The French Connection Car Chase! youtu.be/IzEloJ5venk The film is often cited as containing one of the greatest car chase sequences in movie history.[8] The chase involves Popeye commandeering a civilians car (a 1971 Pontiac LeMans) and then frantically chasing an elevated train, on which a hitman is trying to escape. The scene was filmed in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn roughly running under the BMT West End Line (currently the D train, then the B train) which runs on an elevated track above Stillwell Avenue, 86th Street and New Utrecht Avenue in Brooklyn, with the chase ending just north of the 62nd Street station. At that point, the train hits a train stop, but is going too fast to stop in time and collides with the train ahead of it, which has just left the station.[Note 4] The most famous shot of the chase is made from a front bumper mount and shows a low-angle point of view shot of the streets racing by. Director of photography Owen Roizman, wrote in American Cinematographer magazine in 1972 that the camera was undercranked to 18 frames per second to enhance the sense of speed. Roizmans contention is borne out when you see a car at a red light whose muffler is pumping smoke at an accelerated rate. Other shots involved stunt drivers who were supposed to barely miss hitting the speeding car, but due to errors in timing accidental collisions occurred and were left in the final film.[9] Friedkin said that he used Santanas song Black Magic Woman during editing to help shape the chase sequence; though the song does not appear in the film, it [the chase scene] did have a sort of pre-ordained rhythm to it that came from the music.[10] The scene concludes with Doyle confronting Nicoli the hitman at the stairs leading to the subway and shooting him as he tries to run back up them. Many of the police officers acting as advisers for the film objected to the scene on the grounds that shooting a suspect in the back was simply murder, not self-defense, but director Friedkin stood by it, stating that he was secure in my conviction that thats exactly what Eddie Egan (the model for Doyle) would have done and Eddie was on the set while all of this was being shot.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 07:54:32 +0000
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