People have begun to notice that the Woke Fascists have censored The French Connection (1971), which won the Oscar for Best Picture.
The fascist culprit is almost certainly the child groomers at Disney.
About ten minutes into William Friedkin’s masterpiece, while the characters of Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider) are being established, the narcotics detectives exchange the following dialogue:
Doyle: You dumb guinea.
Cloudy: How the hell did I know he had a knife?
Doyle: Never trust a ni**er.
Cloudy: He coulda been white.
Doyle: Never trust anyone.
This happens after a long day after a black drug pusher slashes Russo.
A commenter over at Hollywood Elsewhere noticed the censorship while watching the urban classic (#20 on my all-time list)on the Criterion Channel, a streaming platform (ironically) dedicated to preserving old and new classic films. Jeff Wells, who runs Hollywood Elsewhere, checked it out and found that the Criterion Channel is indeed running a censored version.
It gets worse… According to Hollywood Elsewhere commenters, the movie was censored at a May 12 screening at the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theater, Turner Classic Movies is running a censored print, and iTunes is selling a censored print.
So, it looks like the film’s distributor, 20th Century Fox, is censoring and vandalizing one of the greatest movies ever made and licensing out the censored version.
Guess who owns 20th Century Fox and has for over four years already?
That’s right, the child groomers at Disney.
So, unless Aero, the Criterion Channel, Turner Classic Movies, and iTunes are censoring the movie on their own (which is unlikely), the art vandals here are the perverts and fetishists at Walt Disney.
Imagine how morally broken Disney must be to think it’s okay to expose children incapable of consent to adult sexuality, transsexuals, homosexuality, transvestites, and drag queens, but then that same Disney (if Disney is the party responsible) vandalizes a classic to “protect” adults from a racial slur in a 50-year-old, R-rated movie?
A poster for William Friedkin’s 1971 ‘The French Connection’ starring Gene Hackman. (Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images)
Even if Popeye Doyle’s use of the slur was gratuitous, it is still obscene to censor any kind of art, much less a Best Picture Oscar winner. What makes it worse is that the slur is not gratuitous. The French Connection presents life as it is, not as we would like it. Yes, it’s based on a true story, and Doyle and Russo are both based on real cops (who appear in the movie), but “based on” doesn’t mean the real Doyle was racist. For example, the French Connection ends with an obsessed Doyle shooting another cop and hardly blinking an eye.
That never happened.
Regardless, what Friedkin (who won Best Director) and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman (who won Best Adapted Screenplay) are doing in that scene is defining their characters. Doyle is no hero. He’s a complicated, dangerous, and sometimes amoral obsessive pursuing a righteous cause (bringing down an international drug dealer). So, like many people in those days, he uses racial slurs—and not just ni**er. He also says “guinea” and frequently refers to his prey, Frenchman Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), as that “frog sonofabitch.”
I don’t know if the Doyle character is racist or a misanthrope. One of the endless pleasures of the French Connection is trying to figure Doyle out. One moment you empathize with him; the next, he betrays your empathy. One moment he’s a hero; the next, he’s a grade-A jerk. Great movies don’t give you all the answers. Instead, they challenge you to work through the complicated emotions that come with a complicated protagonist. This approach is good for society. Forcing us to confront complicated emotions thickens our skin, helps us mature, and makes us wiser.
American actor Gene Hackman with director William Friedkin on the set of his movie The French Connection, based on the book by Robin Moore. (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)
File/Original Caption/ Los Angeles, CA: French Connection producer Phillip D’ Antoni and star Gene Hackman hold the awards they won for “best picture” and “best actor” respectively at the Academy Awards ceremony. (Getty)
At best, Doyle is an anti-hero. Friedkin and Tidyman deliberately crafted him in that way because they want us to understand that 1) The French Connection is about the brutal reality of urban life, 2) cops can be racist, 3) sometimes it takes a bad guy to stop a bad guy, and 4) blind, personalized obsession in pursuit of a righteous cause is no virtue (the movie ends with that haunting and unforgettable reminder).
Go back and look at number two again: “sometimes cops can be racist.” Isn’t that the message the Woke Gestapo wants America to hear? So why censor it? I’ll tell you why… Evil cannot create; it can only destroy.
Two final points…
First, what other art is being quietly censored or removed entirely?
Second, this is why you need to purchase hard copies. Like the “books” in Fahrenheit 451, it is up to each of us to preserve art.
No amount of protest or reason will change things. Don’t waste your time complaining to Disney. Disney is evil. Disney is only interested in corrupting the innocence of your children. Evil cannot be reasoned with. Instead, you have out-maneuver them, and the only way to do that is to purchase a hard copy.
If you own a digital copy, even one that wasn’t censored when you purchased it, I suggest you look again. Disney probably went in and censored it, but, you know, for your own good.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.