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I doubt if anyone who has seen THE FRENCH CONNECTION could ever forget its chase scene. That incredibly frantic, bordering on the impossible, thrill ride that had Gene Hackman pursue his nemesis through a swirl of traffic and against a glare of streets/buildings beneath the El, was breathtaking. I'm also at once proud and ashamed to admit that this (a dirt-encrusted overcrowding of crumbling structures) is Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where I had lived the first third of my life. This is also where my most cherished dreams and aspirations were achieved or lost or were never realized to begin with. I wouldn't want to have been born or had lived in any other place or time...maybe I'm crazy, but that's the way it is.

In 1970, when the scene was filmed, the word either leaked out or was intentionally put out through Bensonhurst. Even though Hackman wasn't as well-known as he came to be, a movie was in the offing and that's sure to attract a crowd. Many were the pedestrians and cars that lined up along an already congested street, 86 Street, along which the El ran (a portion of the B Train/Line route from Coney Island to Astoria, Queens). The two real life cops portrayed in the film, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, used their clout (I would guess, Tammany Hall-inspired) as honored detectives to secure dubious and flimsy filming permits to secure the streets for the scene. This resulted in several real, if minor, car crashes...but that's show business. (More could be found in Wikipedia)

I believe that New Yorkers take a perverse delight in the danger this city is prone to. They take an often boastful attitude toward it all, if only through the vicarious medium of film. But New York is and was, especially in the 70s, an extremely dangerous city. Even in 1965, a Queens woman by the name of Kitty Genovese was attacked and killed by a knife-wielding maniac for no reason. At least fifty people heard her screams, from an attack that went on and off for nearly two hours, without anyone coming to her aid or calling the police. The apathy and fear that would all too frequently allow evil to prevail because of good people doing nothing was already in the works. When Son of Sam decided to have his "fifteen minutes" of homicidal fame that ended in Brooklyn, it was a surreal summer of disco glitz, glamour and machismo talk (sure to impress) as everyone danced the night away to "Stayin' Alive."

When THE FRENCH CONNECTION was completed, it seemed that everyone I knew was supposed to be in it. My friend Louie was "in it" (so he said)...Tony was "in it" (so he said)...Teri was "in it" (so she said). Even Father Gardiano of the famously unknown Our Lady of Guadalupe parish was rumored to have said he was "in it". In Bensonhurst a rumor went a long way: if anyone (especially a priest) was rumored to had done something, then it naturally followed that it actually happened. I'm still waiting for these faces to appear each time I view THE FRENCH CONNECTION...but I could never find them in that seedy, sordid neighborhood of yesterday; maybe they were actually in a better part of town at the time.