The French Connection

If there is one filmmaker that I initially misguidedly believed was an overrated Hebraic hack whose main objective was to profit off of cinematically assaulting the spiritual core of America’s white Christianity majority, it is William Friedkin, who I now regard as one of my favorite filmmakers of the New Hollywood era. Of course, I had good reason to believe this since it seems more than a little bit dubious when a Jewish filmmaker directs a film like The Exorcist (1973) where a demonically possessed preteen girl fucks herself with a crucifix or an extremely gay film like The Boys in the Band (1970) where a rampantly heterosexual auteur, who was a well known womanizer, curiously attempts to empathize with exceedingly effete flaming homos that bitch and moan like neurotic preteen girls throughout the entire movie during an era when homo-hating was more or less the norm, as if the filmmaker was willing to reduce himself to the point of self-degradation in an attempt to rip to shreds the moral fiber of America (of course, Friedkin would later redeem himself with his S&M sod slasher flick Cruising (1980)). Naturally, one cannot also forget that Friedkin started out as a somewhat socially conscious documentarian whose most notable and revered doc The People vs. Paul Crump (1962) partly led to a negro murderer who killed a white security guard to get off of death row and eventually released from prison (notably, as he explains in The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir (2013), Friedkin felt colored killer Crump was innocent at the time he made it, but later came to the conclusion he was probably guilty).  As his somewhat underrated serial killer flick Rampage (1987) demonstrates, Friedkin later changed his mind and now supports capital punishment in certain contexts. Not surprisingly, I also assumed that Friedkin’s first big cinematic hit, The French Connection (1971), was an early example of a Hebraic leftist attempting to demonize white working-class cops, but after many viewings of the film and reading a lot about the director I have come to a more nuanced and appreciative view of the flick and its certainly subversive director, who more or less single-handedly reinvented the cop film sub-genre. Instead of being intended as a kosher cultural Marxist assault on white men in blue, Friedkin—an oftentimes fierce fellow who apparently loathed Israel so much that he complained while visiting the Jewish state during the 1970s, “I can’t wait to get out of here, all these people are just so obnoxious. They’re like many family”—had somewhat less pernicious but no less interesting objectives, including getting out of the arthouse ghetto and making a film that could be enjoyed by his Hebraic prole relatives from his hometown of Chicago. 

While Friedkin was proud of what he achieved artistically with some of his early artsy fartsy works, especially his somewhat overlooked Harold Pinter adaptation The Birthday Party (1968), it was not really paying the bills and after a fateful meeting with Howard Hawks—a true mensch best known for classic Hollywood works like The Big Sleep (1946) and Rio Bravo (1959) that was considered a big hero among the young filmmakers of the New Hollywood movement—the filmmaker decided to completely change the direction of his filmmaking career, even if he forever remained a perennial Francophile of sorts. Indeed, while making the almost insufferably histrionic cocksucker chamber piece, Friedkin began dating Hawks’ long estranged daughter Kitty Hawks and eventually moved into her apartment. Despite the fact that she had not seen her father in nearly two decades, Kitty decided to bring Friedkin along when she opted to travel to Los Angeles in what would ultimately be a fairly somber reunion with her legendary maverick Hollywood filmmaker daddy. As revealed in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (1998) by Peter Biskind, when The Boys in the Band was brought up, Mr. Hawks stated to Friedkin, “That’s about those queer fellows.” When Friedkin replied, “Yeah,” Hawks unloaded a rant on the young filmmaker that would ultimately be life-changing, stating to the young and still naive filmmaker, “I don’t know why you’d want to make a picture like that. People don’t want stories about somebody’s problems or any of that psychological shit. What they want is action stories. Every time I made a film like that, with a lotta good guys against bad guys, it had a lotta success, if that matters to you.” Of course, Hawks’ words did matter to Friedkin, or as the filmmaker confessed himself, “They really stayed with me. I would have embarked on a course of having made obscure Miramax type films before Miramax. But I had this epiphany that what we were doing wasn’t making fucking films to hang in the Louvre. We were making films to entertain people and if they didn’t do that first they didn’t fulfill their primary purpose. It’s like somebody gives you a key and you didn’t even know there was a lock; it led to THE FRENCH CONNECTION.” 

 Unequivocally one of the greatest, most important, and iconoclastic cop flicks ever made, the film may have been made with Friedkin’s less than cultivated deli worker uncle in mind (indeed, this how the filmmaker regularly described his post-The Boys in the Band output), but it is also a piece of visceral and sometimes refreshingly venomous celluloid art with a wonderfully wicked punch that is packed with keen cultural cynicism, albeit thankfully not of the sneering passive-aggressive leftist pansy sort. Heavily influenced by Friedkin’s background as a documentarian, The French Connection—a partly fictionalized adaptation of the 1969 nonfiction book of the same name by Robin Moore—is also as realistic as cop flicks come. Indeed, less interested in Ernest Tidyman’s script than the daily habits, behaviors, and idiosyncrasies of the mick-wop police duo it is based on, Friedkin hired NYC Narcotics Detectives, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, to act as full-fledged technical advisors that coached their cinematic counterparts on how to act out of a scene (in fact, both men portray cops in the film, with Egan playing the boss of the character that is based on him). Based on the true story of how Egan and Grosso uncovered a major international drug ring that involved the smuggling of $32 million worth of uncut heroin from France to NYC that was hidden inside a car owned by a popular French TV personality named Jacques Angelvin, the film is a true blue collar masterpiece where testicular fortitude reigns supreme and where all forms of political correctness are exterminated in an oftentimes racially-charged frenzy of no bullshit street cop action and violence.  Indeed, The French Connection is probably the only film that would simultaneously offend the extra sensitive sensibilities of limp-wristed vegan socialist faggots, Israel-supporting cuckservatives, and ghetto negro dope dealers.

 Shot largely in a cinema-vérité style with tons of excitedly erratic handheld camera work and somewhat unpredictable elliptical editing and featuring an oftentimes ominous and discordant musical score by Don Ellis that is just as crucial and unforgettable as Bernard Herrmann’s score in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), The French Connection is not only arguably the first great ‘prole arthouse police’ flick, but also probably the most honest and authentic depiction of what it takes to be a truly masterful street cop who can strike fear into even the most mentally unstable of drug-addled negroid convicts and mob-connected goombah psychopaths. Indeed, the film's sometimes obnoxiously extroverted yet oftentimes hilarious (anti)hero ‘Popeye’ and his introverted wop partner ‘Cloudy’ are not socially inept dorks that do everything by the book but obscenely obsessive urban soldiers that do what they have to do to get that job done, even if a couple of flamboyantly dressed jigaboo dope dealers get their feelings hurt in the process. Far from having a low opinion of Popeye and his pal, Friedkin—a man from a humble Chicago working-class background who has openly admitted to engaging in his fair share of petty crime as a young lad—rather respected the two police officers that inspired the film and has even described Egan as a cop genius of sorts. As someone with veteran cops in my family that worked the streets of one of the biggest quasi-third world shitholes in the United States, The French Connection proved to be an almost liberating experience the first time I saw it as a gritty and in-your-face ride through NYC post-industrial purgatory that offers no easy answers and never succumbs to lame pseudo-moralistic posturing. In short, the film is certainly no phony piece of cultural Marxist twaddle like so many contemporary cop flicks where darkie dope dealer are portrayed as hyper-masculine neo-noble-savages who cannot help their choice of trade because they grew up with a social handicap and where the only good cops are old wise negroes, inordinately stoic women that can magically beat the shit of big strong men, or idiotically idealistic ethno-masochistic antiracist cucks who rather promote the absurdist fantasy of racial equality than uphold the law. Aside from being a preternaturally gritty yet artful crime-thriller that totally changed the (sub)genre as a Hollywood film that was mainly inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (1960) aka Breathless and Costa-Gavras' Z (1969), Friedkin’s early masterpiece is also an early critique of the perennial abject failure that is the so-called ‘War on Drugs.’ Indeed, not only does the film demonstrate that war is a failure even when the ‘good guys’ technically win a symbolic battle by busting a drug ring, but it also makes it quite clear in its notoriously stoically cynical quasi-epilogue that the ostensible war is rigged and that none of the real bad guys are ever truly brought to justice because they are great comrades of the white collar crooks that are in charge of the system. 

