MovieChat Forums > The French Connection (1971) Discussion > Stripping the Car for Drugs

Stripping the Car for Drugs

posted 9 years ago by kag2
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While NYPD is stripping the car for heroin, the French drug peddlers arrive looking for their "stolen" car. Roy Schneider stalls them, then eventually presents their car to them after a few hours.

Was that the same car put back together? If so, how could they put it back together so completely after practically tearing it apart? Or was it another car of the same model?

BTW: Irv, who led the stripping of the car (but missed the rocker panels) was Irving Abrahams, the NYC police auto mechanic who in real life stripped the dirty drug car. Not a bad acting job by a novice who was playing himself.

[–] wrfarley 9 years ago

The film plays very loose with the truth here. In the real case, the car was impoounded after the arrests were made, so there was no urgency to dis-assemble and re-assemble the car, which as you point out, Irving Abrahams and his team actually did. In fact, in Robin Moore's book, it reads like it was a more exacting and time consuming task than was shown in the film. They went over the Buick Invicta inch by inch until they found the traps concealed behind the wheel well (not in the rocker panels, as shown in the film).

My hunch is that before making the film, Abrahams or somebody else told Billy Friedkin that they could pull a car apart and put it back together again in four hours, the time described in the film. Based on that bit of info, Friedkin and Ernest Tidyman decided to make the capture of the car a more dramatic scene that it actually was.