"The French Connection" was a 1971 Oscar-winning thriller. But where in France was the "connection"?

The French Connection starred Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, and Roy Scheider and was the first R-rated movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture since the introduction of the MPAA film rating system.

The story starts in Marseille, where an undercover detective is following Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), a wealthy French criminal who runs the largest heroin-smuggling syndicate in the world. The policeman is assassinated by Charnier's hitman; Charnier plans to smuggle $32 million worth of heroin into the United States by hiding it in the car of his unsuspecting friend, a French television personality. Meanwhile in New York City, detectives Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy "Cloudy" Russo (Roy Scheider) are conducting an undercover stakeout in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn...