Chasing History Through City Streets

In the late 1960s, increasingly sensitive film stocks and lighter camera hardware freed the era's filmmakers to carry on the erstwhile tradition of movie chase scenes dating back before D.W. Griffith, unencumbered by the unrealistic and unconvincing studio-bound back lots and rear projection stages that hampered their forebears. Director Peter Yates's 1968 Bay Area policier "Bullitt" ended the decade with a lethal on-location two-car pursuit that built on Mr. Yates's groundbreaking 1967 chase sequence in the little-seen "Robbery," and set a new standard for nail-biting realism. When 20th Century Fox gave the green light to "The French Connection" in 1969, director William Friedkin and "Bullitt" veteran producer Phillip D'Antoni were challenged to conceive a mid-film chase sequence that would surpass the high-speed hill-and-highway duel in "Bullitt."

"One thing that I set out to do with the chase in ‘French Connection,'" Mr. Friedkin said recently, "was to make it completely different from ‘Bullitt.' I couldn't have a car chasing another car, because ‘Bullitt' had done that."

Instead of picking over other film sequences, Mr. Friedkin followed his documentary instincts and personalized his mid-film show-stopper.

"I really drew it from my feelings and knowledge of the city of New York," he said. "I lived there for 20 years and I used to walk the streets. I walked in every neighborhood and I rode the subway." The film's tour de force would be "an impression of the transportation systems of New York City," the director said.

Soon, Mr. Friedkin and his crew were making discrete inquiries with Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials regarding the feasibility of a car vs. subway train duel. "When I found out from the Transportation Authority that the top speed for a train was 50 miles an hour," he said, "I knew that I could pull it off."

Mr. Friedkin's conception would differ from Mr. Yates's in another very import detail. The chase in "Bullitt" was done on a closed course. "Basically what they did was run the cars through the streets of San Francisco," Mr. Friedkin said. "They cleared the streets and the cars were running with no interference whatsoever." Shooting without pedestrians in the frame allowed Mr. Yates and his team to make shots of their cars in sped-up motion, a trick that background extras and bystanders would have given away by appearing to move unnaturally fast themselves.

"The French Connection" is, of course, a portrait of Popeye Doyle (played to the Oscar-winning hilt by Gene Hackman), one of the cops-and-robbers genre's loosest cannons. Doyle's manic pursuit in a commandeered Pontiac of a would-be assassin absconding on the elevated train would need to measure up.

"I felt that the chase, more than anything, should reflect the character of Popeye," Mr. Friedkin said.

"There are no rules and no holds barred when Popeye cuts loose," growled the finished film's promotion. Staging a car-on-car pursuit on closed streets would've shortchanged Mr. Hackman's performance and robbed the film of an extra dimension of, in Mr. Friedkin's words, "innocent people in jeopardy," that characterized Popeye's smash-and-grab police work throughout the rest of the film.

Though the MTA was initially reticent to give its blessing, the presence of decorated real-life French Connection cops Eddie Egan and Sonny Grasso helped open the necessary doors. "Ultimately, we found a guy at the Transportation Authority who let us do it," Mr. Friedkin said. "I'm sure his bosses or superiors didn't know, and that he didn't quite know what we were doing, exactly."

For the car-bound portion of the chase, Mr. Friedkin turned to someone who knew exactly what he was doing. Even before supervising the sequence and appearing on-screen as the black Dodge Charger's wheel-man in "Bullitt," driver Bill Hickman, who died of cancer in 1986, was a Hollywood legend. It was Hickman who was first on the scene of his racing partner James Dean's fatal crash. Dean died in Hickman's arms.

"Bill was a kind of a daredevil and a great stunt driver," Mr. Friedkin said. "I liked him a lot and I gave him a part in the picture." When not sparring with Doyle on-screen as unctuous FBI Agent Bill Muldering, Hickman sat in behind the wheel for Mr. Hackman during the most harrowing parts of the film's pursuit. Over 12 days scattered throughout the film's tight five-week schedule, Mr. Friedkin, Hickman, Mr. Hackman, cinematographer Owen Roizman, and their crew battled physics, city traffic, pedestrians, the MTA's stringent rules, and one of the coldest winters New York City had seen in a decade.

"It came down to the final week of shooting and Hickman and I were having a drink together in a bar down near Water Street," the director said. "He said to me, ‘So what do you think, boss? Think we've got anything?' And I said, ‘Bill, I don't think we've got anything here. There's nothing really special.' He took it as a challenge and said, ‘All right, let me drive it for real.'"

The final run in the Pontiac yielded Hickman's finest performance. "We mounted a camera on the car by the bumper and I operated another camera over Bill's shoulder because the actual cameraman had a family," Mr. Friedkin said. "We drove 26 blocks at 90 miles an hour though traffic with pedestrians on the street and no stuntmen. All we had on the top of our car was a gumball siren. That's the pair of shots that you see most in the sequence. It was very dangerous and not something I would do today. But by the grace of God nothing bad happened. We finished and I gave Bill a big hug and bought him a big drink."

Though not scored with music, "The French Connection" car and subway pas des deux is accompanied by a post-recorded audio mosaic of overtaxed motors, curses, tire squeals, and subway screeches that rise with an amphetamine staccato intensity. Nevertheless, music was part of the director's vision from the beginning.

"Santana's ‘Black Magic Woman,' the instrumental part from the studio recording," Mr. Friedkin said. "I always had that song and that tempo in mind when we did the chase so that it would have an outward shape." With shooting done, "we used it behind the film to pick up the tempo more and adjust the lengths of the shots themselves," he said of employing an FM radio hit to tighten and tweak a brilliant meshing of sound, image, emotion, and kinetics that only the movies can deliver.