 While the greatest police duo that NYC has probably ever known, Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy ‘Cloudy’ Russo (Roy Scheider) are certainly men of the street that just as easily could have been crime bosses had their lives taken a slightly different course, but of course that is what makes them great cops as streetwise men with the subversive minds and intuitions of criminals. A beer-chugging mick alpha-prole that enjoys lecherous sadomasochistic sex with random lecherous sluts and prostitutes that he finds on the street who oftentimes has to be woken up and forced out of bed for work by his partner after a long night of hardcore drinking and fucking, Irish-blooded detective Popeye is an exceedingly erratic extrovert and born renegade who might not play by the rules of the unnecessarily bureaucratic legal game but he gets the job done, even though it is a completely thankless job that has many risks and dangers.  Of course, the risks and dangers are exactly why Popeye is in the game. While Cloudy is somewhat of a sidekick, he is an imperative part of the partnership as he not only believes in Popeye and supports him on most of his somewhat seemingly crazed hunches, but he is also able to keep his comrade in line and make sure he is right on schedule when it comes to the work day, among other things. More than just a fearless and obscenely obsessive fellow of the brazenly bombastic sort, Popeye thrives on unpredictable danger and morbid excitement to the point where he pushes other cops out of the way to get in the middle of the action, as if he lives to challenge death. A somewhat sullen, pessimistic, and innately introverted man who, unlike Popeye, tends to think deeply before he acts, Cloudy might not be as brazen as his partner, but he is just as brave and is willing to follow him anywhere, including an extremely dangerous international drug trafficking conspiracy involving seemingly psychopathic professional hitmen, guido gangsters, and government-connected Jewish lawyers, among other upscale criminal rabble. 

 Beginning somewhat abruptly but quite fittingly in scenic Marseille, France, The French Connection starts with a literal bang in the form of a French police detective being shot in the head right at fairly close range upon walking into the front door of his home after spending the day trailing a local shipyard owner named Alain Charnier (Luis Buñuel regular Fernando Rey), who is a legitimate businessman that also happens to be in charge of the largest heroin-smuggling syndicate in the world. The French detective was killed by Charnier’s suavely psychopathic personal hitman Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi of Costa-Gavras’ Z) and the similarly dapperly dressed criminal duo will soon be traveling to New York City to smuggle $32 million worth of heroin hidden inside of a Lincoln car owned by a popular French television personality named Henri Devereaux (Frédéric de Pasquale), who has no idea what is hidden in the automobile and has only agreed to bring the vehicle to the United States as a favor to his friend. Charnier is selling the drugs to a sleazy mob-connected Jewish lawyer named Joel Weinstock (Harold Gary), who likes to keep his hands clean and thus uses a young guido named Salvatore ‘Sal’ Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) and his 19-year-old wife Angie (Arlene Farber) to do the extra dirty bitch work for him. Indeed, Sal and Angie own and operate a less than impressive working-class newsstand luncheonette as a front for their drug operation. Of course, Popeye and Cloudy spend a good portion of the film uncovering this somewhat intricate international criminal plot. 

 When we first are introduced to the lovably pugnacious protagonists, they are conducting an undercover narcotics stakeout in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn where Popeye is entertaining young negro children while sporting a Santa Claus outfit and Cloudy is running a hotdog stand as they covertly watch a drug deal that is going down in a nearby all-black bar. When Popeye gives him the signal after seeing the transaction take place, Cloudy proceeds to attempt to arrest the black criminal but the dope dealer manages to runaway after stabbing the wop cop in the arm. After a long chase through a trash-covered black ghetto that somewhat resembles a Vietnam War zone, Popeye and Cloudy manage to capture the shiv-wielding criminal and then naturally proceed to smack him around a little bit in retribution for his violent transgressions. Considering their virtually completely opposite personalities, Popeye and Cloudy are quite good at playing ‘Good Cop, Bad Cop,’ especially when dealing with less than sophisticated spooks, though they use a fairly bizarre and quite hilarious approach to these almost unintentionally avant-garde mind games. Indeed, while Cloudy asks the criminal legitimate questions about the crimes, Popeye throws him off by aggressively asking him about if he is guilty of “Picking Feet in Poughkeepsie.” This technique proves to be quite successful, as Popeye’s question petrifies the violent yet seemingly mentally feeble negro dope dealer so much that he is all too happy to answer Cloudy’s questions.  In fact, the heroin-dealing homeboy is so psyched out by Popeye that he also confesses to picking his feet in Poughkeepsie.  After arresting the criminal and leaving work for the day, Popeye remarks to Cloudy in regard to the fact he was stabbed by a seemingly borderline retarded negro, “You dumb guinea. Never trust a nigger.” When Cloudy replies, “He could have been white,” Popeye reveals he is more of a vulgar misanthrope than a racist by replying, “Never trust anyone.”  Luckily for Popeye, Cloudy has an insanely inordinate degree of trust for him. Although Cloudy wants to go straight home after work because he is tired as a result of being stabbed in the arm, Popeye convinces him to go out for some drinks at the Copacabana where the biggest drug trafficking scheme ultimately falls into their lap by sheer happenstance. 

