French Connection II

The New York detective Popeye Doyle follows Alain Charnier, the drug boss who got away in the first film, to Marseille. He has no French, no authority, and the French police do not want him there. Charnier's men take him and force heroin into him for weeks. When he is let go he is no longer a policeman but an addict. John Frankenheimer directed. Gene Hackman is Doyle again and Fernando Rey is Charnier. At the centre is not a chase but a withdrawal. The long sequence of Hackman coming off the drug is still what the film is remembered for. He protects nothing about how he looks, playing every stage of helplessness and degradation, which is why it holds up as real. The choice of Marseille is the spine of the story: in the first film Doyle knew everything in his own city, here he knows nothing, and that leaves him exposed for the first time. Who it is for: viewers who like the hard police films of the seventies and Gene Hackman. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the pace of the first film. The sequel is a story of collapse rather than action and its middle section is deliberately slow.