anybody? I'd really like to see some opinions.
shareBoth films were 'sort of' based on actual crimes and featured big city cops who went totally baddass to bust bad guys...
So Dirty Harry for me
But French was really great !
I love Hackman...the guys a legend but Eastwood did the violent cop thing a bit better imo
Tough one, but I'd go French Connection. I just love the way William Friedkin give it's a grimy low down feel, like it's a documentary. Gene Hackman was well deserving of his Best Actor Oscar, and Roy Scheider is every bit as awesome in this. Fernando Rey and Marcel Bozzuffi are fantastic villains without having to be OTT. Plus the famous chase scene is still the very best nearly 50 years on.
Also the sequel is so great, not a patch on first film but Hackman is even better as Popeye Doyle. That weening himself of heroin scenes are fantastic acting. Plus the end chase is one of my favorite endings ever, could you imagine if that happened today people be complaining "is that it".
Love Dirty Harry by the way. Still my favorite from the series and one of Eastwood's very best.
This is a very good movie but I'd choose Dirty Harry.
shareThe French Connection is better. In my view, it's not close.
shareI'd rather watch Dirty Harry; I find it a little more entertaining. In terms of pure "artistic accomplishment" they're really close, but I might (weirdly) squeak The French Connection ahead.
shareThe French connection for sure. Dirty Harry is the Lethal Weapon of its day. Not that that's a bad thing but The French Connection is a crime drama instead. A better developed story, more realistic action and less cheesy one-liners. It also has a better feel to it, with TFC you're down in the mud with the characters, I don't get that kind of perspective from Dirty Harry.
shareDirty Harry
shareDirty Harry.
Here's why.
I was around in 1971 to see both films(at a fairly young age.) I remember that TFC came out first around October and then Dirty Harry was a December Xmas attraction. The Time magazine critic wrote his Dirty Harry review noting "The French Connection was a thriller; Dirty Harry is a cop movie."
I think he had it exactly BACKWARDS. Dirty Harry was a THRILLER...and a very thrilling one with some Hitchcockian style to it -- principally Harry's long run across San Francisco at night with ransom money in a satchel and the World's Most Evil psychotic villain taunting him from phone booth to phone booth, climaxing in the showdown in Kezar Stadium(that Panavision wide shot of Harry's arm extended with the 44 Magnum was classic) and the oh-so-satisfying stomp down on the killer's wounded leg.
There was a stylized, lush plush look to Dirty Harry(directed by thriller specialist Don Siegel) that was entirely missing from The French Connection. The French Connection was a "70's movie" in the "New York movie" tradition -- plenty of grit, a documentary style(director William Friedkin had started in documentaries), dirt and grime on the streets and a "crossover"(in the Marseilles opening and with the French villains) to the popular "Eurofilms" of the 60's and 70s.
But in the final analysis, The French Connection was so interested in being gritty that it lost coherence. There were a lot of slack, hard to understand scenes as we waited, and waited, and WAITED for the big car chase, which was good but which IMHO was not as good as the classic Bullitt car chase from 3 years earlier. (Also, I thought some of the actors up in the elevated train car were amateur.)
AFTER the big car chase, The French Connection really didn't have many cards to play as it marched towards its truncated finale.
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But this: Dirty Harry killed HIS villain at the end. The main villain in TFC ...gets away, in a classic "70's movie downer ending." (Hackman got him in the very last second of French Connection 2 but we had to wait 4 years for the satisfaction.)
Dirty Harry did two historic things: (1) Transformed the Western gunslinger into the modern cop action hero(all the better to have Eastwood in the role for the transition, instead of first choice Frank Sinatra and (2) allowed for a film's villain to te the ULTIMATE in sadistic savagery: he killed women, and children and raped and killed a teeanger girl and hijacked a school bus. Henceforth, many screen villains could BE that bad -- censorship had prevented it in earlier decades.
The French Connection was one of many "New York movies" in the 70's and ended up at the 1971/1972 Oscar ceremony. Dirty Harry wasn't welcome there -- it was considered too conservative a movie, even fascist -- in left wing circles. But TFC was fine -- because though Popeye Doyle proved a hero of sorts, he was a bad cop, a racist, a bully, near psychotic(at film's end, he doesn't shoot the bad guy - he shoots and kills an FBI man by accident!)
That The French Connection won Best Picture in 1971 was a bit of a fluke. The main competition was Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show and Hollywood didn't particuarly like Bogdanovich or the countercultural film production company(BBS) that made the movie. So they gave the Best Picture Oscar to a 20th Century Fox release and Best Actor to Gene Hackman for an early performance which, ironically enough, he would better many times in future films(Scarecrow,The Conversation, Night Moves.)
CONT
William Friedkin said he went into therapy after winning his Oscars for The French Connection. He had never considered it Oscar material and here it was winning the Big One. He felt unworthy. (Hack screenwriter Joe Esterhas wrote that Friedkin was right to feel that way.) Next up for Friedkin: The Exorcist. No Best Picture win(it was nominated though) but an all time blockbuster and classic(and as flawed as TFC in my book -- Freidkin tended to screw up his own successes.)
I like The French Connection enough, but it was a disappointment to me in 1971 and Dirty Harry -- with its wall-to-wall excitement, thriller plotting and action, was not.
I feel the same way now.
If I'm not mistaken, Nixon's "war on drugs" was a (new) thing at the time. Maybe it has some influence on why TFC won the best picture award. Maybe it has some influence why the movie was produced in the begin with...
shareTrue.
TFC was certainly the more "realistic and topical" of the two movies. The movie made the point of opening with the brutal execution of a cop and made the point: "whatever your take on drugs, these are the men who move them."
Dirty Harry was ALMOST a horror movie, really. Scorpio was a terrifying killer, a human monster. The whole movie is about stopping him.