 A man that quite literally lives and breathes policing as if it is an accursed sixth sense that brings just as harm and danger as happiness and joy, Popeye is always on the lookout for “dirty” guys even when he is off-duty, so naturally he is quite intrigued when he notices Sal Boca and his wife Angie, who he has never seen before, entertaining some mob-connected drug dealers at the socially prestigious jet-setter section of the Copacabana. When Cloudy notices an ugly swarthy middle-aged Hebrew, Joel Weinstock, at the Boca’s table flirting with a couple hot blondes, he cannot help but remark, “It’s Jewish lucky. He don’t look the same without numbers across the chest,” to which Popeye affirmatively replies, “That table is definitely wrong.” Somewhat predictably, instead of going home and resting for the night like most normal people that are terribly tired after a long and draining day of work, renegade workaholics Popeye and Cloudy decide to spend the rest of the night and early morning tailing the Bocas’ car and ultimately discover their dubious luncheonette. Needless to say, Popeye and Cloudy begin regularly spying on the luncheonette, with the latter even regularly even hanging out inside the restaurant and flirting with Angie, who offers to ‘model’ blouses for the undercover cop if he is willing to pay the right price. Upon doing a background check, the police duo discovers that Sal once attempted to rob a Tiffany’s in broad daylight but he ultimately got off the charge because the luxury jewelry store refused to prosecute, thus hinting that the seemingly lowly dago dumb ass has friends in high places, including Judaic lawyer Weinstock, who the cops also begin monitoring. After discovering from a Blaxploitation-esque negro informant with a goofy Afro that a major heroin shipment is coming to NYC, Popeye manages to convince his hard-ass supervisor, Walt Simonson (who is somewhat ironically played by the real-life ‘Popeye,’ Eddie Egan), to setup a wiretap on the Bocas' phones, thus eventually leading them to discovering the ‘French Connection’ upon hearing frog accents.  Unfortunately for Popeye and Cloudy, they are also forced to work with a federal agent that they greatly despise named Mulderig (played by Hollywood stunt-driver Bill Hickman, who was James Dean's friend/driver and who executed the elaborate chase scenes in Bullitt, The French Connection and The Seven-Ups). Mulderig blames Popeye for the death of another cop, so it is only fitting that the protagonist accidentally kills him in the end. 

 Under the dubious pretext of coming to NYC to shoot a documentary about life in the rotten Big Apple, Devereaux arrives to the drastically deteriorating metropolis with a shiny new Lincoln Continental Mark III that he does not realize is full of a wealth of uncut heroin that will apparently keep both local dope dealers and junkies happy for at least a couple years. Devereaux brought the car as a special favor to his friend Charnier, who, upon a superficial glance, hardly seems like the sort of fellow that would be responsible for the world’s biggest drug smuggling operation. A supremely cultivated man and immaculately dressed virtual dandy who loves and is completely faithful to his beauteous young wife and who lives for wining and dining at fancy frog restaurants, Svengali-like master criminal Charnier makes Popeye seem like a virtual barbarian by comparison, but of course the main theme of the film is the thin line between police and criminals.  Of course, Charnier's sort of aristocratic smugness gives Popeye all the more incentive to take him down. Despite their stark differences in terms of cultivation and demeanor, Charnier and Popeye certainly make worthy adversaries, especially when it comes to playing the cat-and-mouse game. Naturally, Popeye almost immediately begins trailing Charnier when he arrives in NYC and it does not take long before the latter realizes this. Needless to say, Popeye is all the more determined to catch “Frog #1” (which is the nickname he actually gives the Frenchman) when he manages to outwit the protagonist in his own city and escape from his gasp while looking quite elegant and smug while doing it. Indeed, after a game of cat and mouse that results in the Frenchman escaping via public transporation, Charnier rubs his small victory over Popeye in his face by waving at the protagonist in a taunting fashion as he rides away in the subway shuttle at Grand Central Station. Upon failure after failure in terms of finding ample evidence to use against Charnier and his men, Popeye’s boss Walt closes the assignment stating, stating to the protagonist in a particularly pissed fashion, “Jimmy, you wasted two months on this. No collars are coming in while you two are running around jerking off. Now, go back to work! You’re off special assignment!” Luckily for Popeye, Charnier contracts his hit man Nicoli to kill him, thereupon making it quite clear that the international drug smuggling operation is the real deal.  Despite the fact that Sal is extra paranoid as a result of being under police surveillance and having his phones tapped, among other things, his shadowy business partner, stereotypically pushy Jew Weinstock, talks him into carrying out the drug deal as planned.

 While looking quite dejected upon walking back to his symbolically prison-like apartment complex, Popeye gets quite the surprise when a sniper’s bullet kills a woman that is only a couple feet away from him. Of course, the assassin is Nicoli and instead of attempting to seek shelter, Popeye opts to aggressively hunt his would-be-hunter, thus ultimately erupting into one of the greatest and most insane chase scenes in cinema history. While Nicoli manages to outrun Popeye and evade capture by boarding an elevated train at the Bay 50th Street Station in Bensonhurst where he shoots and kills a negro cop that dares to try to stop him, the protagonist does not give up there and instead ‘borrows’ a car from a random civilian and uses it to chase the train in extremely dangerous rush hour traffic. Meanwhile, Nicoli makes his way to the front of the train where he hijacks the fairly elderly black driver at gunpoint. While Nicoli demands that he skip the next stop, the driver is so horrified as a result of having a gun pointed directly at his head that he suffers a heart attack and is knocked unconscious, thus causing the train to almost crash into another train that is parked at the next stop. When a stupid would-be-heroic young white train conductor dares to try to stop the armed frog hit man, Nicoli naturally shoots him dead. As a result of being violently thrown against a glass window after a emergency trackside brake is applied to prevent the train from crashing, Nicoli is left somewhat exhausted but he manages to exit the train. Unfortunately for Nicoli, Popeye has managed to cheat death after almost getting into numerous serious car wrecks during the chase. Indeed, while the car he borrowed is left more or less totaled, Popeye is left fairly unscathed and luckily manages to confront Nicoli not long after he exits the train. When Nicoli attempts to flee from the protagonist while standing at the tops of the steps of a train station platform, Popeye shoots and kills him with a single shot to the back of the head, thus causing the hit man’s corpse to fall down the staircase where it fittingly lands next to the deadly detective, who also collapses due to exhaustion. 

 After Popeye and Cloudy impound Devereaux's Lincoln Continental Mark III after Sal Boca dubiously leaves it on a random ghetto street where it could easily be stolen, the protagonists find what they are really looking for after having a police mechanic completely disassemble to the entire automobile. Indeed, 120 pounds of heroin is found tightly packed in various small blue and green obloid packages inside the rocker panels of the car. Rather reluctantly, Devereaux eventually shows up at the police impound and threatens to portray NYC in a negative light in the documentary that he is supposedly making if the cop on duty does not give him back his car in a speedy fashion.  Of course, the cop on duty finds Devereaux's effetely arrogant demeanor to be quite comical and treats the famous frog in a fittingly passive-aggressive fashion. After four hours of waiting, Cloudy eventually approaches Devereaux and informs the frog celebrity in an almost sardonic fashion that he has his car and it is pristine condition, stating, “It’s in perfect shape, not a scratch. You must lead a charming life.” Indeed, Popeye and Cloudy had the police mechanic reassemble the car with the heroin still inside so that they can later catch them in the act with heroin-filled automobile. Naturally both petrified and paranoid as a result of his experiences with the police, Devereaux returns the Lincoln to Charnier and tells him that he is no longer willing to do him anymore favors.  While he originally planned to have Devereaux do the job for him, Charnier is forced to drive the car to an old factory on Wards Island to meet Weinstock, Sal, and about a dozen other similarly swarthy criminals to finalize the drug deal. Although the deal could not have gone more smoothly and Charnier is quite happy to receive two briefcases full of cash for his international conspiratorial efforts, the French businessman is in for the shock of a lifetime upon driving across the Wards Island bridge and discovering Popeye standing at the front of a police roadblock on the other side of the bridge. 

