The French Connection (1971)

Two NYPD narcotics cops - Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider (from Jaws) - track down drug dealers and a shipment of heroin from France.

Spanish actor Fernando Rey plays the heroin smuggler they're after.

I didn't always understood why this movie won so many Oscars and Best Picture, and thought it might have to do with the famous car chase scene.

But watching other cop films that were made before this, I can see how different a film this is in comparison, and how it influenced later films.

I watched this film in college as part of a film appreciation course I took during my Senior year.

This film was followed by a second movie 4 years later, "The French Connection II", which I haven't seen. (Also a TV-movie "Popeye Doyle" was made in 1986 and starred Ed O'Neill).

Peter Boyle was originally cast to play the lead, but turned it down because his agent thought the movie was going to be a failure.

Frank Sinatra in The Detective (1968)

I first watched this in 2005, curious to see Frank Sinatra play a detective in one of the very first R-rated movies (in the United States, "R" means - "Restricted to persons 18 years of age and over).

Frank plays a detective in this crime drama, but the tone of the movie feels like it's made for television. The French Connection had not yet come out.

Frank investigates a case where a homosexual is killed. He first inspects a room with a corpse...and takes notes of what he finds: "Male Caucasian. Lying nude on floor....Penis cut off...side of skull smashed in...cuts on face and chest...fingers shredded...semen stains on the sheets".  It's unusual to hear Frank Sinatra recite those lines.

In small roles are Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Duvall, Jack Klugman and Al Freeman Jr. ("Malcolm X").

There's some softer moments with his love interest, played by Lee Remick, but I wasn't convinced they were really interested in each other.

Duvall plays a tough cop who goes to a gay hangout to find a suspect, and then beats one of the suspects. Sinatra then calls him a miserable son-of-a-b-----.

There are strange moments like that throughout this film, which is otherwise unmemorable, and doesn't portray the gay community very positively. I was reminded of 1992 when there was alot of protest over similar crime films with gay suspects such as Basic Instinct and Silence of the Lambs.

This is probably a film that may be best enjoyed by fans of Frank Sinatra.

From 20th Century Fox films.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

This has been one of my favorite movies since I was in high school, and I try to watch it every few years or so to see something new in it that I hadn't noticed before. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway star as the title characters. Arthur Penn directed. Released by Warner Brothers. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were notorious real life bank robbers in the early 1930s and constantly on the run from the law; this movie depicts their story.

I remember seeing Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers when it came out in 1994, and remember some comparisons to this film. But that film had a different tone, and was trying to tell a different story, I feel.

What I like about this film is that its a very hip, groundbreaking late-60s movie, as well as anti-establishment/anti-capitalistic/anti-banks - and very violent in its time. And its box office success paved the way for directors to be explicit in they way they show sexuality and violence in films, such as "Midnight Cowboy" and the "The Wild Bunch" in the following years.

 All of the principle members of the cast were nominated for Oscars for their roles, including Gene Hackman enthusiastically playing Clyde's brother Buck Barrow, who tags along with them on their crime spree through the south for a short while. In between the robbery-and-shootout scenes is a romance - Clyde and Bonnie, escaping the real world through crime, and always talking/arguing about their future plans together as a wealthy couple, which never happens.

Also starring Dub Taylor who went on to co-star in aforementioned "Wild Bunch". Here he plays a kindly old father of one of the crime duo's recruits (Michael J. Pollard). Estelle Parsons plays another recruit.  The film's cinematography, costumes, and sets recreate the days of the depression. A good scene shows the characters going to the picture show to watch "42nd Street" - and showing the famous "We're in the Money" sequence.

The real-life couple's poses for photographs and a poem that Bonnie Parker wrote and published while they were on the lam - are all depicted in the movie. I have always loved the great car chase scenes, the banjo-picking score (including "Foggy Mountain Breakdown"), and the humorous cameo by Gene Wilder - whose car is stolen by the "punks". Also co-starring Denver Pile as a local sheriff who does them in.

Read Blondie's post on Bonnie and Clyde from October 2009.