Gene Hackman is the main attraction in The French Connection, and he leads the line wonderfully in the action-packed classic. The movie also features a pretty awesome car chase, but the actor thinks he has found a better one.
You would think Gene Hackman would want to big up his work as much as possible, but he is not afraid to be humble and honest, it seems. Sure, The French Connection may be one of the best thriller movies of all time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its epic car chase sequence is the best ever.
In fact, Hackman has an alternative take. In an interview with The New York Post, he proves he is not only one of the best actors of all time, but also a knowledgeable fellow too, as he discusses the art of exciting audiences with an edge-of-the-seat chase scene.
He said: “Filmmaking has always been risky — both physically and emotionally — but I do choose to consider that film a moment in a checkered career of hits and misses. As for the car chase, there was a better one filmed a few years earlier with Steve McQueen.”
Hackman is referring to the classic, Bullitt. Whether that McQueen flick actually does do it better than The French Connection is a matter of taste, but Hackman is just happy with his work regardless. He adds: “The film certainly helped me in my career, and I am grateful for that.”
Funnily enough, it’s not a film Hackman has revisited very often at all. “I haven’t seen the film since the first screening in a dark, tiny viewing room in a post-production company’s facility 50 years ago,” he claims. “If the film has a legacy, I am not sure what that would be. At the time, it seemed to me to be a reverent story of a cop who was simply able to solve and put a stop to a major crime family’s attempt to infiltrate the New York drug scene.”
Whatever its legacy, The French Connection is arguably one of the best movies of all time, and many new movies have tried to replicate the success of that blistering car chase.