 With nowhere to escape, Charnier heads back to Wards Island and thus conveniently leads the cops directly to his American business partners in the process. While most of the criminals flee to one of the old factory buildings, Charnier goes in the opposite direction and heads to a different ruined building where he seems to practically disappear into thin air. Naturally, while Cloudy and the rest of the cops go after the large group in the one building, Popeye predictably opts to hunt for his great rival Frog #1 in the other building. After getting in a gun fight that involves gassing out the criminals and shooting dumb wop Sal dead, Cloudy follows Popeye into the building. When Popeye notices a figure walking inside a room in the building, he wastes no time in unloading a storm of bullets on the individual, not realizing it is federal agent Mulderig. Somewhat humorously, Popeye is less than disheartened upon realizing that he has accidentally killed the very same enemy who accused him of getting other cops killed. When Cloudy remarks, “Mulderig. You shot Mulderig,” Popeye totally ignores what he says, states while in a state of semi-madness in regard to Charnier, “The son of a bitch is here. I saw him. I’m going to get him,” and then heads into the dark abyss of the ruined factory until he disappears from the frame. While the viewer subsequently hears a gunshot, it is never revealed where it came from in what is ultimately a poetically nihilistic conclusion to a poetically nihilistic film. In the end, the film concludes with an epilogue that reveals Joel Weinstock was indicted by a Grand Jury but the case was dismissed for ‘lack of proper evidence,’ poor celebrity pawn Devereux was convicted “guilty of conspiracy” and “Served four years in a Federal Penitenitary,” and Alain Charnier was never caught and that he is believed to be living comfortably somewhere in France. As for the protagonists, “Detectives DOYLE and RUSSO were transferred out of the Narcotics Bureau and reassigned.” 

 While one could certainly easily argue that The French Connection paints a somewhat unflattering and even sometimes perturbing portrait of early 1970s NYC cops, it indubitably features an exceedingly more disturbing depiction of the war on drugs and American legal system to the point where it hints that the government and American politicians protect and aid the very same criminals that it pretends to be fighting. Indeed, the protagonist and his buddy might be using dubious police methods that would probably horrify the average naive American citizen, but they still certainly come out looking like the only real good guys in the film, with Hebraic lawyer Weinstock—a fictional figure that is apparently a composite of multiple real-life criminals (the Jewish community in general?!)—being arguably the most repugnant character as a sleazy scumbag that contracts dumb dago fuck-ups to do his dirty work. Of course, the Jewish caricatures are no surprise if one considers that Friedkin’s one-time fiancée/baby-momma, Australian dancer Jennifer Nairn-Smith, once stated regarding the filmmaker, “William denied his whole background. He hated being Jewish. Think Yiddish, dress British.”  Not surprisingly, as the historical documentary record unequivocally demonstrates, both wops and yids, who have a long and overlapping history together in organized crime, were involved in the real case that Friedkin's film is based on (notably, the slang term for heroin, ‘smack,’ is derived from the Yiddish word ‘shmeck’). In fact, the real-life goombah mob underling that Sal Boca is based on, Tony Fuca, was the nephew of guido gangster Angelo Tuminaro who, due to his marriage to Jewess Bella Stein—the daughter of a powerful prohibition bootlegger and bigwig in the Jewish mob—acted as a liaison man between the Jewish and Sicilian mafias. Contrary to the great myth of ‘noble’ gangsters who refused to push dope as perpetuated by Hollywood films like Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), the Ashkenazi and Sicilian mobs always sold drugs (in fact, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had identified Tuminaro as a major narcotics trafficker as far back as 1937).  While Hollywood has been very careful to portray organized crime as a largely Sicilian and sometimes Irish enterprise, the Jewish mafia has always been the most powerful and government-connected (somewhat ironically, Hebraic mob boss Meyer Lansky's granddaughter Mira Lansky Boland worked as the “law-enforcement liaison” for the powerful Jewish anti-free-speech group the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the 1990’s and even arranged expensive trips to Israel for certain influential American police officers who could potentially have something to ‘offer’ the ADL in return). After all, one must ‘never forget’ that Ukrainian-born Judaic mobster Semion Mogilevich masterminded the largest money laundering scheme in US history and managed to get away with washing 7 billion dollars through the Bank of New York, which is notably one of the owners of the so-called Federal Reserve System.

 The French Connection is also notable in that it completely undermines the nasty little negrophiliac Hollywood myth that black drug dealers are strong, intelligent, and ultra-masculine Übermensch kings of the ghetto that have been forced to peddle dope dealers because of racism or some other absurd bullshit excuse. Of course, like all drug dealers, negro dope-peddlers are the worst sort of parasites as inordinately morally retarded psychopaths that profit off of the spiritual and cultural destruction of their uniquely forsaken communities. In Friedkin's film, these negroes come off as unwitting shabbos goy pawns and unconscious uncle toms who are so stupid that they do not even realize that the heroin that they are killing they own people with is provided to them via Jews, wops, and frogs.  Quite hilariously, like the real-life contemporary black thugs featured in various videos all over the internet, after getting caught red-handed engaging in some preposterously stupid crime, the negroes in Friedkin’s film literally bitch “I ain’t do nothin’” (hence the recent popularity of the somewhat new pejorative term for blacks “Dindu”) and incessantly talk back to the cops like a vile whiny bitch on the rag, which is surely something they learned from their government-subsided welfare queen single-mothers. In short, there is no confusion while watching The French Connection that, even what it comes to the drug trade, negroes are at the bottom of the food chain as low-level gram-peddlers that probably had no idea that the laced, watered down garbage that they are haplessly peddling originally derived from premium grade product from France. 

 While The French Connection was followed by an innately inferior yet somewhat entertaining fictional sequel entitled French Connection II (1975) directed by John Frankenheimer and an all more pointless made-for-TV spin-off entitled Popeye Doyle (1986) starring Ed O'Neill instead of Gene Hackman as the titular lead, I personally regard To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) as a sort of unofficial update of the aesthetic techniques and thematic motifs that Friedkin explored in the original film, albeit fittingly transported to the ultra-phony West Coast, which epitomized the worst of the Reaganite 1980s. Of course, in its featuring of various grotesque cripples and midgets (not surprisingly, Friedkin apparently owns original pieces of artwork by degenerate kraut commie artist George Grosz), an artist-cum-counterfeiter villain who creates quasi-Expressionistic art, and complimentary soundtrack by English new wave group Wang Chung, To Live and Die in L.A.—a cinematic work that also has an highly ambitious, refreshingly anarchistic, and unforgettable chase scene—has a somewhat bizarre arthouse meets Miami Vice vibe about it and thus somewhat lacks the unwaveringly visceral cinema-vérité essence of its 1970s East Coast predecessor. As someone that grew up around cops that worked some of America’s worst streets, I can safely say that Friedkin is the only American filmmaker that I can think of that has taken a fairly realistic and reasonably objective approach to portraying real street smart police—warts and all—albeit without the phony Judaic anti-white liberal moral posturing.

