Grit and Grime Crime Drama Movies

For almost as long as there have been movies there have been crime dramas. Two of Alfred Hitchcock's earliest films were Blackmail (1929) and Murder! (1930). In the 1940's the film noir movement dealt almost exclusively with crime of one sort or another. In Double Indemnity (1944), an insurance salesman (played by Fred MacMurray of all people) kills a client in order to steal his wife and collect on his insurance. In The Maltese Falcon (1941) Humphrey Bogart's private detective Sam Spade get's caught up in a spate of murders over a statue of a bird...for some reason.

Bullitt and The French Connection DVD movies

Throughout the 1950s and 60s directors like Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Norman Jewison and others continued telling stories of murder, mayhem and larceny. When you think about it, most Westerns involve crime of some sort too. None of this should be too surprising. Crime fiction goes back much further than the advent of film. Some of the most popular books of all time are detective stories by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. Crime provides the so-called "esseence of drama:" conflict.

In the late 1960s a new trend in crime dramas developed, partly in response to the cultural and political turmoil of the time: the more "realistic," gritty crime drama. The protagonists, often police detectives, became more flawed, sometimes being as morally compromised as the criminals they were pursuing. The violence in the films became more graphic and intense. Even the settings became dirtier, grimier and darker.

I don't think this was an entirely bad development. It seems a little ridiculous in some older films when people get shot, fall and die without a drop of blood shown. Or worse, get shot in the arm or leg, and continue walking and talking as if nothing happened. (Though to be fair, that still happens in today's movies too.) Realism can be a good thing. But it can also be taken too far.

I recently watched The French Connection for the first time. Because it is consistently on critics' and audiences' lists of the greatest films, I was expecting a pretty good movie, at least. I just don't get it. Sure, some of the chase scenes were impressively designed and shot. There were moments of suspense and an interesting use of a car to hide drugs, but overall I thought this movie was unnecessarily dark and dirty and basically pointless.

Gene Hackman plays Popeye Doyle, a detective on the trail of an international drug ring. Hackman often plays unlikeable characters - the murdering president in Absolute Power, Superman's nemesis Lex Luthor and the stubborn, power-hungry submarine captain in Crimson Tide come to mind - but these are usually the "bad guys" of the movie. Popeye Doyle is the protagonist of this film and he's every bit the asshole he was in those other roles. He is openly racist, abusive to suspects and fellow police officers and excessively violent.

I understand showing moral complexity, but Doyle shows no redeeming qualities. At the end of the film he blows away his fellow officer, thinking he was the criminal he had been chasing, and barely stops to think before continuing his pursuit. The final tag in the film says that the druglord got away and Doyle and his partner were reassigned. By rights, he should have been locked up.

Everything about this movie was unpleasant. The streets of New York look filthy. The characters looks ragged and dingy. Even the cars. I guess the filmmakers can't be blamed for the ugly cars of the 1970's, but they did choose one of the absolute ugliest cars I've ever seen for a key set piece in the film. Doyle chases after a brown Lincoln Continental Mark III. That thing is ugly. It looks like it has a huge clockface on the back. Again, I know the cars can't be blamed on the filmmakers, but they did make watching this movie even less enjoyable for me.

I get that the movie is trying to show a realistic portrayal of police work, especially in the drug world, in New York in the 60s and 70s. I get that the filmmakers were drawing a distinction between the "tough-talking," bigoted, but hard-working detective and the suave, worldly druglord. But I came away from the film asking myself "why?" What was the point? It just felt like I, as the viewer, was just supposed to wallow in the muck so I'd know it was there. Well, I knew it was there before watching this movie. I don't need to wallow in it.

By contrast, I also just watched Bullitt (1968) for the first time. I had seen the famous car chase, but I'd never sat down and watched the whole thing. It also fits in the category of "gritty police drama," but in my opinion, it doesn't wallow in the grime and is a much better movie for it. Steve McQueen's police detective, Frank Bullitt, is assigned to protect a mob informant who is set to testify before congress. Bullitt has to deal with hired assassins on one side and a power-hungry, vindictive senator on the other. Despite Bullitt's various flaws, he still comes across as a complex human with some integrity where it really matters.

I wouldn't put either of these movies in my top 100, or even 500 movies. But I can imagine watching Bullitt again someday. I never want to see The French Connection again, and its placement on so many lists of the best movies makes me wary of trusting those lists.