New York movie cops can be a cliched bunch of heroes so when yet another Big Apple crime drama was mooted at the start of the Seventies, the response was far from enthusiastic. However, Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) is not your average doughnut-chomping law enforcer.

The star of The French Connection is loud, brash and relentless in his pursuit of justice. And he's also not the bloke you want to get a lift from.

(Image taken from the Time Out Film Guide 2000)

The movie was directed by William Friedkin, a controversial film-maker who doesn't suffer fools gladly and uses some outragous ruses to get certain performances from his actors.

He tends to reject the usual method acting route and believes that firing off a shotgun will give his thespians just the motivation they need.

TFC was a fact-based thriller about a drug ring which was broken by the New York police department and was adapted from a novel by Robin Moore. Despite becoming a best-seller, few people were desperate to turn it into a movie.

Friedkin - the maker of a handful of forgettable Sixties features at the time - was eventually attracted to the project but didn't want it to be just another thriller of the type you would see on TV shows such as Naked City. He realised he had to put a law enforcer on the big screen of the like no-one had ever seen before: A cop who's both good and evil.

The movie was shot in New York for five weeks through the winter of 1970 and 1971 and producer Philip D'Antoni believed that the last great genre thriller, Bullitt, had worked so well because of a breath-taking car chase through the streets of San Francisco.

He believed that there should be one in this movie as well, but never thought Friedkin would deliver the nail-biting chase featuring Gene Hackman's car and an elevated subway train for which the movie would become legendary.

Perhaps the most stunning thing about this - the mother of all car chases - is that the bulk of it was done for real. It would have taken an age to get permission to film on suich a massive section of New York's busy streets so Friedkin and his crew just put their heads down and hoped for the best.

The result is jaw dropping.

Don't miss the scene where Hackman crashes into another unsuspecting motorist (luckily no-one was killed) and then there's that woman crossing the road with her pram. A fine advert for good brakes if ever there was one.

The film is very much a product of its time: Immersed in cynicism, brutal, bloody and in the same class as Dirty Harry. In one scene, Doyle shoots an unarmed man in the back and in another, he kills an FBI agent - hardly the cosy sort of law enforcement usually found on Heartbeat.

The movie cost a mere $1.8million and when it opened in October 1971, Friedkin rang the studio on the night it opened - October 7th - to see what the till receipts were like.

"I'm a millionaire," he grinned after realising the movie was a smash. It eventually raked in over $26million on American soil alone.

However, the maverick film-maker was not too keen to acknowledge the contribution of scriptwriter Ernest Tidyman who picked up an Oscar for his work, claiming the dialogue was ad-libbed.

Friedkin's arrogance would later become his undoing. After making another smash, The Exorcist in 1973, he spent millions of dollars on the dreadful Wages of Fear remake, Sorcerer (also with TFC's Roy Scheider); a laughable horror called The Guardian and the incredibly dull erotic thriller Jade.

If success on his terms can be measured by the speed of his car chases, then it's intriguing that as opposed to the hi-speed spectacle on display here, Jade features one of the slowest car chases ever put on film.

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