Undoubtedly, The French Connection now seems somewhat antiquated in the sense that cops like the ones featured in the film no longer exist.  As one veteran cop once told me, not even the toughest of criminals have the balls to fight cops anymore like they used to.  Additionally, I have been told that one of the main reasons so many people have been shot and killed by the cops in recent decades is because police departments starting hiring small and physically weak cops due to complaints from the public that the police were beating the shit out of people.  Of course, this backfired, as these small, weak, and oftentimes scared new cops, which include women, are much more likely to use their weapons than the old tough cops who were not afraid of brawling with violent black bucks on PCP (as any good cop can tell you, the only way to stop a deranged person that is high on angel dust is to knock them out).  Additionally, as depicted in The French Connection, these old school tough cops were way less likely to ruin a negro's life by doing tedious things like busting him for a mere dimebag and instead used a more common sense approach to policing that usually involved merely destroying the drugs and letting the suspect(s) go free.  I can also say that, although totally anti-drug, the police veterans I know are for the complete legalization and taxation of drugs because they consider the supposed war on drugs to be a bureaucratic joke, but I digress.  Probably the only film about Jewish mobsters that quite deservedly won an Academy Award for Best Picture (as well as Best Actor (Hackman), Best Director (Friedkin), Best Film Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay (Tidyman)), The French Connection undoubtedly makes Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984) seem like a Steven Spielberg movie in terms of its almost anarchic commitment to visceral authenticity in terms of the world of half-crazed cops and heroin-dealing wops.  One must not also forget that, in terms of its splendidly unflattering depiction of the less Hollywood-esque segments of the city, the film indubitably demonstrates that 1970s NYC was a real-life dystopia that made the dystopian realm featured in 1970s sci-fi flicks like Richard Fleischer's Soylent Green (1973) seem like a silly leftist delusional as written and directed by individuals that wanted to ignore and obscure the real serious issues that plague the United States, especially American cities.  Additionally, Friedkin's flick probably has the capacity to cause the mindless lemmings of the black lives movement to cry hysterically and/or suffer a serious panic attack.  Also, it is hard not to love a film where Frenchmen are called ‘frogs’ by boorish Americans, especially when one of the frogs is portrayed by a rather respected Buñuel star who barely even spoke French.

-Ty E

Light Sleeper

It is oftentimes said that writers spend their entire lives writing the same book over and over again and of course the same has also been said of filmmakers, especially of the auteur oriented sort like Federico Fellini and Alexander Kluge, but also seemingly autistic Hollywood blockbuster whores like Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay. Undoubtedly, if any American auteur provides great evidence to this theory, it is screenwriter turned filmmaker Paul Schrader (Cat People, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters), who first came to fame for penning Taxi Driver (1976) and would go on to direct a number of cinematic works that feel like reworkings of the screenplay for that film. Indeed, if Hardcore (1979) is a sort of ‘Calvinist Taxi Driver’ and Affliction (1997) is a ‘redneck Taxi Driver,’ Schrader’s Light Sleeper (1992) is a ‘bourgeois Taxi Driver,’ albeit with a tad bit of American Gigolo (1980) thrown in for good measure (additionally, The Walker (2007) would be Schrader's ‘dick-sucking Southern dandy American Gigolo’ and the Scorsese/Schrader collaboration Bringing Out the Dead (1999) is like ‘Taxi Driver as an EMT’). Of course, in the sense that it is about a reasonably intelligent ex-drug addict who is suffering a midlife crisis, one could argue that it is the most autobiographical of Schrader’s Bressonian ‘a man and his room’ films. In fact, as the auteur stated himself in the book Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings (1990) in regard to Light Sleeper and its relation to his other works, “Well, that form of the script is the same as the format of TAXI DRIVER, in that it uses pseudo-chapters rather than scene numbers, but the deeper connection comes from the fact that this is a character that I have felt comfortable with in the past and hadn’t written about in some time. As to the specific moments – well, you don’t want to be too self-referential, but if it works, it works, and if you’re ploughing the same row ten or fifteen years on, you’re going to end up with the same roots being dug up. The character of John LeTour is, in my mind, another installment of the characters of Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER and Julian Kay in AMERICIAN GIGOLO. These characters are really not so much people as souls, they drift around and things happen to them, they watch and they are acted upon. I don’t really see this group of films as a trilogy, I just think that as I get older my views about this character and these themes change. So that when the character and myself were in our twenties, he was very hostile and paranoid and felt oppressed by the world, and was a cab driver. When he was in his thirties he was very narcissistic and self-involved, and he was a gigolo. Now he’s forty and he’s anxious and uncertain, and he delivers drugs. He hasn’t made anything of his life, and he doesn’t know what will become of him.”  Needless to say, Light Sleeper does not feature a grungy porno-obsessed prole weirdo who becomes murderously obsessed with saving a hopelessly naive teenage prostitute from a white pimp like in Taxi Driver, but it does feature a devastating portrait of self-destructive inwardness that explodes into a poetic transcendental bloodbath.

 I might be a good decade shy of suffering a midlife crisis and I have never sold drugs as a career, but I certainly could somewhat empathize with the loner protagonist of Schrader’s film, even if I found him to be somewhat of a passive bitch in many respects. Indeed, I could identify with the titular insomniac in the sense that the protagonist feels like he is trapped in a sort of perpetual soul-draining personal pandemonium where he hates his job and life and feels like he has no other options and has run out of what he describes as “luck” (notably, the protagonist and his friends believe in New Age bullshit and love chatting about numerology, among other hopelessly banal esoteric things).  Undoubtedly, the increasingly mentally perturbed protagonist is like a forlorn phantom who passively drifts through life and does only the bare minimum to survive in his insufferably sterile and stagnant world of white collar dope dealing, though a seeming case of hypergraphia compels him to write in journals that he disposes of soon after he finishes filling them up with writing, as if he is ashamed of what he has written and considers it to be more or less a disposable waste that is the putrid result of his brain defecating.  A film about a man with no life who, due to his trade, is constantly wandering in and out of other people's lives, it is not surprisingly probably the only flick where a drug dealer is used as a midlife crisis metaphor.  While an extremely personal cinematic work, the protagonist is actually based on a real-life drug dealer that Schrader knew and naturally decided to reconnect with when he was assembling the project.  Interestingly, Schrader has also compared Light Sleeper to Taxi Driver in the sense that he wrote the script very fast as if he was being compelled by some unseen force, or as he stated himself, “It came to me pretty much as a piece; I saw it all, and I always knew what was going to come next. What happened was that I had a dream about this character sometime in September 1990, somebody I had know years before. I woke up at about four in the morning, and I knew from that moment that he wanted me to write about him. By six I also knew I was definitely going to do just that. I hadn’t written about this type of character in almost ten years. I’d been looking around for a personal, original piece to write and it hadn’t been coming, so I had given up, and then it just came. So I set off to track down this man I had known.”  It should also be noted that Schrader has himself described Light Sleeper as an ‘inverse Taxi Driver,’ as the autobiographical lead was transformed from an active man that symbolically drove the cab to a passive man that sits in the back (in fact, Willem Dafoe spends almost as much as time in a taxi as De Niro's did in the Scorsese flick).

