There is a moment, about halfway through The French Connection, when Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle commandeers a stranger’s car, slams it into gear, and tears off after an elevated train rattling above the Brooklyn streets. No music. No stunt doubles visible. Just the scream of an engine, the blur of storefronts, and a middle-aged cop in a porkpie hat driving like a man possessed. It remains the greatest car chase ever filmed — and the man behind the wheel of that performance was, at the time, practically nobody.
Gene Hackman was forty-one years old, twice nominated for an Oscar and still not a star, when he became Popeye Doyle. The role would win him the Academy Award for Best Actor, turn him overnight into one of the defining screen presences of the 1970s, and saddle him with a character so raw, so ugly, so uncomfortably real that Hackman himself spent years wrestling with what he had unleashed. This is the story of how that happened — the casting fight, the real-life cop who haunted the set, the chase that nearly got people killed, and the Oscar night that changed everything.
The Part Nobody Wanted Him For
The French Connection began life as producer Philip D’Antoni’s follow-up to Bullitt. D’Antoni had Robin Moore’s bestselling 1969 nonfiction book — the true story of two New York narcotics detectives who busted an international heroin ring — and he had a young director fresh off The Boys in the Band named William Friedkin. What he did not have was a star.
The studio’s wish list ran to the usual marquee names. Steve McQueen passed; he had just done Bullitt and had no appetite for another cop picture. Paul Newman’s name floated through the conversation, as it always did in those days. But the budget was under two million dollars, and Friedkin didn’t want a movie star anyway. He wanted a face that looked like it had spent twenty years on stakeouts in the cold — somebody the audience would believe actually lived in that gray, garbage-strewn New York.
Gene Hackman, at that point, was a respected character actor with two Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor — for Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and I Never Sang for My Father (1970) — and absolutely no box-office clout. Friedkin’s first instinct, by his own later admission, was that Hackman might be too soft for the part. Popeye Doyle, as written, was a brute: a racist, obsessive, borderline-alcoholic detective modeled on a real NYPD legend named Eddie Egan, a man whose methods were as notorious as his results. Friedkin worried that Hackman, with his thoughtful eyes and stage-trained intelligence, couldn’t summon that street-level menace.
Hackman wanted the role badly, and he fought for it. In the screen test, something shifted. The softness Friedkin feared turned out to be exactly what the part needed — because Doyle’s danger was never cartoonish. It was the danger of an ordinary-looking man with an extraordinary capacity for obsession. Hackman got the part. And then he and Friedkin spent the entire shoot at each other’s throats.
Meeting the Real Popeye
The ghost hovering over the production was Eddie “Popeye” Egan himself — the real narcotics detective on whom Doyle was based, a man so colorful and so controversial that he was practically a folk character in the NYPD. Egan visited the set. He watched Hackman play him. And by most accounts, he was not impressed — at least not at first. There are stories of Egan grumbling that Hackman didn’t look tough enough, didn’t walk right, didn’t feel like a cop.
But Egan’s presence served a purpose beyond authenticity. He was a walking reminder of what the film was really about: not heroism, but a particular kind of American lawman — effective, relentless, and deeply flawed. The real Egan was famous for his results and infamous for his bigotry. He used racial slurs the way other men used punctuation. And Friedkin, committed to a documentary-style realism that would come to define the film, insisted that Doyle talk the way Egan talked.
This is where Hackman drew his line — or tried to. He was profoundly uncomfortable with the racist language in Ernest Tidyman’s script. He told Friedkin so, more than once. Hackman was a liberal-minded man, a former Marine who had served alongside Black men, and spitting slurs on camera sickened him. Friedkin’s answer was blunt: this is who the man is. If you clean him up, you lie about him. Reluctantly, Hackman did it. The slurs stayed. And the discomfort you can see flickering across Doyle’s face in some scenes — that isn’t entirely acting.
It is one of the great tensions of the performance. Hackman never lets you admire Doyle, exactly. The famous bar interrogation — “All right, Popeye’s here!” followed by the surreal, menacing “You ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?” routine — is funny until it isn’t, until you realize you’re watching a man terrorize a suspect for sport. Hackman plays Doyle as a man who loves the hunt more than the justice, and the film never forgives him for it. That moral queasiness was deliberate, and it was Hackman’s own conscience bleeding into the frame.
The Chase That Nearly Killed Them
If the casting was a gamble and the characterization a tightrope, the car chase was pure madness — and it is the reason the film is still talked about more than fifty years later.
