Where to watch The French Connection (1971)

Trivia & production notes

• Director William Friedkin initially opposed casting Gene Hackman in the lead role, instead pursuing Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Peter Boyle, Steve McQueen, and others before ultimately settling on Hackman.
• Fernando Rey was cast as Alain Charnier due to a case of mistaken identity—Friedkin asked his casting director to find actor Francisco Rabal after seeing him in a Luis Buñuel film, but the director contacted Rey instead, and Rey remained in the role when Rabal proved unavailable due to language barriers.
• The film came in $300,000 over its original $1.5 million budget, finishing production at $1.8 million.
• William Friedkin drew inspiration from Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 film Le Samouraï and Alain Delon's performance as a solitary hitman when shaping Gene Hackman's character of Popeye Doyle.
• The film's documentary-like realism was directly influenced by Costa-Gavras's Z, which demonstrated how to shoot a fiction film as if the camera were capturing events as they unfolded rather than following a predetermined script.
• The World Trade Center appears in the background of scenes at the shipyard, with the completed North Tower and partially completed South Tower visible, making the film among the earliest to feature the landmark.
• The famous car chase sequence was filmed in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, with a 1971 Pontiac LeMans pursuing an elevated train running under what was then the B train line above Stillwell Avenue and 86th Street.
• The car chase cinematographer Owen Roizman undercranked the camera to 18 frames per second to enhance the sense of speed, an effect visible in shots of stalled cars with accelerated exhaust smoke.
• Several accidental collisions between stunt drivers were left in the final chase sequence when timing errors caused cars to actually hit Gene Hackman's vehicle rather than narrowly missing it.
• Alain Charnier, the film's main antagonist, is based on Jean Jehan, a real French drug trafficker who was never extradited because France does not extradite its own citizens.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article The French Connection (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.