The French Connection, a film which won Friedkin an Academy Award for Best Director, finds Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle on a ceaseless trek, endlessly rising and reaching out, always missing the height and toppling down towards concrete. Its docu-realism intensifies the entrapment of the detectives – an occupation always needed, always running – in the world as well as the slinky movements of the pursued. The 1971 film lets a variety of personalities loose in their roles, and Friedkin (as well as the audience) observes as they clash, while their surroundings manipulate the nature of their attributes, decisions, destinies. Its stage is 70s New York City in its winter grime and glory: numerous dead-ends, intertwining levels, methodical side-eyes leading to full-blown sprints within elevated trains. The grit drills practicality into each motion, addressing faux-documentary head-on by showcasing accurate representations of crime within a societal maze; as confusing as it is maddening, vast, haunted and cold.

‘Popeye’ Doyle, who infamously nailed a junkie for “picking your feet in Poughkeepsie,” is aware of this reality he is seeped inside, dripping down the cracks in frivolous chase. “Never trust anyone!” he states, after rolling racial expletives off his tongue. He trusts himself and the view he sees, the action discovered along the job, the voids which his suspects float into like unknowingly commanding bosses of the capitalistically damned. Obstacles are just that, a part of a world which Popeye accepts even though he is always on the outside looking in, cracking the glass of the underworld via more radical, morally ambiguous methods.