The French Connection Structure Breakdown

After recently doing a breakdown of Alien, the guys at the 241 Podcast and I decided to analyze an early, but contemporary action-oriented film. We chose the classic film The French Connection, which came out in 1971, and won Five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor in a Leading Role. The question—does it still hold up today and give us tools and approaches that might still be useful now?

Here’s our in-depth discussion of the movie, and below you’ll find my structure breakdown and three observations.

As always, these breakdowns contain SPOILERS, and are only recommended if you've already seen the movie. You can check my introduction to these breakdowns, to get an overview of my process and philosophy.

Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments below!

The Basics

Director: William Friedken
Writers: Ernest Tidyman, Robin Moore, William Friedkin
Release Date: 1971
Runtime: 104 minutes
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067116/reference/

Movie Level Goals

Protagonist: Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle
Antagonist: Alain and Sal
External Goal: To bring down the drug deal case
SUCCESS | FAILURE | MIXED
The drug deal is successfully stopped and Sal is killed, by Popeye also kills a fellow cop and the mastermind Alain escapes.
Internal Goal: None
Popeye is single-minded and unapologetic in his attempt to stop the deal and capture the criminals

Three Observations

Feel free to watch the video or read the transcript below it.

The French Connection is a classic cop thriller from 1971. It won five Academy Awards: Best Director for William Friedkin, Best Picture, Best Actor for Gene Hackman, Best Screenplay, and Best Editing. It feels like it's a movie that's been a little bit forgotten with the passage of time, but a lot of directors still quote The French Connection as very influential on the movies they're making today. The movie has some really interesting narrative structural things that I want to talk about, so let's get into our three observations about the narrative structure of The French Connection.

Observation #1 Range of Information

The first thing I want to talk about is the range of information in The French Connection. When we talk about the range of information, we're talking about how freely we move about between the different characters in the film. We can generally have a limited or unlimited range of information. If we're limited, we're usually pretty stuck with the protagonist. Whatever the protagonist sees, we see. Wherever they go, we go. We don't tend to jump around between characters. However, we can also have a more unlimited range of information where we can move from the protagonist to other characters, including the antagonist. This changes our alignment—who we are with at any particular moment in the movie.

One of the really interesting things that The French Connection does is it makes very strong use of unlimited range of information. In fact, the movie does not start with our main characters, Popeye and Buddy, played by Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider. Instead, it actually starts in Marseilles, France, with our criminal element that are eventually going to be the antagonists for Jimmy and Buddy. As the first act unfolds and really as the entire movie unfolds, we move back and forth between each set of characters—between the French criminals, the New York criminals, and Jimmy and Buddy, our police officers. We're really jumping often between three groups of people. When the French criminals and the American criminals come together, we tend to be moving between two sets of characters.

What does this do for us? It creates suspense. It allows us to get a little bit of information about one set of characters and a little bit of information about another set of characters. We're always a little ahead of each set of characters, but we don't have the full amount of information. We don't fully know what each set is up to, but sometimes we know a little bit more, let's say about the criminals, than Jimmy and Buddy do. Sometimes we know that Jimmy and Buddy know a little information that the criminals don't know that they have. This suspense creates a lot of tension and it's part of what drives us through the movie and keeps us propelled through the story. This is especially important in The French Connection when we get into act two, which is largely about stakeouts, characters following each other, and cat-and-mouse games. In a lot of ways, it's not a lot of action, and yet we always have a lot of suspense and tension driving the movie forward and keeping us as an audience engaged.

Observation #2 The Inciting Incident

The second observation I want to make is about the inciting incident. The inciting incident is that moment, usually anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes into the first act, that gets the ball rolling for the movie. It usually takes the status quo and changes it for the protagonist, launching the movie from that point. Often in today's movies, we have very strong inciting incidents. Something really big happens to a character that knocks them out of their normal routine and causes them to have to respond, getting the movie rolling. What's really interesting is that The French Connection barely has an inciting incident at all.

When we first meet Buddy and Jimmy, they're making an arrest. They chase down a guy, arrest him, and accuse him of potentially murdering a police officer. It's a little unclear whether he confesses to having done it or not, but they feel pretty good about this arrest and go back to the police station. Afterward it's late at night, and Popeye invites Buddy to go out for drinks. Buddy's not interested; it's been a long, tiring day and he just wants to go home. But Popeye convinces him to have just one drink. They have some rude banter back and forth and then we cut straight to a nightclub bar where they're having drinks.

