The True star of this movie is New York City

Its loud , its big and its falling apart at the seems, the whole entire enterprise is just an excuse to show how far New York City had fallen by 1973. Every shot is chosen to accentuate the negative, Cops question suspects in front of the backdrop of condemned lots full of rubble and abandoned buildings , that look down like dead ghosts from another time..
New York of 1973 is junkified, both figuratively and literally , the people as well as the city itself are ready for the trash heap. The "nice" people, escaped to the suburbs, in this is what is left behind: Pure Chaos. A city so desperately in need of help, that only men as Vicious as Popeye Doyle can do the job. But Popeye is a sadist, he enjoys beating people up, the city and its dysfunction allows him to express his wildest fetishes all in the name of the law.-he wouldn't have it any other way.
The New York we see, is the result of free will, people have abandoned it, they better dealed it, it got too much for them, they quit on it.Especially when all the minorities came in, and then the drugs, it became a boiling cauldron of despair, So the white faces took their kids and escaped, some north to westchester, others east to long Island, others over the bridge to staten island, they got as far away as they could, and they left the outer boroughs to rot.
Most of what we see, happens in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, because manhattan -the Golden City-where the rich lived , and the tourists visited didn't change too much, though with budget cuts and less police and garbage pickups it was a far cry from what it is now.
Early 1970s New York was probably the Nader of the City, when it hit rock bottom, due to budget constraints and a increase in crime, that liberal Mayors wee unable to stem, This film perfectly epitomizes that time, the mere randomness of the chaos. The new normal, that people just and to deal with, they had no other choice.
The French Connection is just one of the movies that turned New York City into the poster child of Dystopia run-amok. Midnight Cowboy was the first"Death Wish" would follow . All of it springs from a angst, caused by thoughts of the Holocaust , theVietnam War and Watergate, when it seemed human beings could not be trusted in anyway, and the best defense was to move away from them, and even then put iron bars on all the windows.
The emotion these movies manifest from is fear, fear is exploited as it always is to peak the interest of the movie goer, to give him something he can't see by staying home and watching TV-a manufactured stab at truth. Some area of the city had become as dangerous and as wild as any place on earth, still there were enclaves of civilization, vanguards of safety , neighborhoods that were barricades against the insanity.
But the movies never shows the good neighborhoods, as far as the audience knows there are no good ones, the movie is also shot in winter, to accentuate the grimness, Winter, wherever it is a source of misery. Peoople looking uncomfortable, tan-less skin, chalky, unhappy, and in this movie a cold wind is always blowing. people grimace even when nothing bad is happening to them. the Winter is of course a metaphor, and the director uses it brilliantly .
Locations are chosen for their griminess, whether it be a police chop shop, or in the last scene some deserted factory, with not a lightbulb to spare, all is dark and gloomy, the audience leaves the movie theatre checking themselves for bugs.
Movies always exaggerated, everything is magnified , But in the French Connection, the Bleak streets that popeye doyle worked his turf, we see what is actually happening, while sections of a city abdoned to crime and deviancy , most of it the results of drugs and the chaos they caused. Popeye Doyle grew up in a city before the drugs, a different New York, and he is the classical man, trying to return it back to the way it was, to return to his childhood, tilting at windmills, a man who cannot be bought off, Sisyphus in the flesh, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only to see it fall back to the same starting point. So, is the war on drugs-and that has never changed.
The Director is doing all of this subconsciously, in the hopes that his film will illuminate how bad the city has become, through a host of apocalyptic horsemen, Prejudice, Crime, Drugs, and corruption. The worst of them all is political corruption, because when the elected official only crd about graft and kickback money a city falling apart, a city defenseless, is the result.