The French Connection

Explicit content warning

05/14/20 • 64 min

Sean and Cody descend into the crime-ridden hellscape of early 1970s New York to examine urban environments and how they played on the silver screen at the dawn of “New Hollywood.” In The French Connection, a thoroughly unpleasant unhinged racist cop (Gene Hackman) and his surprisingly rational partner (Roy Scheider) spy on a Mafia-connected high roller (Tony LoBianco) and figure that he’s up to no good. In fact he’s about to bring a huge score of magic white powder over from France, hidden in the innumerable crevasses of one of the ugliest cars ever manufactured. Will the cops shut down the French junk chute in time? Environmental issues discussed include de-industrialization and the decay of American inner cities, white flight and “redlining,” the geographic dimensions of the transatlantic trade in heroin, and more.

How did parts of New York, Detroit and other cities wind up resembling the ruins of Dresden after World War II? What did postwar federal mortgage programs have to do with drugs? Why did so much heroin come out of Marseilles in the ‘60s and where did it end up? How do you disassemble a Lincoln Continental down to the sub-atomic level and then put it back together so that no one notices? Why is Gene Hackman so angry in this movie? How do you film the world’s greatest car chase without permits? How did Tricky Dick Nixon rig the drug laws to make life miserable for people he didn’t like? What’s with that totally insane jazz music on the soundtrack? All of these questions will be thoroughly roughed-up, interrogated and booked on this episode of Green Screen.

Sean's Video on "The Places of the French Connection": https://youtu.be/9MG5KxQxIcA

The French Connection at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067116/

The French Connection at Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/the-french-connection/

Next Movie: Tremors (1990)

Website for This Episode

Sean's Video on "The Places of the French Connection": https://youtu.be/9MG5KxQxIcA

The French Connection at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067116/

The French Connection at Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/the-french-connection/

Next Movie: Tremors (1990)

Website for This Episode

Previous Episode

The Empire Strikes Back

Life on Earth is too depressing right now, so Sean and Cody blast over to the ice planet of Hoth (which looks suspiciously like Finse, Norway) to figure out how the Star Wars gang handles a cryonic environment. In The Empire Strikes Back, resistance heartthrob Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) gets his face effed up by the Bumble creature from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer while testy Han Solo (Harrison Ford) sells Wookie kisses and the rebellion prepares for an epic space battle with military tactics straight out of 1916. Analysis of The Empire Strikes Back touches not just on icy environments and how to live there, but how science fiction often depicts the environment, the cultural memory of Vietnam, Art Deco design and its socioeconomic assumptions, and how this film in particular evokes the classic “Golden Age” science fiction of yesteryear’s pulp magazines.

The idea for this episode started with a single inexplicable question: what do tauntauns eat? In addition to that burning inquiry, numerous others come up. Is the “wampa” monster the astral equivalent of a baby alligator flushed into the New York City sewers? Wouldn’t Cloud City be way too cold to just walk around outside? Why do people who work in Antarctica dread touching doorknobs? What can a train ride across Norway teach you about Star Wars? What’s the ideology of the Empire? Why are sci-fi planets so often depicted as having only one climate? Is the lining of Lando’s cape made of Corinthian leather? Is the “I am your father” thing just a cop-out? We’re ready to target all these questions and more on this episode of Green Screen. The shield will be down in moments!

The Empire Strikes Back at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080684/

The Empire Strikes Back at Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/the-empire-strikes-back/

Next Movie: The French Connection (1971)

Website for This Episode

Next Episode

Tremors

Eager to escape the drug-addled inner city of the last episode, Sean and Cody tool on out to dusty rural Nevada in search of subterranean beasties that seem to have a taste for almost-leading-man that-guy actors, the dad from Family Ties and an especially fetching Fred Ward. In Tremors, bromatic handymen Val (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Ward) start finding dead people all over the place, apparently chomped by hungry creatures who have inexplicably decided that humans are their new favorite food. Can Val and Earl rescue the beleaguered denizens of Perfection, Nevada from the hordes of grabby ghoulies, or will they end up as fertilizer? Environmental issues discussed include nuclear weapons testing, cultural fears of the unintended consequences of technology, and the centrality of water infrastructure to the modern West.

How did our hosts (one of whom has a Ph.D.) initially get fooled into thinking Paradise, Nevada was a real place? Are the “graboids” recent arrivals on the scene, or have they always been there, and if they have, how come no one noticed them before? Is the infamous “nuke the fridge” scene from Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull based on a true story? Did Howard Hughes give John Wayne cancer? What happens when you set off a nuke underground? Why should you never underestimate the power of slime? What’s a “Weisiger moment”? How many degrees of separation is our podcast’s biggest fan away from the real Kevin Bacon? Was the premise of the sitcom Family Ties funny to anyone who wasn’t a Baby Boomer? All these questions will be messily devoured in this monstrous episode of Green Screen.

Tremors at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100814/ Tremors at Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/tremors/

Next movie: Princess Mononoke (1997)

Website For This Episode