The setup is simple: a hired killer named Nicoli hijacks an elevated train on the BMT West End Line, taking a potshot at Doyle from the train. Doyle, on the street below, flags down a civilian’s 1971 Pontiac LeMans and takes off after it, racing beneath the elevated tracks along New Utrecht Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. What follows is roughly five minutes of the most visceral driving ever put on film.
Here’s what most viewers don’t know: much of it was shot without permits, on real streets, in real traffic. Friedkin has described how the production secured permission for only some stretches of road, and how off-duty cops were stationed to hold traffic — with mixed success. Stunt driver Bill Hickman did the truly hair-raising driving, hitting speeds near 90 miles per hour, threading between real cars and real pedestrians. Friedkin himself rode in the back seat operating a camera for some of the shots, bouncing around like a man in a washing machine. Hackman did some of the driving in the closer, slower shots, white-knuckled and reportedly terrified.
The chase took weeks to film in the brutal winter of 1970–71, and it shows — the gray light, the dirty snow, the steam rising off the streets. That authenticity is the whole point. There is no process trailer smoothness here, no rear-projection. When Doyle’s Pontiac clips another car, when it smashes through a construction barrier near the end, you are watching physics, not choreography. In fact, at least one of the film’s most spectacular crashes was a genuine accident — Hickman misjudged a turn and plowed into the barrier for real. Friedkin kept it in the picture. Why wouldn’t he? It was perfect.
The chase doesn’t even resolve cleanly. Doyle loses the train, arrives too late, and the sequence ends in frustration — which is exactly the film’s thesis. This is police work as grinding, dangerous, often futile obsession. Hackman’s face in those final shots of the chase — sweating, furious, humiliated — tells you everything about who Popeye Doyle is. He doesn’t want to catch the bad guy because it’s right. He wants to catch him because he has to.
Oscar Night, April 1972
When The French Connection opened in October 1971, nobody expected what happened next. Made for under two million dollars, it grossed more than fifty million — an astronomical return. Critics were stunned by its rawness; audiences were electrified. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards.
On the night of April 10, 1972, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, the film swept five of them: Best Picture, Best Director for Friedkin, Best Adapted Screenplay for Tidyman, Best Film Editing — and Best Actor for Gene Hackman.
Consider the company he beat: Peter Finch for Sunday Bloody Sunday, Walter Matthau for Kotch, George C. Scott for The Hospital, and Topol for Fiddler on the Roof. These were giants. Hackman, the forty-one-year-old former “least likely to succeed” from the Pasadena Playhouse, walked past all of them. His acceptance was characteristically unadorned — no theatrics, just a working actor’s gratitude, as if he couldn’t quite believe the room was applauding for him.
The win did something peculiar to Hackman’s career. It didn’t just make him a star; it made him a particular kind of star. Hollywood in the early seventies was drunk on pretty young antiheroes — your Redfords, your Beatty’s, your Nicholsons. Hackman was none of those things. He was craggy, thick-voiced, built like a man who’d worked with his hands. His stardom was the stardom of authority: the man in the room who’d seen things you hadn’t. For the next two decades, whenever a film needed moral weight — a reverend on a sinking ship, a surveillance expert with a conscience, a coach, a sheriff, a president’s nemesis — there was exactly one call to make.
What Popeye Left Behind
Hackman returned to Doyle once, in French Connection II (1975), directed by John Frankenheimer. It’s a strange, bleak, underrated film — Doyle goes to Marseille, gets kidnapped by the heroin ring, and is forcibly addicted to heroin himself, enduring a harrowing withdrawal sequence that Hackman plays with terrifying commitment. It didn’t come close to the original’s success, but it proved something: Hackman wasn’t interested in repeating the trick. He wanted to go darker, not bigger.
In the years that followed, he would spend a surprising amount of energy running away from Popeye Doyle — taking gentle roles, funny roles, villain roles, anything to prove he wasn’t just the snarling cop in the porkpie hat. And yet Doyle never really left him. Every coiled, quietly furious authority figure Hackman played for the rest of his career — and there were dozens — carried a little of Popeye’s DNA. The obsession. The moral fog. The sense of a man doing the wrong things for reasons he can’t quite explain.
William Friedkin died in 2023, and in his final years he still talked about the kid from the screen test who hadn’t looked tough enough. The movies remember it differently. They remember a winter in Brooklyn, a Pontiac LeMans doing ninety under the elevated tracks, and a forty-one-year-old unknown driving straight into immortality. Popeye Doyle made Gene Hackman a star. The remarkable thing is how little, in the end, he seemed to want it.