Let’s face it: Streaming video is a convenience: Just a couple of button pushes and you have your favorite movie playing on your TV.
The bad news? May not be the movie you originally watched.
Veteran film blogger Jeffrey Wells scooped everyone by revealing a censorship campaign against William Friedkin’s 1970s Best Picture winner The French Connection. Wells’s rebellious site, “Hollywood Elsewhere,” reported that multiple versions of the 1971 cop classic had been edited to remove an exchange between lead character Popeye Doyle (played by Gene Hackman) and his partner, Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (played by Roy Scheider).
The original sequence found Hackman’s character using racial slurs, an indication of the anti-hero’s tortured moral state. Critics from the era didn’t object to the sequence, nor did the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The film earned five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Hackman.
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The news didn’t make the mainstream media cut, even on platforms dedicated to covering all things entertainment (Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter). Enough movie lovers learned about the censorship via various right-leaning platforms to make the film’s Blu-ray edition soar to $142 on Amazon.com. (Most Blu-ray titles roughly run from $8-$40.) Twitter users urged peers to scoop up physical media versions of their favorite films … while they still can.The censored film is reminiscent of how “sensitivity readers” tweaked classic books by Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl in recent months to align with modern cultural mores.
The difference? No one has confessed to making the edits, nor were consumers warned about the change while watching the film on various platforms. Plus, although many news outlets covered the recent wave of sensitivity “upgrades” for books, The French Connection sanitization apparently missed most editorial meetings.
I reached out to Criterion for comment — and received no response.
Five groups dedicated to cinema and its preservation similarly ignored queries on the subject, including one founded by legendary director Martin Scorsese (The Film Foundation).
Silent Censorship of Classic Movies Has Begun – The Messenger
I have DVDs and BluRays of most of my favorite movies. If you do not, you may want to start collecting them, especially if they can be found in the Walmart discount bins. They will probably be illegal to own them in a few years because Hate Crimes and all that stupidity.
While you are at it, make sure you have spare DVD/BluRay players. They may suddenly be found dangerous to your healyt by the EPA or NIH and banned from production and sales.
On the other hand, advances in AI will soon let, well, just about anyone, modify or add scenes back. Not that that’s necessarily a good thing; but we are already seeing the beginnings of the end of film and, perhaps, TV acting as a career.
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More broadly, those that wish to revise works for “correct thought” are beyond despicable, imo. Just for starters, if the thought is bad, okay; but how do you expect to learn from past mistakes if you won’t even admit they occurred?
“Paging Winston Smith. 6079 Smith W, please report to nearest speakwrite.”
Do not think for a moment that having the BD/DVD would help. Those things require microprocessors to work, and any microprocessor is susceptible to remote control. Yeah… I know, you do not have a wi-fi connected player, etc… do you really think that will matter in a few years?
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But, to the point, I am not surprised at all. I will bet every dollar pResident Briben allows me to keep in my wallet that the person who edited this scene was not even offended by the words used. In fact, they probably removed the scene because they are afraid of a potential blowback from the woke crowd.
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That is the inevitable outcome of political correctness. First they get you afraid to personally use the word, next you become afraid to let anyone else use the word. Eventually, you will be afraid of thinking it. All because someone you have never met might be offended by it.
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Now, if only we could edit movies and TV shows to remove the forced woke BS that is being crammed down our throats every day. Imagine watching a show that does not cram a gay person into every scene strictly to have a gay person in the show. What a wonderful thought.
The beauty of America right now( for now) is we can “self edit”… its called turning off the idiot box. Hollywierd hasn’t made a good movie excet for Top Gun in forever. We use a Roku… no regular tv, no cable, no satellite.. all of this woke political correctness will eventually bite them. Politics has fukkin ruined everything it touches. Until We the People stop putting up with it it will go on..