 Not surprisingly, Schrader has described Light Sleep as his most personal film, with the prole ex-GI Travis Bickle being replaced with a character that the auteur could more relate to as a spiritually-oriented ex-drug addict who has suffered much personal failure, especially in relation to love and romance. During the film, the protagonist is reunited with his great love—a woman he has not seen in a longtime who he had a very toxic relationship with that involved lots of drugs and self-destruction—by happenstance and makes a predictable attempt to get back with her, only to lose her in the most violent and tragic of ways, thereupon leading him to take serious action for possibly the first time in his entire life.  An emotionally turbulent flick with a somewhat ironical ending about a man who is only able to get free from his personal purgatory by finally accepting he is imprisoned, Light Sleeper is a tale of personal redemption that most people will find totally inexplicable because the morose protagonist ultimately loses his personal freedom at the conclusion yet develops a hopeful and optimistic mindset as a result. In other words, Schrader’s film is a somewhat arcane cinematic work that probably can only been truly understood and/or appreciated by people that have experienced some form personal despair or alienation. Indeed, Light Sleeper might be about bourgeois coke peddlers and features some sex and nudity and a couple of violent deaths, but it is probably not going to appeal to someone that sees the guido gangsters of Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) as cool cats that are worthy of emulation.  In that sense, Schrader's film is one of only a handful of cinematic works that makes drug dealing seem about as glamorous as working as a technician at a Wal-Mart pharmacy.

 As seemingly perennially dejected dope dealing protagonist John LeTour (Willem Dafoe) narrates at the very beginning of the film while riding in the back of a taxi, “Labor Day weekend. Some time for a garbage strike. Everybody crazy to stock up. They want to score at the last minute and they want it now. Never fails. The faces look alike. You gotta use memory tricks: each has some peculiarity. It keeps your sharp. A D.D. told me, when a drug dealer starts writing a diary, it’s time to quit. I started writing after that. Not every night. Now and then. Fill up one book, throw it out, start another.”  Indeed, not unlike with the summer heat that makes the wops and negroes in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) become all the more irritable and destructive, the sight and stench of piles upon piles of trash that are crowding the streets of NYC as a result of the garbage strike seems to be only compounding LeTour’s unending personal misery, which reaches its peak in the film and is ultimately released in the form of murder. A reformed drug addict that has ironically spent over the last decade peddling cocaine to a rich and largely Wall Street connected clientele that is willing to pay a highly inflated price so they don’t have to endanger their lives by attempting to procure dubious product from dubious darkies on the literally and figuratively dark side of town, LeTour is a born loner-cum-loser that is forced to regularly socialize with various individuals that he seems to be quite apathetic towards as a result of his trade, including a ‘Theological Cokehead’ (David Spade) who states to the protagonist whilst sitting in his whitey tighties in between snorting a line of blow, “…so if there’s no God, then how can we conceive of him? I mean, the idea of God presupposes the existence of God. That is the Ontological Argument. That’s Anselm. That’s 1200 or 1400.” The protagonist works for a hot yet vulgar fire-crotched fag hag named Ann (Susan Sarandon) and her mustached best fag friend Robert (David Clennon), who looks like the typical AIDS-ridden homo agitator featured in Rosa von Praunheim’s aberrosexual agitprop docs Silence = Death (1990) and Positive (1990). As LeTour describes, Ann “made” him the d.d. bitch-boy he is today, as he found her glamorous and wanted to become a part of her supposedly exciting life, but a lot of things have changed since the 1970s and crack has destroyed the supposed glamour that was once associated with the black market drug trade. While Ann and Robert plan to get out of the criminal underground and go legit by starting a super chic cosmetics company, LeTour does not know what he wants to do, though he is thinking about getting into music recording. Of course, as his various past failed life plans demonstrate, LeTour is an aimless and seemingly weak-willed fellow who cannot seem to commit to anything, including Ann, who is clearly a longtime romantic interest of his.  While Ann incessantly flirts with him to the point where she jokes about giving him blowjobs, LeTour just cannot seem to initiate a love affair with her, even though he is in her company all the time. Luckily, fate will force the protagonist to get a little bit of testicular fortitude and compel him to take serious action, even though he does not want to. 

 As a result of a “yuppie murder” involving a “19-year-old Barnard co-ed bitch” whose corpse was found with a large amount of cocaine in the middle of a public park, the police have become interested in high-class drug dealers of LeTour’s ostensibly cultivated caliber. As a man that does not own a TV and does not read newspapers, LeTour learns about the homicide from a dopey ghetto wigger dope dealer named ‘Jealous’ (Sam Rockwell), who warns him to be on the lookout for pesky cops.  Jealous also complains that, “19 gram shit is a drag” in regard to the size of their dope transaction, but the protagonist is not about to get charged with dealing because he is carrying a couple extra grams of the rich man's candy (as LeTour explains regarding the law, “19 is carrying, 20 is dealing” when it comes to cocaine).  Not surprisingly, LeTour does not think much of his buyers or their drug-addled pseudo-philosophical rants as demonstrated by his remark, “Everybody wants to talk. It’s like a compulsion. My philosophy is: You got nothing to say? Don’t say it. They figure, you can tell a D.D. anything. Things they’d never tell anyone else. Of course they’re stoned to start.” Despite his antisocial attitude, LeTour cares enough about clients to not let them kill themselves with the drugs that he sells them. Indeed, when a fairly Jew-y junky Wall Street type of the exceedingly effeminate sort named Eddie (Paul Jabara)—a fellow whose drug addiction apparently ruined his marriage and a number of jobs—demands more drugs than the protagonist is willing to sell them, LeTour refuses to give in and later calls his client’s brother when he suffers a sort of violently deranged dope psychosis. Undoubtedly, LeTour’s most prestigious client is a suave yet slimy Swiss prick named Tis (Hebrew Victor Garber doing his best ‘evil Aryan aristocrat’ caricature) who has the protagonist deliver him some Valium (aka diazepam) at a hospital as a result of getting exceedingly stressed that he had to bring an underage teenage girl to the emergency room after she overdosed on coke. Although he has no clue at the beginning of the film, Tis will ultimately become LeTour’s arch nemesis. 

