The French Connection

Winner of five Oscars including best picture, director and actor this grimy cop movie is short on characterization and long on law-and-order fervour. The redoubtable Gene Hackman is the maverick cop Popeye Doyle who reins in foreign (French) drug peddlars. The film is memorable for two reasons, its innovative, perfectly helmed and edited action sequences and a blatant exploitation of the anxieties of Americas "silent majority" during the tumultuous and uncertain times of the 70s