The French Connection
April 2009 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: Blu-ray	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Hollywood has done a pretty decent job of putting out iconic releases on Blu-ray. We’ve had Patton, The Godfather, Dirty Harry, Friday the 13th, and Halloween. These are all films that everyone knows, even if they have not seen them. Add The French Connection, which won five 1971 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Actor (Gene Hackman), Director (William Friedkin), Adapted Screenplay, and Film Editing. It would launch Hackman’s long and impressive career and place Friedkin among the upper hierarchy of movie directors.

So now we have the film on Blu-ray. Or do we? In a fascinating extra on the second disc called "Color Timing The French Connection," director Friedkin shows us how, for the Blu-ray release, he created a black-and-white master, then an oversaturated color master that was bled into the black-and-white. The process is described in detail, using numerous examples with back-and-forth switching so one can easily see the differences. The end result is a high-contrast image that is pastel and bluish much of the time. It’s really not bad, but it’s not the original that people saw in the theaters. Nowhere on the package does Fox point to this as a "director’s cut," when having a completely altered image it lives up to that title more than do other movies that have simply had a little bit of deleted footage reinstated. That said, I sort of like the new look. It’s cold and icy, detailed yet gritty, seeming to fit the police procedural masterpiece quite well. There’s still a lot of grain, particularly in dark scenes that were deliberately underlit so this print looks very filmlike. But this release surely should have been noted as something different from what we have seen before.

The music-only track requires a little explanation as well. Don Ellis, an avante-garde jazz trumpet player, wrote it, but Friedkin heavily edited his music, moving complete cues to another part of the movie or simply leaving them out. This process is covered in another of the extras, where it is made clear that Ellis was OK with this process. But the music-only track on this Blu-ray presents the entire Ellis score as he originally planned and conceived it. That makes it far more interesting than most music-only tracks. Ellis’s music, edgy and shrill, often written in quarter tones, had a lot to do with the overall nervous energy that the film conveys, and it’s just great to see it treated with such after-the-fact reverence.

The actual video transfer of the newly color-timed version seems just fine, and I didn’t notice any glaring edge enhancement or artifacts. The audio is a different story. The 5.1 mix opens up the sound more than one might think possible from a movie originally released in mono, but the balances are quite awry. If you set the volume so the dialogue can be heard comfortably, the opening-credits music will set your teeth rattling and drive you out of your home theater. The 1.0 track has better balances but also less impact. It’s a lose-lose situation that is embarrassing for such an important movie.

That the movie survives all this manipulation is a tribute to its excellence. It was a groundbreaking film that retold a real-life story in which two New City policemen pursued the largest drug operation in America, resulting in the apprehension of the criminals and keeping a massive amount of heroin off the streets. Many of the extras deal with the real story, and Sonny Grosso, the detective excellently played by Roy Scheider, is on hand for a Friedkin interview as well as to host another supplement. Grosso was so inspired by the movie of his exploits that he got involved in Hollywood and became an actor, consultant, and producer.

Most of the extras that I’ve mentioned are on the second disc along with several other featurettes, some brand new in HD and some in SD carried over from the previously released DVD of this movie. The first disc contains, in addition to the movie, a commentary by Friedkin and one by actors Hackman and Scheider. The former is more informative if dry; the actors are warmer and livelier in reminiscing about a time that was obviously a good one for them. There’s also a pop-up trivia track that provides a running commentary on the movie if you don’t want to hear any sounds but the ones on the soundtrack.

I don’t know if Fox intends to put out an "original" version of this movie for Blu-ray at some point, but in the meantime we have this one. I find that it looks good, sounds tolerable, and has a very impressive list of extra features. In sum, it’ll do, but Fox really should have noted the differences on the package.

• Go Back