Gene Hackman has long been a personal favorite. Perhaps it's the resonance of his speaking voice that echoes a spot in my memory about educated, mid-western speech patterns. Maybe it's the rough-hewn physical presence with a receding hairline and wily eyes that see more in a glance than they reveal in a single spoken word.

Regardless, Hackman's now 30-year old portrait of "Popeye" Doyle epitomizes the man and I'm not sure it's actually the actor's highest achievement especially when considering the stunning array of roles he's enacted in his long career. It's hard to emphasize this one performance over others when he is, at heart, a working actor starring in movies year-in, year-out with a filmography other actors should look at with envy.

The pairing of his sloppy and physical persona with an adaptation of Robin Moore's novel by Ernest Tidyman resulted in producer Philip D'Antoni's runaway hit for 20th Century Fox. Tagged with the phrase, "Doyle is bad news - but a good cop," director William Friedkin managed to fuse an exploration of then-current police narcotics practice with a new set of formal considerations in The French Connection that broke new ground in American movies.

Concerned with shutting down an international heroine, Fernando Rey plays Alain Charnier, a former Marseilles dock worker-turned-narcotics exporter. His buyer is an up-and-coming Brooklyn criminal named Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) with the investment capital of a Manhattan criminal heavyweight named Weinstock (Harold Gary).

Into this intrigue steps Popeye Doyle and his partner "Cloudy" Russo (Roy Scheider) who are first seen staking out low-level drug peddlers in Brooklyn. After playing a hunch to tail Boca after seeing him at a nightclub, Doyle and Russo lobby for time and resources to run a sting operation. In so doing they gradually learn of the extent of Boca's connections with Charnier until their pursuit results in a final, bloody confrontation.

What sets apart Friedkin's movie from its cinematic ancestors is its detail of police corruption. Popeye and Russo are good cops, even the best at what they do, precisely because they rack up arrests using violence, terror, intimidation and illegal search and seizure operations largely focused on minority groups they pigeonhole with the most incendiary language possible from "nigger" to "spic."

The sense of screen disaffection with civil authority doesn't end with its consideration of beat cops and narcotics detectives. Instead The French Connection touches on the early '70s belief in bureaucratic malfeasance with a weak judicial system that overlooks criminal activities while holding fast to evidentiary proceedings and court justice rather than the leveling power of the street.

By film's end, after Doyle and Russo's pinscher moves in to capture Boca, Weinstock and Charnier, and after Doyle kills a rival FBI-investigator in a fit of confusion, there is a scrawl explaining what happened to each movie character. Having seen Boca shotgunned in the confrontation we learn that his wife and brother received reduced sentences, a French drug mule was incarcerated, Weinstock was released for a lack of evidence, Charnier was never caught and Doyle and Russo were reassigned out of the narcotics division.

Cynicism never met such a hammer of indifference to the sacrosanct American principles of individual heroism and moral righteousness. The film's ending resolves its story without any sense of comeuppance so enjoyable in most cop movies with their reliance on bad guys being brought to justice, if not outright extermination.

This distinct theme of a world gone awry running throughout the film is also reflected in its technical execution with a disjointed editing style that won an Academy Award along with a sound mix layering diegetic sounds from inside scenes with dubbed dialogue, sometimes to confusing effect. Camera movements are jarring and often rely on hand-held devices or moving dollies and cars to carry the recording equipment at a fast pace as Doyle and Russo pursue their prey. Urban environs pepper the movie with slang and hip styles, the painstaking efforts of police surveillance are considered and the trouble of stopping criminal undertakings that one step ahead of the law is put into evidence.

While I'm impressed by this fusion of a directorial vision about the position of modern cops in a modern world with the movie's craftsmanship, I can't help but think The French Connection benefited from the originality of its vision rather than from its strength. In short, I'm not convinced the film holds up or was even intended to be much more than an action movie relying on kinetic camera work, rough dialogue, occasional bursts of seemingly gratuitous police-related gore and an editing style we might see paralleled in many music videos today.

