The French Connection (1971)

Marseilles, France

A detective surveilles a meeting and trails one of them.  Afterward, he buys himself some bread and heads back to his apartment.  He has hardly opened the door when an assassin guns him down.

New York City

Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) takes down a drug dealer while dressed as Santa Claus.  His partner, Buddy "Cloudy" Russo (Roy Scheider) suffered a knife-wounded during the arrest.  Rather than go home, Popeye convinced Cloudy to get a drink.  This soon turns into a stakeout of Sal Boca, a convenience store owner with a criminal record.  Popeye has a hunch that something big is coming and Sal is part of it.  However, the mastermind of the drug dealers, Alain Charnier (Fernado Rey) is quite clever himself.  He quickly spots Popeye following him and takes measures to lose him.

It is a gritty movie that spends the majority of its time in the dark underbelly of New York's drug culture.  It's cops, drug dealers, and innocent bystanders.  As the Charnier and his sidekick are French, they only speak French to each other; the Amazon version of the film has no subtitles, making their conversations a mystery.  

Gene Hackman won the Academy Award for his role as Doyle.  Doyle is a loose cannon cop with anger management issues and poor taste in hats.  To the positive, he is a workaholic with a nose for finding the bad guys.  Overall, he is not a particularly likeable person.  He's abrasive and abusive.  On the other hand, he has an endless supply of persistence.  Hackman's range as an actor was truly impressive.  He could be hard-as-nails dangerous (this movie or Unforgiven), funny and devious (Lex Luthor from the Superman series), or goofy and harmless (Young Frankenstein).  RIP

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)

Dr. Heywood Floyd authored a report on the Discovery mission to Jupiter in the wake of its failure.  Years later, the US is preparing a new ship to find out what happened.  However, the Russians also have a ship that will go to Jupiter; they will arrive a year earlier.  Despite rising tensions between the US and the USSR in Central America, Dimitri Moisevitch (Dana Elcar) suggests a joint operation.  Three Americans - Floyd, Curnow (John Lithgow), and Chandra (Bob Balaban) - travel to Jupiter with the Russian crew.  By the time they arrive, tensions between the US and the USSR are on the brink of war.  This makes cooperation between the Americans and the Russians difficult.  While flying near Europa, they send a probe and are on the brink of seeing something when the probe is destroyed.  Hmm.  Later, they airbrake in the Jovian atmosphere before rendevousing in orbit around Io with the Discovery.  Doctor Chandra reactivates HAL and investigates what went wrong.  Meanwhile, strange events are happening.  Visions of Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) abound and the massive monolith destroys another Russian probe.

The movie's big failure is that it takes place in a future that never came.  The USSR was gone less than 10 years after the film was made.  The inclusion of Cold War politics was a mistake and adds very little.  Also, despite being made 15 years after the original, the special effects are less impressive.  Though there are lots of Russian cosmonauts on the Leonov, only two get much development.  There is Tanya Kirbuk (Helen Mirren) as the commander and Max (Elya Baskin).  Baskin and Lithgow have good chemistry during the spacewalk transit between the Leonov and the Discovery.  Baskin proves to be a very likable character, which was doubtless intentional considering his fate.

A sequel that is very different from the original.  Just okay.

Sorcerer (1977)

This movie had the misfortune of opening a month after Star Wars.  No theater owner wanted to stop showing Star Wars for this jungle adventure.

The movie opens in Vera Cruz, Mexico where a man in a hotel room has just poured himself a drink when Nilo (Francisco Rabal) walks in and shoots him.  The assassin slips away.  Next, we see several men in Israel who leave a bomb in their wake.  No sooner have they rendezvoused back at their apartment than the military arrives.  Two bombers are killed, one is arrested, and only Kassem (Amidou) escapes.  In France, Victor Manzon (Bruno Cremer) is summoned to the bank where he is threatened with criminal prosecution for fraud on account of having offered worthless collateral.  Given 24 hours to arrange payment, his plans go sideways and he flees the country.  In New Jersey, Jackie Scanlon (Roy Scheider) is involved in a heist against a well-connected mobster.  The only survivor in a car accident immediately after the heist, he flees the country.  As it happens, all four of these men find themselves in the same backwater Latin American village.  Three of the fugitives work under assumed identities for an American oil company, the big employer in the region.  The plot moves into high gear when an oil well explodes and is now a free-standing flame thrower that needs to be 'blown' out with explosives.  The only explosives available are highly unstable.  Four men are needed to risk life and limb to deliver them to the well, just over 200 miles away through dense jungle.

 

The movie builds very slowly.  The introduction of each character is interesting but might have been better provided in a flashback so that there isn't a long gap between a character's introduction and his next appearance.  The middle part that covers their unenviable lives in the squalor of a jungle village is slow and generally boring.  The two trucks driving through the jungle and overcoming tremendous obstacles is intense and the best part.  More of this and it might have been a better competitor for Star Wars.

 

The very best portion of the movie is when the two trucks come to a giant tree that is blocking the road.  Kassem, the Palestinian bomber, uses one of the boxes of explosives and rigs a timer with a bag of sand and a rock.  The blast is magnificent.  This alone makes the movie worth seeing.

 

The name of the movie comes from one of the two trucks.  Apparently, it was common to give names to vehicles and the two trucks are named Sorcerer and Lazaro.  The movie is based on the 1950 French novel, "The Wages of Fear" by Georges Arnaud.