When the Rules Change
What The French Connection reveals about a world that no longer plays by the same rules.
Deep Life Reflections | Essay 125 | James Gibb
We spend years getting good at things the world no longer rewards.
In Range, writer David Epstein makes an interesting distinction between the types of problems we face. He calls them “kind problems” versus “wicked problems.”
Kind problems are closed, stable, and predictable. The rules are clear, the patterns repeat, and feedback is immediate. Chess is a classic example. Then there are wicked problems. These are complex, unpredictable, and often unique. The rules may change at any time, the feedback is delayed or incomplete, and past solutions don’t always fit the present. Most modern careers now fall into the second category. In a wicked world, Epstein argues that it’s breadth—the ability to draw on different fields, to connect ideas across contexts, and to adapt—that gives us the edge.
If Epstein gives us the framework for this idea of how to survive in a wicked world, one where the rules have changed or simply no longer apply, then cinema gives us the character. Popeye Doyle.
“That son of a bitch is here. I saw him. I’m gonna get him.”
That’s the last line of William Friedkin’s multiple-Oscar-winning The French Connection, and it sums up the character perfectly. New York City Narcotics Detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle, played by the late, great Gene Hackman in his breakout role, is no meticulous specialist. He’s impulsive, prejudiced, obsessive, and volatile. He doesn’t think in systems or operate in predictable environments. He reacts, adapts, and keeps pushing forward. Above all, he’s relentless. He doesn’t wait for the rules to make sense.
The film was released at the dawn of the 1970s, the greatest decade in cinema. New Hollywood was in full swing. Young, ambitious directors like Coppola, Scorsese, and Spielberg were taking their cameras into the streets, creating morally ambiguous characters we’d never seen before. The French Connection led the way, with its young, risk-taking director drawing inspiration from the energy and realism of the French New Wave—Godard, Truffaut—and bringing that restless style to American cinema.
On the surface, the film is about a major drug trafficking case: $4 million worth of heroin smuggled from Marseilles to New York, hidden in a car. Doyle and his partner, Buddy ‘Cloudy’ Russo (Roy Scheider), close in on the ringleaders. But the pursuit is elusive. Every lead slips away, much to Popeye’s growing fury.
New York has never looked so grim. This is no love letter to America’s most famous city. Shot in the dead of winter, it’s grimy, freezing, and stripped of any glamour. I felt cold just watching it. The crew felt it too, cameras and equipment often froze in the frigid temperatures. Like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which revealed a Paris far from the postcards, Friedkin’s New York is filthy, stripped-back, and dangerous, acting as a metaphor for Popeye’s mind.
In the character of Popeye, we have a portrait of obsession. And this is at the centre of the film. Doyle is deeply flawed, his judgment is questionable, his morality ambiguous, his policing often reckless. And yet, we root for him because he acts. He’s no Gary Cooper in High Noon, standing tall in clear-cut moral territory. This is a messy world—a wicked environment—and in that environment, it’s Doyle’s imperfection, his instinct, and his refusal to stop that pull him closer to the arrest.
Hackman is superb as Doyle. A natural pacifist, he initially struggled to inhabit the role’s violence and aggression. Friedkin pushed him hard, and Hackman almost quit on the second day. But he persisted, dug deep, and delivered a performance that won him a Best Actor at the Oscars and a little bit of cinematic immortality.
The film’s most famous moment, an 11-minute chase that begins on foot and explodes into a breakneck car-versus-train pursuit, is still fantastic. Part of its power comes from how real it feels: Friedkin had no permits from the city, so he shot it guerrilla-style with stunt driver Bill Hickman (fresh from Steve McQueen’s Bullitt) tearing through Brooklyn traffic, and pedestrians, at genuine high speeds, which is very obvious on watching. In one brilliant anecdote years later, Friedkin recalled getting permission to film on the elevated train after handing a New York official $40,000 and a one-way ticket to Jamaica. Friedkin admitted in his memoir that he regretted the risks he’d taken, calling them incredibly irresponsible, and said that if he had the chance to do it again, he wouldn’t.
Like many great films of the ’70s, The French Connection is rooted in fact. It’s based on Robin Moore’s 1969 book The French Connection: A True Account of Cops, Narcotics, and International Conspiracy, itself drawn from real detectives and real cases. Friedkin’s version, like the stripping of the drug car in the final scene, strips away the glamour of the crime genre and neat, tied-up endings, replacing them with grit and an ending that feels intentionally unsatisfying, mirroring real-life.
The French Connection emerged in an America where trust in institutions was crumbling. The Vietnam War dragged on, the Pentagon Papers had been leaked, and Watergate was just around the corner. Half a century later, in 2025, we have a very similar set of circumstances, just a different set of names.
Audiences back in the early 70s were ready for anti-heroes: flawed, morally ambiguous figures who looked nothing like the polished ideals of 1950s cinema. Doyle fit the moment perfectly. Here was a cop who bent and broke the rules as it suited him. A year later, Clint Eastwood would bring his anti-hero to the screen in the form of Harry Callaghan, better known as Dirty Harry. Another character walking a moral tightrope.
Which brings me back to David Epstein’s Range, and his idea of kind and wicked problems. How do we act when the world refuses to follow the rules? In such a world, developing range, in thought, in experience, in our responses, seems to be more essential than ever.
You don’t need certainty. You need the ability to act without it.
That’s why The French Connection still endures more than half a century later. It’s about a flawed man in a chaotic world willing to act without certainty.
And in wicked environments, that’s sometimes the only way forward.
Because the rules aren’t coming back.
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