding people he’s still employable. The Independent helps him make his case by crediting Connection with influencing everything from The Wire to Grand Theft Auto IV. “Roughly a third of the way through, gamers are faced with a mission, the Puerto Rican Connection, which emulates the famous chase scene at the heart of Friedkin's thriller,” writes James Mottram. “Commandeering a car, just as Gene Hackman's rogue cop "Popeye" Doyle does, you are asked to trail a target, who boards an elevated train, through the streets of Liberty City (the GTA version of New York)…Unsurprisingly, the 73-year-old Friedkin hasn't played the game, let alone completed the mission, but he doesn't seem concerned that the film that launched his career has been ripped off.”

“Joel Surnow, who created 24, told me he was most influenced by The French Connection,” Friedkin notes, and indeed, until now I had forgotten about the amnesiac cougar subplot in the 1971 Best Picture winner. It isn’t known whether the creators of CSI are similarly indebted to the director, but they did hire him to direct an episode – his most recent screen credit to date. “"It was fun and successful, so they've asked me to do another one in January.”

As for The French Connection, Friedkin plays it modest en route to patting himself on the back. “We thought we were making a little B picture, a little cops-and-robbers movie. So the fact that it became so celebrated, so memorable, and a standard for the genre – which I realize has been copied over and over again, including its attitudes – was a huge surprise.” He discounts the Oscar-winning script by Ernest Tidyman, claiming that hardly a word ended up in the mostly ad-libbed movie. And he takes a shot at Bullitt, Connection’s most oft-cited competition for the title of greatest car chase on film. “I don't think the chase is that great," claims Friedkin. "What they did basically was clear out the streets of San Francisco and drive these cars over the hills. There were no people on the streets. I decided I had to put the public in jeopardy.” Good to know.

Related:
William Friedkin Has No Sense of Social Obligation
When Good Directors Go Bad: Cruising (William Friedkin)

Reviews By Request: The Hot Rock (1972, Peter Yates)

Paul Clark — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader “Uncle Crizzle” (a.k.a. Craig Lindsey) for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks), see the bottom of this post.

The more heist movies I see, the more I realize that the secret to a good one lies in three factors. First, the characters have to be engaging. There are only a limited number of heists one can pull onscreen, but if we enjoy the people onscreen it scarcely matters. Second, the script shouldn’t run out of ideas before the ending, so that the audience won’t be too sure where everything stands until all the pieces finally fall into place. Third- and perhaps most importantly- the movie has to be light on its feet. If the style or the storytelling becomes overbearing, the movie will turn into a slog, which is pretty much the last thing you want from a heist movie.

Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock succeeds on all three counts, with the added bonus of getting better as it goes along. In the opening scenes, I was expecting a fairly standard issue heist movie, albeit one with an impressive, quintessential seventies-era cast. But The Hot Rock has plenty of surprises up its sleeve, not least that the story’s central heist scene happens even before the midpoint of the film. Best of all, it takes itself just seriously enough that it doesn’t feel like a lark, but never too seriously. It’s a lot of fun.

But back to that central heist, which involves the titular rock, a massive diamond that’s long been a point of contention between the ruling factions of an obscure (and apocryphal) African nation. The country’s ambassador to the U.N., played by Moses Gunn, hires the recently-released-from-prison John Dortmunder (Robert Redford) to mastermind a plan to steal the stone for him. Dortmunder’s team- comprised of safecracker George Segal, driver Ron Liebman, and explosives expert Paul Sand- exhaustively plan the job which, while quaint by modern-day standards, is a pretty good one. Of course, it doesn’t quite go according to plan, and it’s the aftermath of the heist that makes the movie so enjoyable.

The Hot Rock was based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake, who I was familiar with primarily for his hard-hitting crime novels written as Richard Stark and his nihilistic screenplay for The Grifters. However, this film is based on one of Westlake’s lighter Dortmunder books, which gave me some pause since my only previous exposure to a Dortmunder story was the godawful 2001 Martin Lawrence vehicle What’s the Worst That Can Happen? That film took Westlake’s story and buried it in shticky storytelling and hammy performances until it became all but unwatchable, and I feared the worst from The Hot Rock as well.

