We are ten minutes into William Friedkin’s The French Connection and we’ve just seen our two heroes beat the shit out of a black guy. Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle (Gene Hackman) is a hard, cynical New York City police detective, a proto Dirty Harry who shoots first and asks questions never. His partner, Buddy ‘Cloudy’ Russo (Roy Scheider), is no less tough but more grounded, often having to pull Popeye back from the brink. They patrol an urban hellscape awash with drugs and crime and have identified the black guy (Alan Weeks) as a pusher. He earns his beating by pulling a blade and slashing Cloudy’s arm.
After they book him, Popeye chides his partner for being caught off-guard:
Cloudy: ‘How the hell did I know he had a knife?’
Popeye ‘Never trust a n****r.’
Cloudy: ‘He could have been white.’
Popeye: ‘Never trust anyone.’
It’s an exchange that tells us everything we need to know about Popeye. Unless, that is, we are watching the movie on the Criterion Channel, a US streaming platform that specialises in artistically and culturally important cinema. The version streaming there has been edited to remove the n-word. It is not the only venue running a bowdlerised recut, with Apple TV and Turner Classic Movies reportedly streaming censored cuts. It’s not clear whether these platforms requested a censored version of the 1971 narco thriller, or whether they are simply streaming the cut licensed to them by rights-owner Disney.
The French Connection is a cornerstone of New Hollywood, which lasted from the late Sixties to the dawn of the Reagan era and saw young filmmakers seize control of the movie industry from the studios. From this creative insurrection came an eruption of popular artworks that would go on to define not only their era but a cinematic benchmark often reached for but seldom met. In the movie, Friedkin’s fifth feature as director, you can see the influence of the Warner Brothers’ gangster pictures and the hand-held camerawork and impatient editing of Jean-Luc Godard, and you can also glimpse the germs of The Godfather, Thief, Heat and Se7en. It was named Best Picture at the 1972 Academy Awards and took home four other Oscars. In 2005, the Library of Congress acquired a print for preservation on its National Film Registry.
To take the censor’s scissors to a movie like this requires not only supreme arrogance but an invincible philistinism. A moralist might demand that a director conform with contemporary mores and a dullard might advise an artist to avoid controversy, but only a wanton vandal would step in and slash away at the artwork himself. Even iconoclasts believed their destruction was in service of the Sacred but the modern-day Smasher Dowsings see movies as nothing more than products and the more banal the product the more markets you can sell it to.
To take the censor’s scissors to a movie like this requires not only supreme arrogance but an invincible philistinism
Where a creator understands that risk and provocation are inseparable from art, a corporate curator is in the business of churning out bland vanilla pudding and perceives anything difficult or challenging or thought-provoking as lumps to be scooped out before serving. It may be rationalised as anticipating the expectations of today’s audience or spun as a solemn statement of anti-racism, but it is really a joint enterprise between commercial interests and cultural soullessness.
Scoop out the n-word from The French Connection and you don’t just hurt the rhythm of that scene, you deny the audience an honest accounting of the movie’s lead character. You smooth his roughest edge — you change him. Popeye is not meant to be a hero and the critics of the day understood that. ‘There are no good guys in this harsh new variant of cops-and-robbers,’ Pauline Kael observed, only a ‘shrewd bully’ with ‘a filthy mouth and a complete catalogue of race prejudices’. Dilys Powell called Hackman’s portrayal ‘a performance of devoted, inexorable vindictiveness’. The best Alexander Walker could say of him was that he exemplified ‘a kind of grubby honour’.
Popeye is not John T Chance, the right-minded sheriff of Rio Bravo who recruits an everyman posse to uphold justice, but Will Kane, the idealist lawman of High Noon who grows embittered by the cowardice of the townsfolk. Popeye is what Kane might have become if, instead of tossing his shield away in disgust, he had stayed on in Hadleyville and sunk into the corruption and the cynicism.