 While LeTour has nothing to live for at the beginning of the film, that somewhat changes during a dreary rainy night when he spots his ex-girlfriend Marianne Jost (Dana Delany) standing outside in the rain while riding in a taxi. LeTour has not seen or talked to Marianne in many years and she is not exactly happy to see him because they had a considerably corrosive drug-fueled relationship that concluded in a nasty fashion.  Apparently, LeTour has made numerous attempts to reconnect with his ex-flame, but she has routinely ignored him as she fears reigniting the passionate and exciting yet mutually destructive cocaine-driven romance that they once had. While Marianne reluctantly agrees to get in the taxi, she soon gets out after LeTour lies to her by telling her that he is completely straight and has quit dealing (somewhat humorously, LeTour's beeper gives him away immediately after he tells Marianne in a seemingly sincere fashion that his powder-peddling days are over). Luckily for the protagonist, he later bumps into Marianne and her much nicer sister Randi (Jane Adams) while delivering drugs to Tis at the hospital. The Jost sisters are at the hospital because their mother is dying of cancer, so it is a somewhat awkward time for LeTour to attempt to weasel his way back into Marianne's life. While her mother apparently loves him, Marianne refuses to allow LeTour to see her, though she agrees to follow him to the hospital cafeteria where she unloads her many justifiable grievances and complaints in regard to the seemingly nightmarish nature of their terribly failed romance.  Somewhat ridiculously, Marianne more or less blames LeTour for ruining her entire life. Indeed, when LeTour dares to happily state to her in regard to their past relationship, “We were happy,” she somewhat aggressively replies, “We were miserable. We were either scoring or coming down. Mostly coming down.” Naturally, when the protagonist states, “Out on the streets dancing with friends. . .We were magical,” Marianne begs to differ and replies, “You took off for 3 months without telling me and called once. That’s how magical we were. You were an encyclopedia of suicidal fantasies. I heard every one. I mean, nobody could clear a room like you, John. And the friends, you may have noticed, turned out to be mine, not yours. I envy you. A convenient memory is a gift from God. In rehab it’s called ‘Euphoric Recall.’ You only remember the highs, never the lows.” Of course, Marianne's unwavering negatively and hostility does not stop LeTour from attempting to get her back, as he then brags to her about being clean from drugs for two years and states, “If I could do that, I could do anything. We could do anything. We could start all over again.” Somewhat annoyed that he is attempting to drag her back into a relationship that she assumes will be catastrophic for her life, Marianne abruptly decides to leave, though the viewer suspects that she still loves the protagonist and that she is fighting as hard as she can to not give into her deep-seated emotional and lustful longings. That night, instead of thinking about Marianne when he gets home, LeTour writes in regard to his sassy fag hag boss, “I can always find another way to make a living. I never planned this in the first place. Not like Ann. She came up to sell, have parties, make contacts. She was glamorous. I just wanted to be around her. She’d sit up listening to coke stories. Now it’s me and Robert. The whole crowd was the same age then. Everybody’s younger now. She made me.” Of course, LeTour’s desire to reignite his romance with Marianne does not end there. 

 When he has a lunch ‘date’ with Ann the next day, LeTour asks his beauteous boss, “What are the odds of meeting someone that you haven’t seen in years twice in 2 days?” and she reveals her affinity for metaphysical mumbo jumbo by replying, “If it’s indicated in your house of relationships, it’s pretty high. You should have Robert do your chart.” Indeed, aside from playing films directed by Crowleyite auteur Kenneth Anger at her apartment (indeed, during a scene at the beginning of the film, Scorpio Rising (1964) can be seen playing on a TV in Ann's apartment), Ann is into numerology and Madame Blavatsky, among other things that demonstrate that she is a superstitious chick who lives life according to ‘emotions’ and ‘senses’ as opposed to reason. While LeTour and Ann both seem like they want to declare their romantic affection for one another, it seems like they have too many emotional and psychological hang-ups to say what they really mean. When Ann asks him if he will still keep in contact with her after they close their underground stardust operation, LeTour holds Ann’s hand and passionately declares in an unintentionally goofy fashion, “Ann, you want me, just call. Write a letter, tell a wino, I’ll be there.” Naturally, Ann is somewhat taken aback by LeTour’s response and does not know how to react. While LeTour’s conversation with Ann does not lead to anywhere romantic, he does finally rekindle his long awaited lurid love affair with his ex-flame Marianne later that night. Indeed, while she does accuse the protagonist of wasting a decade of her life, Marianne cannot help but kiss him in the hospital hallway and then take him back to her inordinately stylishly decorated apartment where they make passionate love. Notably, it is apparently the first time the two have fucked when they were both sober. While staring at LeTour’s purple-headed love truncheon, Marianne remarks while practically drooling, “That’s quite an erection!” and he replies, “I never had anything like it stoned.” In fact, Marianne is so hopelessly horny that she gleefully confesses to the protagonist in regard to her aroused main vein, “I’m dripping.” While the two have seemingly otherworldly sex and subsequently fall asleep while embracing one another in a loving fashion, LeTour later awakes to find Marianne getting dressed and preparing to sneak out of the apartment, thus underscoring the female character's annoyingly emotionally schizophrenic behavior.  When LeTour questions her about what she is doing, Marianne states in an exceedingly bitchy fashion, “This is the end. It was wonderful and I’m glad it happened this way. It will never happen again. You will not call me. You will not see me again. I’m happy for you. I wish you the best. I’m leaving. I shouldn’t have left the hospital, but I don’t regret it. Please get dressed and leave as soon as you can. I have a key. Bye.”  Needless to say, LeTour refuses to accept his ladylove's rather callous final farewell, though, as the film soon demonstrates, both he and she would have been better off if he had.

 On top of the fact that Marianne has dropped out of his life again and refuses to return his calls, LeTour finds himself being hassled by a short angry guido cop with the rather fitting name Bill Guidone (Robert Cicchini) who threatens to bust him if he does not give him any leads regarding the death of the rich 19-year-old “co-ed bitch” that was found with dope on her, stating in a stereotypically bombastic wop-ish fashion, “Tell me something I don’t already know. It’s either that, leave town, or get your ass busted day in, day out.” When LeTour discovers that Marianne’s mother has finally died, he makes the major mistake of randomly showing up at the funeral where he is predictably immediately verbally reamed by his morbidly depressed (ex)lover. Indeed, as soon as she sees the protagonist walk into the funeral home, Marianne causes a scene by smacking and pushing him while screaming in his face like a demented banshee bitch on crack, “Every time you come into my life something terrible happens. I thought I was rid of you. What are you . . . ? How did you . . . ? I don’t want you here! I don’t want you around! I don’t want you around my mother! Damn you! Just get out! Get the fuck out of my life! Get out! Get out of here!” As LeTour soon discovers, Marianne’s mother died when they were fucking, hence her hateful irrational hostility towards him, as if their lovemaking session resulted in her mommy's long overdue death. Later that night when LeTour goes to deliver some drugs to Swiss twit Tis at his luxury sky rise apartment, he is horrified to find Marianne there totally stoned out of her mind.  Needless to say, Marianne is quite embarrassed and refrains from saying anything to LeTour. When a visibly highly dejected LeTour exits the apartment building, he soon hears a woman scream and receives the heartbreaking shock of a lifetime when he sees Marianne’s corpse lying on the sidewalk pavement.  Naturally, LeTour refuses to believe that Marianne would commit suicide by jumping out of a building. While the police, media, and even her family conclude that Marianne committed self-slaughter since she was morbidly depressed as a result of both her's mother death and the fact that she had completely ruined her life and had nothing to live for, LeTour immediately realizes that Tis killed both the 19-year-old teen and his lady love and thus seeks to take revenge against the super smug Swiss neo-preppie prick. 

