This Academy Award winner for Best Picture involves Gene Hackman and Roy Schneider as NYPD vice cops (based on Eddie Egan and Sonny “Cloudy” Grosso) and their obsession with stopping a shipment of heroin from being smuggled into New York from Marseilles. Fernando Rey was cast as Alain Charnier – alias “Frog One” – the ship builder who arrives in the Big Apple to supervise the transaction.

The French Connection is so hugely influential that director William Friedkin – who also won an Oscar here – is still credited for it over thirty years later whenever his latest B-movie is being reviewed. Contemporary directors regard this film with reverence; genre filmmaking at its purest, the way it’s “supposed” to be done.

Shot with handheld cameras and cast with (at the time) unknown character actors, the film achieves a documentary sense of reality, as if we just wandered onto a real bust. Friedkin was heavily influenced by Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Costa-Gravas’ Z, films which didn’t construct any sets, but shot on real locations.

To achieve this verisimilitude, Friedkin didn’t tell the camera operator where the actors were going to move. The performers were free to go wherever they wanted and the cameraman had to make the decision to follow somebody, or stay with someone else. This lends the picture an induced documentary feel.

In spite of what today plays like a standard issue cops and robbers plot, the movie was groundbreaking in its day. Roy Schneider recalls a mostly black audience in New York cheering the scene where Hackman tells Schneider “Don’t ever trust a nigger.” Here’s what they all knew Whitey was saying anyway, but somebody finally had the balls to say it in a movie. John Wayne would have never done such a thing.

The French Connection also features hands down the greatest car chase ever put to film. Hackman’s Popeye Doyle pursues a sniper – who has hopped an elevated train – on the streets in a car he commandeers from a civilian. The reckless chase, where Doyle shows little regard for life and limb, goes for 26 city blocks under the N subway line in Brooklyn. What’s so memorable about the chase is not the choreography but rather, the illusion that there is no choreography.

The film also has a gritty ending in which, like the real case, the French drug smuggler escapes the efforts of the NYPD to nab him. Instead, Doyle accidentally shoots an FBI agent, offering an ambiguous conclusion and further reflecting something that resembles an actual drug case. The film’s countless imitators would be more interested in spectacle.

The screenplay was by Ernest Tidyman, adapting a book by Robin Moore. According to Friedkin, they never really had a script, and Friedkin put the film together based on his impressions of the case and the cops he hung out with on busts. Tidyman has an Oscar to state otherwise, one of four that the film was awarded.