This fine action film, which follows a heroin delivery en route from Marseilles to New York and the efforts of detective Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) to intercept it, sports one of the most renowned car-chases in the cinema. But this is only the most memorable and perhaps most obvious coup in a film filled with brilliantly conceived editorial decisions. William Friedkin was one of the first of the new Hollywood directors to use music and sound as an expressionistic presence. The French Connection's raw, on-the-street visual qualities (augmented by intentionally crude lighting) are accompanied by a visceral soundtrack created by a selective use of natural sounds. Music functions here as an electronic presence, punctuating the tension, and even underscoring the ambiguity of the action. It all builds to an overwhelming climactic cacophony underneath the El train. Avant-garde filmmaker and critic Nathaniel Dorsky calls The French Connection the “son of Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player--but a very American film, bringing raw, high-powered American energy to the New Wave.” In its buoyant, spontaneous rhythms and the kinetic directness of Jerry Greenberg's editing, Dorsky notes, the film is a “return to elemental cinema.”