Don Siegel's The Beguiled

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I would suggest that Dirty Harry is better in three major ways.

First, it is a far superior film from a cinematic or aesthetic perspective—better cinematography, better compositions, better editing, better score. Compared to Dirty Harry, The French Connection almost looks like Shaft. A bigger budget helped. (IMDb posts a $4M estimate for Dirty Harry, compared to $1.8M for The French Connection, although the figures listed at this site are not always correct—for instance, Dirty Harry's domestic gross, while not as large as The French Connection's, was some $35M, not the $28M listed here). Also helpful were Don Siegel's dark, rich, wide-screen compositions, making stunning use of San Francisco. Carl Pingitore's editing is nerve-frying, Bruce Surtees' cinematography is haunting, and Lalo Schifrin's eerie score—at once chilling and pulsating—was ahead of the curve.

That is not to say that The French Connection is poor in any of these areas, and certainly the camerawork and editing are memorable in the famous chase scene. But I do not believe that it is as stylistically dynamic as Dirty Harry or nearly as impressive in terms of composition and images.

Second, the story is much simpler in Dirty Harry. A simpler story is not inherently advantageous, but in terms of these films, Dirty Harry's simpler story provides a leaner, clearer narrative structure that offers more in the way of definition and less in the way of clutter. The French Connection offers your almost-typical conspiratorial murkiness, which to some extent results in narrative mushiness. In other words, there are a lot of 'vague intricacies' that do not really mean that much. And sure, the overall conspiracy is great—it leads to a stunning denouement—but it does not facilitate narrative energy and momentum quite like Dirty Harry.

Third, and related to the first two points (especially the latter), Dirty Harry offers a social and psychological focus that The French Connnection merely alludes to. Propelled by the leaner narrative structure and Siegel's taut yet expressive direction, Dirty Harry constitutes a chilling study in alienation and isolation. Of course, these themes are not explicit—but they are really channeled. Clearly, in Dirty Harry, any sense of American societal consensus has evaporated, if it ever existed. Remoteness and divisiveness permeate the entire atmosphere and the human interactions (even though there is a sense of realness to them), and the more removed from what is happening in the streets one happens to be, or the higher up the social hierarchy ones gets, the more unfeeling and abstract one tends to be. Ultimately, people just talk past one another and the law serves self-interest rather than justice. Many people are disposable pawns.

The French Connection, I sense, aims for something similar, but it fails to connect matters in the same manner and achieve the same precision, in part because the film cannot free itself from its plotting. Dirty Harry, conversely, constitutes a full-fledged societal vision.

To be sure, The French Connection offers several classic scenes and sequences: the subway stalking, the car/subway chase, the final pursuit in the warehouse, the postscript, and some others. But as a fully realized vision, I do not feel that it possesses the same definition as Dirty Harry, even though the latter is just as ambiguous.

Let me also make a note about the leading performances. I am not going to say that one is better than the other because we are talking about different characters played by different actors with different styles—and both portrayals are truly memorable, vivid, and idiosyncratic. And I have no problem with Gene Hackman receiving the Best Actor Oscar for his role. But I do feel that in the end, Eastwood's performance represented more of a game-changer. To feature such a morose, saturnine, severely alienated male protagonist, and one who makes no physical contact whatsoever with a woman and virtually no eye contact with a woman, raised the ante of antiheroism to a new level, even more so than what Lee Marvin had sometimes done in the 1960s, or what Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, or Dustin Hoffman had occasionally done in the sixties, or what Eastwood had already done in the sixties. One could sort of say, "Movie heroes are not supposed to be like that," just in their temperament and disposition, but Eastwood did it in Dirty Harry.

Dirty Harry also offers a second memorable performance with Andy Robinson as Scorpio, and it places more people in sustained jeopardy (beyond a car chase) than The French Connection.

But I certainly like The French Connection—I consider it a very good, atmospheric film with a great 'feel.' Yet compared to Dirty Harry, The French Connection seems rather inchoate in my view.

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Maybe The French Connection is more considered as an art film.

The film definitely attracted more highbrow acclaim, hence the Academy Awards attention. I believe that one would be hard-pressed to legitimately perceive it as an "art film," especially given that the movie looks like Shaft at times (and I like Shaft, but it is visibly cheap). Dirty Harry is certainly gritty and Siegel filmed it entirely on location except for the famous bank robbery sequence, but the film's look and compositions are more darkly artistic than anything in The French Connection, I would argue.

But being a New York movie likely helped The French Connection win support from the trendsetting crowd of New York critics and cultural connoisseurs (Pauline Kael included). Plus, Hackman possessed a New York acting background, the film involved drugs, and conspiratorial convolutions are often mistaken for signs of "complexity." All those factors may have helped render The French Connection more fashionable than Dirty Harry.

Of course, The French Connection is a valuable film irrespective of trendiness, and it certainly possesses its legitimate ambiguities. But as you indicated, Dirty Harry has proved more influential.

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