The French Connection – tape 106

At the start of this tape, there’s a couple of tiny slices of other recordings. Something of a Channel 4 ‘Banned’ season called ‘Juvenile Liason 2′(no idea), and just a handful of frames of this, which looks like an old film. It’s got credits on it, so let’s see if iMDb can help. My first thought was Hitchcock, and it turns out to be To Catch A Thief.

After those two scraps, the actual recording here, obviously a much later over-recording, since this tape number would have been around 1985, but the BBC1 logo is much later than that – this one didn’t appear until 1991.

The movie today is William Friedkin’s The French Connection. I’m sure I’ve tried to watch this before, but if I did it didn’t stick in my memory. But Mark Kermode tells me it’s a classic, so I’m happy to give it a go, and who doesn’t want to watch Gene Hackman in anything? His second appearance here in less than a fortnight.

It’s even a Christmas movie, as Hackman is undercover in his opening scene.

Sometimes it’s interesting to see how they do the effects in films. In the very first scene, in France, a man gets shot in the face. There’s a very brief flash of blood, and if you slow it down you can see that it’s done by shooting a bit of fake blood at his face with an air blower.

There’s a guest appearance by The Three Degrees.

I don’t think this is the same Ratner’s we had in the UK.

I wonder if the classic nature of this film stems from how it seemed at the time. It’s very gritty, and has that 70s thriller aesthetic, and Hackman’s Doyle is allowed to be racist without comment.

I like the scene where they’ve got the car that was imported from France, and they’re sure the drugs are hidden in it, but after tearing it apart, they can’t find anything. Then the old engineer at the car pound says “I can’t understand it, we’ve taken everything out except the rocker panels”. And that’s where the drugs were. I wonder if this was taken from a real incident, because it seems a bit far fetched otherwise.

The car chase is good, and it does seem like each time the camera cuts, it’s a second before there’s an actual collision they didn’t intend.

But to me it was just an efficient 70s thriller. I haven’t fallen in love with it. And that’s probably my problem, not the film’s.

BBC Genome: BBC One – 31st May 1991 – 22:20

There’s a glimpse of Saturday Night’s TV, and I’m not saying the 90s was a TV wasteland, but… The highlights, the mullet, the shirt, the apostrophe, that strange look of desperation in his eyes that I’m probably just projecting. It’s like the 90s in microcosm.

Then the recording stops, and underneath we see what was originally recorded on this. It’s another 70s film, and one that I actually do love, although I did see it on its original release, so that’s the 14 year old in me speaking. It’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and we join it just as the spaceships are visiting Devil’s Tower for the finale.

I remember, possibly in a magazine, possibly in a biography, reading about the time Spielberg first saw some of the finished effects shots from Star Wars, since he and Lucas were already good friends at the time. It’s said he totally freaked out at what they were able to do, and he immediately went back to his effects team and told them to make everything much brighter. I think they really took him at his word. I suspect, if this story is actually true, then it probably happened during pre-production, because there’s so much interactive lighting in all the shots that it’s definitely not something that’s just been added at a later stage. So I would guess they were still designing the look of the effects, and hadn’t started shooting them.

Another story which is definitely true is that the modelmakers added lots of tiny details to the bigger models, and there’s a tiny R2D2 on the Mothership. You can just see it, upside down, in this shot.

In this shot, Francois Truffaut’s line is, according to my copy of the fotonovel (I used to love those) “Mince Alors”. I’ve always remembered that, and vaguely wondered if that was just a really poor translation – my French isn’t remotely up to translating colloqialisms like that. So I asked Bing Translate to see if it could translate it.

It translates to “Blimey” and I’m rather delighted by that. Also, Google translate offers the less delightful ‘Gosh’ but still on point.

Among the returning airmen from the vanished Flight 19 are filmmaker friends of Spielberg, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins. They would go on to make Dragonslayer and, for Spielberg’s Amblin, *batteries not included.

This chap is J Allen Hynek, an advisor on the film, and an ‘expert’ in UFOs.

This is Phil Dodds. He plays the ARP keyboard when they’re doing the musical dialogue sequence. He wasn’t the original performer for this part, he was actually the ARP installer sent to install the equipment, and Spielberg liked the way he looked when he was testing out the keyboard that he decided to use him in the film.

The now familiar ‘Spielberg Gaze’ with lots of characters looking up at something with awe and wonder. In this they’re all putting the sunglasses on. When he did the same thing in Jurassic Park they take the glasses off.

This is the 1980 ‘special edition’ so it includes the rather superfluous sequence showing Roy Neary inside the mothership. It doesn’t add a single thing to the story, and Spielberg only added it so that Columbia would re-release the movie. You can tell he didn’t like it, because it’s been taken out of every subsequent release, now Spielberg is the one with the power at the studio.

God, Pan & Scan is an affront. But at least they’re playing most of the end title, and you can tell it’s the special edition because the End Titles contains a large chunk of ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’. This was always what he intended, but when it came to the original release, he had cold feet at the last minute, and used a cue that didn’t include the quotation, possibly feeling it was a bit too twee. I think its inclusion here shows Spielberg’s growing confidence in his own instincts.

Incidentally, most of these facts come from many readings of Bob Balaban’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary’, now republished as Spielberg, Truffaut and Me, and one of the best accounts of what it’s like to be in the set of a big movie ever. Although his part in the movie is relatively small, he was involved in most of the major scenes in the movie, and because the film shot for a long time in Alabama, where they used a Goodyear Blimp hangar as a soundstage because it was the only space big enough for their major set, he hung out with the cast a crew for months, and got lots of interesting stories about making the film. It’s worth it just to find out why members of the crew once came to set with T-Shirts reading “They Belong Here Mozambique”.

After this, there’s a trailer for Clive James and the Heroes of San Francisco about American Football, and the recording ends.