However, the difference between the two movies is telling. Whereas the broadly comic style of What’s the Worst That Can Happen? didn’t suite Westlake’s terse prose one bit, Yates wisely plays the story straight. Primarily known up to that time as an action director (his biggest hit had been 1968’s Bullitt), Yates never leans too hard on the film’s comedy. Instead, he directs the story like a straight thriller, matter-of-factly following his band of crooks from one complication to the next. This only makes the movie that much funnier. Due to unforeseen difficulties, the original heist ends up leading to another job, then another, then yet another, each more unlikely than the last. And the team, which seemed so well-chosen at the beginning, becomes less so with each successive job. Consider that Liebman is perfect behind the wheel of damn near any car, but fairly out of sort when he finds himself in an entirely different sort of vehicle.

As I said before, the cast is a lot of fun. I’ve never been a big Robert Redford fan, but he’s a natural here as the master thief who has to keep his cool in order to think himself out of the messes in which he keeps finding himself. Segal is his usual reliable self as Dortmunder’s trusty lieutenant, all business to the outside world but always kvetching to the boss. Liebman and Sand have some good moments as the other team members. Gunn gets lots of laughs as the seemingly imperturbable diplomat, at first amused by his involvement in the crime (observe his wry smile when he states, “I am a criminal”), only to become increasingly frustrated with every new development in the case. And there’s a choice supporting role for the one and only Zero Mostel, as Sand’s shifty father. Given his over-the-top signature performance in The Producers, I sort of expected Mostel to clash with the others, but instead his outsize personality is in service of an outsize character, which allows him to fit in perfectly with the ensemble. It’s an indelible character turn, with the unfortunate side effect of making me wonder how many priceless Mostel performances we lost to the blacklist.

The Hot Rock is yet another reminder of the kind of action movies Hollywood was great at making during the seventies, but not nearly as good at today. The cast is enjoyable, the storytelling efficient, and most of all, the direction never calls attention to itself. As fun as Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films sometimes are, there’s always a layer of self-consciousness to them, as though Soderbergh deliberately means to evoke a bygone filmmaking style. By contrast, Yates trusts in his story enough to stay out of the way, and the result is a highly enjoyable example of its genre, and a darn good entertainment in general.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Bullitt: The Greatest Car Chase Ever Google Mapped

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The high-speed automotive pursuit from 1968’s Steve McQueen vehicle Bullitt has long been regarded one of the three greatest car chases in movie history, along with The French Connection and, of course, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. But you’ve probably never heard anyone describe it as the most accurate car chase ever filmed. Mention the scene to anyone from San Francisco and they’ll jump at the chance to explain in excruciating detail how the chase defies the laws of space and time.

Now you can see it for yourself. Some enterprising soul, using intel gathered from Ray Smith’s comprehensive account of the chase, has detailed every impossible twist and turn on Google Maps. If you were already impressed with McQueen’s driving skills, wait until you get a load of this. Impressive as it is, though, what we’d really like to see is the Google Maps version of The Cannonball Run.

While we’re waiting for that, here’s the scene from Bullitt. See if your newfound knowledge of the inaccuracies detracts from your enjoyment.

Video of the Day: Peter Yates Interview

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

From the vast "TV Days" archives of amateur television historian Ira H. Gallen comes this 1968 interview with British director Peter Yates, fresh from completing his work on Bullitt.

The interview is interesting enough on its own merits -- Yates, who was then considered quite a maverick among English filmmakers and has now been largely forgotten, discusses the changing role of the car chase and his own desire not to become a Hollywood director. But it's also lots of fun just as a television period piece, given the now-unthinkable thick accent of the host and the panel of film students acting as Yates' questioners, who seem to have wandered in off the set of The Mod Squad.