A filthy, slouching Santa Claus chases a black drug dealer through a Brooklyn alleyway frozen by the December miasma. The feverish, unstable camera seems to stumble along with them. It's not a chase, it's a hunt. It's not a police operation, it's a predatory act. In these first few seconds, William Friedkin isn't just staging an action scene, he's signing a manifesto. The French Connection doesn't belong to the crime genre; it devours it from within, spits out its bones, and dances on its ruins. It is a treatise on urban naturalism that Émile Zola would have written if he had had an Arriflex 35 IIC and a city on the verge of a nervous breakdown like New York in 1971 at his disposal.

Here, the metropolis is not a backdrop but a living, sick organism. Friedkin films it with the detachment of a documentary filmmaker and the eye of an expressionist. The grays, the browns, the dirty white of trampled snow, the steam rising from manholes like the breath of an underground leviathan: it is a color palette that expresses moral asphyxia even before visual asphyxia. This New York is a labyrinth without a Minotaur, because the monster is the labyrinth itself, an entropic system that consumes and corrupts anyone who moves within it. It is the same desolate city that would give birth to Scorsese's Travis Bickle five years later, but here the psychosis has not yet imploded into individual delirium; it is an environmental condition, a pollution of the soul that permeates the air. Friedkin's camera, often handheld, nervous, hungry for sordid details, does not merely observe: it participates, becoming an accomplice to a degradation that is both physical and spiritual, recording the topography of an empire in decline.

At the center of this hellish circle moves Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle. Gene Hackman, in a performance that is less acting and more exorcism, does not play a character, he embodies a primal instinct. Popeye is not a hero. He is not even an antihero in the romantic sense of the term. He is a force of nature, a bundle of exposed nerves, a concentration of anger, prejudice, and obsession. His casual racism, his contempt for rules, his brutality, are not presented as flaws to be overcome, but as tools necessary for survival in his ecosystem. He is a hunting dog that has sniffed out its prey and will not let go, not out of a sense of justice, but out of a biological, apodictic impulse. He is Dostoevsky's underground man with a badge and terrible aim, a being whose entire existence is justified and consumed by the hunt. His relationship with his partner, Cloudy Russo (a magnificent Roy Scheider in his normality), is not one of friendship, but of functional symbiosis: Cloudy is the anchor of rationality that prevents Popeye from completely dissolving into his own inner chaos.

Friedkin's direction, forged in the crucible of television documentary, is the aesthetic and philosophical keystone of the film. The almost clandestine approach, with “stolen” shots in city traffic and the use of natural light, generates a hyper-reality that breaks through the fourth wall. One has the feeling not of watching fiction, but of spying on reality. This technique, which owes much to cinéma vérité and political works such as Costa-Gavras' Z, is stripped here of any didactic intent to become pure cinematic language. Friedkin's truth is not political, it is existential. It is the truth of the cold that gets into your bones, the metallic taste of fear, the deafening and senseless noise of the city.

And then there's the chase. To talk about it as a simple “action scene” is like describing the Sistine Chapel as a “frescoed ceiling.” It is the telluric heart of the film, the point at which Popeye's obsession becomes pure kinetic experience for the viewer. For almost ten minutes, every rule of storytelling, safety, and logic is suspended. Friedkin mounts a car under the tracks of an elevated subway and unleashes hell. There is no music to underscore the tension, only the screech of tires, the roar of the train, the screams of terrified passersby. It is cinema of danger, shot with a disregard for convention that borders on recklessness (many sequences were shot without permits, in real traffic, with unexpected car accidents left in the final cut). The chase in Bullitt is an elegant choreography, a dance of engines and style. This is an epileptic attack. It is the collapse of civil society in the name of an individual goal. Popeye endangers dozens of innocent lives not to save the city from heroin, but because he cannot, ontologically, accept that his prey will escape him. It is his categorical imperative.

In this universe of instinctive brutality, the figure of the antagonist, Alain Charnier (an icy and impeccable Fernando Rey, chosen by Friedkin due to a casting mistake and then kept for his aura of unattainable elegance), serves as the perfect counterpoint. Charnier is not just a criminal; he is European aristocracy, culture, refinement. He is everything Popeye is not. Their duel is not between good and evil, but between two worlds, two methods, two opposing energies. The scene in which Popeye follows Charnier in the subway is a masterpiece of silent tension, a deadly ballet that culminates in Charnier's famous, mocking wave from the departing train. It is a moment of mutual recognition, almost respect, between predator and prey. Charnier is intelligence versus brute force, cunning versus obsession.

The greatness of The French Connection lies perhaps, more than anything else, in its total refusal to offer catharsis. The ending is breathtakingly nihilistic. The operation culminates in an abandoned warehouse, in a confused and anticlimactic shootout. Popeye, blinded by his fury, accidentally kills another federal agent. Charnier, the target of this whole epic of mud and violence, vanishes, probably having fled. The last image is of Doyle, oblivious to everything, stepping into the darkness of the warehouse, firing one last, desperate shot into the dark, and the screen goes black. A sharp sound, like a full stop. The final captions inform us, with the coldness of a police report, that the real protagonists of the story received light sentences and that the drug traffickers were never brought to justice.

There is no victory, no justice, no moral. Popeye's obsession has produced only death and failure. The system, both that of the law and that of crime, continues to grind on indifferently. This ending, unthinkable only a few years earlier under the yoke of the Hays Code, is the seal of New Hollywood and the perfect allegory of an America that had lost its innocence in Vietnam and was about to sink into the paranoia of Watergate. Friedkin's film is a seismographic document that records the tremors of an era. It is a work that transforms the crime thriller into an existential tragedy and the city into a landscape of the soul, demonstrating that cinema, at its best, does not merely tell stories, but manages to capture the feverish temperature of history itself.