1971's The French Connection features one of the most harrowing car chases in cinema history: Detective Jimmy Doyle (Gene Hackman) hurtling down crowded NYC streets in a brown Pontiac to catch a bad guy who's commandeered an elevated subway train. It's a lurid orgy of screeching tires, darting traffic, and considerable impacts–and as Gothamist explains, much of it was shot on busy city streets with no traffic control, putting unsuspecting drivers and pedestrians literally in the center of the deadly high-speed action.

From IMDB's trivia page on the Academy Award-winning movie:

The car chase was filmed without obtaining the proper permits from the city. Members of the NYPD's tactical force helped control traffic. But most of the control was achieved by the assistant directors with the help of off-duty NYPD officers, many of whom had been involved in the actual case. The assistant directors, under the supervision of Terence A. Donnelly, cleared traffic for approximately five blocks in each direction. Permission was given to literally control the traffic signals on those streets where they ran the chase car.

Even so, in many instances, they illegally continued the chase into sections with no traffic control, where they actually had to evade real traffic and pedestrians. Many of the (near) collisions in the movie were therefore real and not planned (with the exception of the near-miss of the lady with the baby carriage, which was carefully rehearsed).

A flashing police light was placed on top of the car to warn bystanders. A camera was mounted on the car's bumper for the shots from the car's point-of-view. Hackman did some of the driving but the extremely dangerous stunts were performed by Bill Hickman, with Friedkin filming from the backseat. Friedkin operated the camera himself because the other camera operators were married with children and he was not.

And that sudden, jarring crash with a crossing white Ford? There's a reason it looks so spontaneous: The other driver was a local who stumbled unbeknownst into the renegade stunt shoot that was taking place on an uncleared public road, according to IMDB:

The car crash during the chase sequence, at the intersection of Stillwell Ave. and 86th St., was unplanned and was included because of its realism. The man whose car was hit had just left his house a few blocks from the intersection to go to work and was unaware that a car chase was being filmed. The producers later paid the bill for the repairs to his car.

Catch it at 2:41 here:

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This five-minute car chase is, of course, a thriller to watch, thanks in no small part to the stunt driving of Bill Hickman, who piloted the black Dodge Charger that dueled with Steve McQueen in Bullitt.

But filming it this way was was astoundingly reckless, especially in the days of no crumple zones, metal dashboards, and minimal seatbelts. That's to say nothing of the pedestrians. With the perspective of time, the filmmakers now seem to grasp that fact, though some renegade swagger still shows through in the retelling of the tale.

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With that said, it's still a phenomenal movie. The legend of its filming will never be repeated by big-budget filmmakers, though the reckless stupidity of rogue GoPro-wielding YouTube wannabes can never be underestimated.

And now that we've had a good scoff, aren't you in the mood to rewatch this classic? Good news: It's just been added to Netflix streaming.

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