Wow.
The French Connection on Blu-ray is one of the great additions to the highest shelf of my Blu-ray library, up there with The Godfather, the Kubrick films, and Pixar’s stuff. (I am soon to throw Raging Bull and The Last Emperor into the PS3 to see what they are like.)
The thing about The French Connection on Blu is that you can see every bit of the grain and the intentionally rough, documentary look of the film. And that is, at least in part, the point. It doesn’t look Pixar digital seamless. It isn’t supposed to.
But you get the movie in all its glory. You get what Friedkin was after with the style. And you get a movie that delivers and delivers and delivers… a true masterpiece that hasn’t lost an ounce of snap after 38 years.
This is unlike the experience of Bonnie & Clyde, a terrific Blu-ray transfer that has, as movies do, aged. But The French Connection, even more than B&C, has been stolen from/imitated relentlessly for every one of those 38 years, yet the original – which, as all films do, does some stealing from other genres and films itself (Siegel’s Dirty Harry came out the same year, working on a similar track, though not as profoundly) – is as strong a piece as ever.
You watch this film and you can see the work of Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, Walter Hill, Michael Cimino, Paul Greengrass, Steven Soderbergh and almost every director who hasn’t come up on the pretty-commercial style of filmmaking in the reflection of this film. All of these filmmakers have added strokes (of genius) of their own to the sauce. And it would be silly to say that none of them would be doing the kind of work they do without The French Connection having been made and made the way it was. But you can feel the bloodlines coming from this film in a way one rarely can.
William Friedkin, it must be said, must be haunted by this singular achievement as well. The closest he ever came to this level of work - in combination with his next film, The Exorcist, which tied many of the same principles to a different genre – was To Live & Die In L.A., which tried in 1985 to meld the style he used in the early 70s to the slicker visual style that was then being embodied by Simpson/Bruckheimer and directors like Adrian Lyne, Tony Scott, and even relative contemporaries (and appreciators) of Friedkin, like Paul Schrader.
Anyway…
Blu-ray films are, first and foremost for me, about the transfer. And this one is great, as I wrote before, because of the clarity of the grain. It’s like watching the movie’s lungs go in and out, with the occasional cough. And the realization that Friedkin was emulating Maysles as much as Kazan really hit me as a result.
The extras here are also terrific, including a recently shot intro to the Blu-ray by Friedkin and a variety of interviews and the like that are not available anywhere else, including commentary by the now passed Roy Scheider and the not-very-chatty-these-days Mr Hackman. (French Connection II also came out on Blu this last week, with more Hackman material for good measure.)
Come for the Blu… stay for the movie.
Wow.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2009/02/the_french_conn.html