To police an irredeemable city, Popeye has had to become irredeemable. His unorthodox methods are said to have got another officer killed. He wears his .38 in an ankle holster so that when he puts the moves on a woman and rubs up against her, she won’t know he’s a cop. The world he inhabits is made up of ‘spics’, ‘guineas’ and ‘greaseballs’, of dope-dealing blacks who don’t need Mapp, Gideon, Escobedo and Miranda, but raids, fists, pat-downs and back-alley interrogations. Of course, if you see The French Connection as a series of racial insensitivities, you didn’t see The French Connection.
The censoring of the movie is of a piece with HBO Max’s temporary withdrawal of Gone With the Wind in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and the decision by other streaming services to excise episodes of sitcoms containing racial language, stereotypes or blackface. But it is short-sighted to see the treatment of The French Connection as merely a function of wokeism. The political pathologies of elite institutions play a role but streaming censorship, like the ‘updating’ of Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse, is an exercise of raw corporate power and an attempt to control access to art and unilaterally rewrite cultural history.
The major streaming services already self-censor in culturally conservative markets such as India and Saudi Arabia, but this is typically to head off the threat of state censorship. In the West, streaming censorship is flourishing where no such threat exists. In 2020, Netflix was caught streaming a cut of Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future II in which Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) no longer discovers a girlie mag while looking for a sports almanac. Disney+ subscribers have spotted a series of stealth edits to beloved movies, from covering up Daryl Hannah’s bare backside in 1984’s Splash to dropping a ‘casting couch’ joke from Toy Story 2. Big Mouse’s streamed version of Adventures in Babysitting alters the much-quoted ‘Don’t fuck with the babysitter’ line to ‘Don’t fool with the babysitter’ and an instance of ‘homo’ to ‘weirdo’. Disney+ has also censored a scene of Goofy smoking a cigarette in the 1942 live-action animated adventure Saludos Amigos, thus saving a generation of children who might otherwise have developed a 20-a-day habit from an 80-year-old anthology film.
Purchasing a title on streaming, as opposed to streaming the content available at a given time, offers no protection from censorship. Generally speaking, users do not own the movies, TV shows or music they buy from streaming platforms and these services can withdraw films, episodes or entire series at any time. Three years on from the post-George Floyd streaming cull, users who have paid to stream withdrawn episodes are still unable to access them. Because censorship is contagious, with no streaming service wanting to be seen as platforming racist content that its rivals have purged, we should expect uncensored cuts of The French Connection to become rarer. The version playing on Amazon Prime UK still contains the n-word scene but it’s anyone’s guess how much longer that will be the case.
There is no solution to streaming censorship that doesn’t ultimately put money in the pockets of the censors, but there is one that will deprive them of their ability to revise popular artworks at a corporate whim. That solution is to continue buying physical media. The cultural gatekeepers can butcher The French Connection on your watchlist but not the one on your shelf. There is a demand for special edition DVDs and Blu-Rays of classic, obscure, underground and controversial movies, a demand often driven by a desire to see uncut versions of movies that were edited for theatrical distribution. This demand has created a market for boutique companies to acquire the rights to produce luxury releases complete with directors’ cuts, censored scenes restored and myriad extras that justify big price-tags, which aficionados are only too willing to pay.
Fans of horror and exploitation movies, familiar with the vagaries of censorship and public disapprobation, grasped before others the value of physical media. Small labels like Arrow, Blue Underground and Vinegar Syndrome have found success retailing expertly produced releases of the sorts of films unlikely to be hosted by a streaming service at all, let alone uncensored. Cinephiles who shrugged at censorship of Gone With the Wind — well, it is pretty racist and hardly peak film art — now see the censors coming for movies they treasure.
That a film was once mainstream, or has been designated a classic, or is regarded as art does not shield it from censorship. Movies, even at their finest, are no match for market interests and the impulse to cultural conformity. Sooner or later, these forces will come for a film that means something to you. Invest in it now or lose it forever.
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