What's really interesting is as soon as we pick up Popeye in the bar, we immediately realize he's casing the joint. He's looking out for people, looking out for suspicious activity. He immediately sees a table with a bunch of well-dressed people. One of them happens to be Sal, who's going to end up being our main criminal element in New York that Popeye is eventually going to start following. To the best of our knowledge as we're watching this unfold, Popeye doesn't have any prior knowledge that there will be criminals there, that there will be people of interest for him as a narcotics cop to go after. He goes, and it's just in his character to be looking out for suspicious things. He sees this table, sees these guys, and immediately gets a sense that there's something going on. This becomes the inciting incident. He points them out to Buddy and convinces Buddy to follow Sal that night, staking him out, and that's what gets the ball rolling. So it's really interesting—we don't necessarily need a really big inciting incident. What's really compelling about this inciting incident is that it grows out of the character of Popeye. It's his sixth sense as a cop that allows him to understand that maybe something suspicious is going on and that it's going to be worth their time to follow up on.

Observation #3 Act 2 to Act 3

The third observation I want to make is about the Act 2 climax and its transition into Act 3, which I think is done very well. As I mentioned a moment ago, as we go through Act 2, we have a lot of stakeouts and characters following one another. Our main French criminal, Alain Charnier, manages to give Popeye the slip, but we still have characters following him to Washington, D.C., where we get a little more information on this drug deal that's going to go down. But basically, Act 2 ends with Jimmy and Buddy not gathering enough information to convince their captain to keep them on the case. At the end of Act 2, the captain fires them from the assignment, saying, "You're done. You didn't get anything. Time to move on." We then see Popeye walking home with a bag of groceries—the only time we see him in any sort of personal life. It feels like everything is done, but then one of our bad guys, Pierre Nicoli, tries to kill Popeye.

What we know, and Popeye and Buddy don't, is that Alain has talked to Sal and they are both worried about the presence of Popeye. So Alain orders that they get rid of Popeye. We end up with a false resolution. We think the Act 2 climax is Popeye and Buddy being fired off the case, but as soon as that happens, we have the assassination attempt on Popeye. Pierre tries to kill him by shooting him from the top of an apartment building. Popeye is able to avoid the shooting, goes up to the top of the building, sees the gun and the spent cartridges, sees Pierre running away from the building, runs back downstairs, and this leads into one of the most famous car chases in cinema. Popeye is driving a car, chasing Pierre who is on an elevated subway train. Popeye is trying to keep up with him, swerving through traffic, avoiding women and babies, constantly slamming into other cars, and eventually getting his man. In a typical Popeye Doyle moment, he shoots Pierre in the back and kills him.

What's interesting, I think, is two things: one, we have a false climax, which can be really interesting for an audience. We think one thing's happened and then immediately we get a reversal where Pierre tries to kill Popeye. The other great thing is that we immediately flow into Act 3. We don't really need any setup at all for Act 3. They've been fired off the case because it doesn't seem like there's any drug deal, but clearly something's going on because someone's trying to kill Popeye. The chase is immediately on and we launch right into Act 3.

One Additional Observation

I do want to make one additional observation, and that is about the character of Popeye Doyle. For modern-day audiences, he is incredibly anachronistic and problematic. A lot of people watching this movie might think, "Okay, this is a movie from the early '70s and it's really just not politically correct. It doesn't comport to the standards we expect from movies today." Popeye is racist, constantly using racist language and racial slurs against almost every ethnic group you can imagine. It might feel like this is just a dated movie from the '70s, but I think that would be a mistake. There might be a little bit of that in there, but I also think it's very purposeful that Popeye is not a good guy. He's not someone we're supposed to be rooting for. He exists in a very gray area where he lives by his own rules and does his own thing. He's not a good guy. Besides all the racial slurs he uses, he goes into an African-American bar, roughs patrons up, and uses his power as a police officer to get what he wants. He shoots one of the main suspects in the back later on. He accidentally shoots the FBI agent Mulderig when he's trying to capture Alain and does it very carelessly.

I think Popeye Doyle is not a good guy. I wouldn't exactly call him an anti-hero. I think he's just in a very gray area, and the movie is presenting this idea that maybe these guys have a code they live by, but it's not a good code. The idea of our protagonists being very unlikable is not something that's very common anymore, but I think it's very purposeful in *The French Connection* and part of what makes the movie so interesting and compelling even today.