A French Connection Hello?

 

There's a flic in Marseille as we open on a peaceful day when a man strolls into a café, picks up a piece of bread to munch and then gets shot repeatedly. It's a pretty apt opening to a movie that's full of gunfire, hand-to-hand combat, car chases, murders, snipings and slashings. And that's just the first 15 minutes.

The film's title refers to the criminal connections between Corsican gangster Paul Carbone and heroin traffickers in Marseille, which he used to ship shipments of the drug to New York. A massive police raid shattered the gang and resulted in some of the most exciting police work ever captured on film.

Almost 30 years later, The French Connection is still an action film to be treasured, and not just for its jaw-dropping stunts. It's also a fascinating cultural document that shows how we changed as a nation during the nineties. The film was a huge commercial success and tapped into the logo-laden zeitgeist of that period. Simple T-shirts bearing the FCUK slogan adorned many closets and were worn with either combat pants or parkas depending on your personal fashion philosophy.

It's a shame that, in recent years, French Connection hasn't been able to replicate this initial success. Its parent company, the Stephen Marks Group, has been a perennial loser and has reported pre-tax losses The french connection ep of around PS5m a year for the past decade or so. The fashion chain is now in danger of being FCUKed.

Marks has already shut more than half of its UK stores and is reducing its operations in the US, too. He blames the decline on the "most difficult winter season" but it's a safe bet that the brand won't be going away completely just yet. A recently relaunched homeware collection and plans to expand in China and India show that there's still life in the old frocks and suits.

Thomas Edison is credited with coining the word hello, but historian Allen Koenigsberg says that claim has "no basis in fact." Five years ago, he launched a tortuous search for an answer to this age-old mystery. It led him to archives of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in Lower Manhattan, where he discovered an unpublished letter from Edison dated August 1877. It lays out a suggestion that he was thinking of using the sonorous syllables to signal the start of a phonograph conversation.