Budgeted at $1.8 million, though, the film managed to draw $26 million in North American rentals and produced one of the biggest hits of 1971. Aside from its plot and considerations about the strength of performance, it's also famous for having produced one of the most extraordinarily effective car chases in cinema history.

That chase which details Doyle's tail of Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi), Charnier's enforcer, begins outside Doyle's Queens apartment building and continues underneath an "L" until its shoot-out conclusion. Along the way numerous immovable objects are crushed beneath Doyle's crazed driving just as Nicoli kills two men in the subway car. By their final confrontation Doyle manages to shoot Nicoli in the back as he turns to run thereby contributing the poster-image often associated with the film in its publicity photos, advertisements and video and DVD box covers.

The car chase is still exciting and anxiety ridden with all the years of rip-offs and attempts to outdo it since 1971. Friedkin himself is among this group of latter-day competitors and specifically attempted to outdo his earlier work with a highway chase in To Live and Die in L.A. and a mountain pass sequence in Ronin.

What sets apart his first major car chase through Queens County is that some of the most harrowing stunts in the chase weren't staged at all. Shot on location and scheduled for one day of production the barricades and cross streets were blocked off only minutes before the stunt drivers began their one-shot take. Due to the complexity of the shot, however, not everyone involved received word to start shooting at the same time. As a result many of the near-death moments were, in fact, near-death moments.

For example, a woman crossing the street with a stroller is nearly hit by Doyle's racing car. After her brush with death that woman went into shock but since there were no injuries there was no need for a retake so the recorded footage made it into the completed film. The car crash at the intersection of Stillwell Avenue and 86th Street was also unplanned and included in the final sequence because of its realism.

Ultimately any assessment of The French Connection has to consider the other films it beat out for awards to muscle its way into memory. In addition to beating out A Clockwork Orange, Fiddler on the Roof, The Last Picture Show and Nicholas and Alexandra for the Best Picture of the year award, it managed to eclipse a remarkable list of non-nominated films as well.

Don Siegel's Clint Eastwood picture about another kind of maverick cop, Dirty Harry, was released to considerable outrage, commercial success and public excitement. Robert Altman continued his genre re- and de-mythologization and released a new kind of western with McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Likewise Mike Nichols gave Jack Nicholson and vehicle for male bitterness in Carnal Knowledge, Sam Peckinpah unleashed his visceral tale of a recluse intellectual-turned-embattled defender of house and home in Straw Dogs and Clint Eastwood parlayed his superstar status into a directorial debut about a woman's fanatical attachment to a radio personality in Play Misty for Me.

Altogether it was not a good year for representations of womankind, nor was it a particularly big year for women's performances. Yet it was a sign of the times to see virtually all the award-winning movies and box office hits circling on the notion of masculinity in crisis. Significantly it was Hackman's Popeye Doyle and The French Connection that was singled out as being the mark of the moment.

Judging history through the eminent perfection of hindsight is a shifty business. Similarly judging the values of a previous time using the prism of current thought and cultural orientation sometimes leaves out what actually happened.

It's often posited that the '70s were a time of rather striking formal, thematic and subject-oriented experiments in American cinema due to economic pressures and competition from non-traditional sources. Into this period were filtered the influences of television, advertising, various foreign film movements, the popularization of documentary practices, journalistic tendencies in all the media and even the cross-fertilization of such underground expressions as pornography and musical concerts. Pollinated by these practices many films of the '70s, The French Connection included, were shockingly original in terms of subject, theme and craftsmanship even if those original tendencies were not as well done as other titles that relied on these pioneering works.

Still, Popeye Doyle is representative of his moment because he's an anti-hero in the truest sense of consideration. His struggle in the world is defined by blindly courageous confidence that makes him simultaneously despicable and charismatic with a working class patois to boot.

He may not be likable but his French connection is a defining moment for all action-adventure movies.