 After calling guido cop Guidone and telling him that Marianne was murdered and hinting that Tis was the killer, LeTour decides that he must protect himself and buys a handgun from a sleazy Latino and his sub-literate Afro-Hispanic homeboy. When Ann demands that the protagonist deliver some drugs to Tis, he attempts to refuse and complains, “I don’t want to go. I have a bad vibe.” Ultimately, LeTour eventually reluctantly agrees to deliver dope to Tis when Ann volunteers to accompany him, though he demands that they make a detour stop at his apartment so that he can grab his supposed “lucky sweater” (aka his gun). When the two cultivated coke dealers finally arrive at Tis’ place, they are shocked to see two armed bodyguards at the door. In fact, the bodyguards piss Ann off so much that she grabs one of their guns, tosses it onto the ground, and yells, “I told you greasy fucks, no guns! When I see a fucking gun, I walk! How fucking dare you?!” Of course, Ann does not stop there, as she goes up to the other body guard—a small and swarthy mestizo—and hits him in the testicles while screaming, “And I don’t know who you are, you little beaner, but kiss my fat ass!” When Tis finally comes out, he apologizes for the weapons and says they are merely for “emphasis.” While Ann somewhat calms down, she knows something is suspicious when Tis tells her to leave so that he can talk to LeTour about police matters. Undoubtedly a smart little bitch that does not take shit from anyone, Ann follows Tis' demand by exiting the apartment but then proceeds to start screaming “fire” while knocking on various apartment doors, thus assuring the police will soon be there. As soon as Ann begins screaming like a harpy, a somewhat anticlimatic gun fight breaks out that ends with Tis running to a back bedroom while LeTour shoots and kills his two bodyguards, though the protagonist is shot in both the arm and leg in the process. Clearly in great pain as a result of his wounds, LeTour wobbles into the back bedroom where he shoots LeTour in the middle of the forehead while he less than inconspicuously attempts to grab a gun that he has hidden inside a duffle bag. Naturally, LeTour is subsequently imprisoned for murdering Tis and the two body guards, though he is in inordinately high spirits for a man that will probably spend the next half of a decade locked inside a cage located inside a maximum security prison full of psychopathic negro rapists, Latino gang members, and goombah gangsters, among other forms of human rabble. In the final scene of the film, which is an obvious homage to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), Ann visits LeTour in jail and the two expression their desire begin a lurid love affair. Indeed, after describing how he will probably spend no more than 5-7 years in prison, LeTour reveals that he is in high hopes and tells Ann, “It hasn’t been so bad. It’s a relief in a way. So far. I’ve been writing. . .And reading.”  LeTour also decides to ask Ann, “Did we ever fuck?,” even though he already knows the answer.  In regard to their future plan to finally fuck, LeTour states to Anne, “It’s one of the things I think about. One of the things I look forward to. I’ve been looking forward,” to which she replies, “Me, too. Strange how things work.” In the end, LeTour kisses Ann’s hand as a sort of gesture of love and devotion to her, even if it is doubtful that any woman would wait so many years for a man, especially a man whose member she never even got to sample. 

 Undoubtedly, the great borderline infuriating irony of Light Sleeper is that the hapless protagonist only becomes ‘free’ when he is imprisoned, as if he was so perennially stubborn in his fatalistically forlorn mindset that it took becoming a murderous criminal to realize what was right in front of his face all along, especially in terms of love, but of course one should not expect anything less from a Schrader flick where the whole Bressonian redemption motif is taken to almost absurdist extremes that border on the (pseudo)Biblical. Another great irony of the film is that, although it is hopelessly late-1980s/early-1990s in terms of overall aesthetic and largely soulless characters and was made at a time where auteurist cinema was practically completely dead, it is more auteur oriented and non-commercial in its essence than the most personal and idiosyncratic works of the New Hollywood era.  Somewhat inexplicably, even the rather outmoded score by Michael Been (who incidentally played the apostle John in the Schrader penned Scorsese flick The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)) still manages to perfectly compliment the film (notably, Schrader originally planned to use some Bob Dylan songs, but luckily he decided otherwise). It should also be noted that the film was shot by American cinematographer Edward Lachman who got his start acting as an assistant director and cameraman on Werner Herzog’s masterpiece Stroszek (1977) and would go on to shoot important cinematic works ranging from Larry Clark’s quasi-pornographic skater melodrama Ken Park (2002) to Ulrich Seidl’s no less pornographic anti-globalization drama Import/Export (2007) to Todd Solondz’s pedo piece Life During Wartime (2009). While it is quite obvious that Lachman at least partly modeled his cinematography after Taxi Driver, especially the many scenes where the protagonist is riding in a taxi, Schrader had the cinematographer watch a couple early Michelangelo Antonioni films to give him an idea of the look he wanted (notably, as the auteur once stated in regard to the film's look, “Antonioni is always good to look at because he loves to define situations by architecture”). Of course, the NYC architecture featured in the film is as dreary and emotionally oppressive as the protagonist’s forsaken soul, thus making it all the more fitting that it concludes in a brightly lit white prison after the protagonist has figuratively ‘seen the light.’ 

 While Light Sleeper is surely not my favorite Schrader flick, it is arguably the director's most immaculate cinematic work to date. Indeed, aside from the dubiousness of the somewhat abrupt murderous climax (personally, I could not imagine a passive pussy like the protagonist killing anyone, let alone three men in a couple minutes) and glaring recycling of the Bressonian ending of American Gigolo, there is not much to criticize (indeed, I even found Susan Sarandon, who I usually cannot stand, quite fuckable, even when I was hoping someone would shove their cock in her mouth so that she would shut up). In its depiction of swarthy Wall Street types high on dope and a scene where Sarandon repugnantly flirts with a young Hasidic Hebrew that she regularly does ‘business’ with, Schrader’s film also has a vague and wholly unintentional Der Stürmer-esque quality.  Considering the film's decidedly dispiriting tone and grim and gloomy aesthetic essence, I think it is only fitting that it features a Hasidic Jew, as they subscribe to a religion that worships death and they have a physical appearance that I personally find to be more insufferably grotesque than that of a semi-rotten bloated corpse, but I digress.  While Light Sleeper has what might be described as a happy ending, it is still a decided downer that sometimes makes Taxi Driver seem like a dark romantic-comedy by comparison, even if it is nowhere near as violent or sleazy (in fact, Schrader should be commended for his understated approach to such subversive material).  After all, there is not many films were a terribly troubled loner finds solace after killing three guys and being imprisoned, but such is the uniquely unhinged vision of a (once) suicidal lapsed Calvinist that was a member of a supposedly hip cocaine-fueled cocksucker party scene during the 1970s despite being heterosexual.  A bizarrely optimistic ‘feel-bad’ flick that concludes in an almost absurdly yet somehow fittingly utopian way, Light Sleeper is a film that demonstrates to the viewer in a sensitively nuanced fashion that, no matter how miserable and unendurable existence gets, there will always be another exciting chapter in your life, even if your great love is thrown out of a building by a rather dapper Swiss psychopath.  

-Ty E