Film

Two businessmen stroll along the sunny streets of Marseille, France, while a detective silently stalks them from a distance. (The unwelcome voyeur violently shuffles off this mortal coil tout de suite.) In Brooklyn, two undercover cops—one posing as a hot-dog vendor, the other dressed as Santa Claus—chase a suspect and beat information out of him. What’s their connection? A major shipment of heroin that’s being smuggled into New York, which will eventually bring the respective parties face-to-face.

William Friedkin’s symphony of long, sharp shocks is memorable for any number of sequences: the cat-and-mouse subway game, the ballbusting bar shakedown, a breakneck chase scene that still seems leagues ahead of greatest-ever competitors. Yet the movie’s most impressive accomplishment is that the unrepentantly brutish, racist lout who’d like to urinate on the Miranda rights ends up being the good guy.

Antiheroes were everywhere in ’70s cinema, but Gene Hackman turns Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle into one of New Hollywood’s more interesting walking contradictions. You cringe every time Doyle opens his obscene joker’s yap, and yet the righteous, sharklike determination Hackman shows in pursuing Euro-suave villain Fernando Rey keeps the audience on Doyle’s side.

Chalk it up to environment, maybe: Dirty Harry Callahan only had to contend with a psycho Frisco hippie, but Doyle is going up against both international horse-pushers and a nightmare version of New York that Pauline Kael dubbed “Horror City.” You unconsciously cut the guy some slack; the film, however, remains anything but.