By N.S.
Tonight, TCM broadcast The French Connection, the 1971 masterpiece on the eponymous heroin trafficking case by a young William Friedkin and Ernest Tidyman, which won five Oscars, and is somewhere in the nineties on my Top 100 list.
I neglected to mention in my essay last night that if you buy the criterion version of the picture, or pay to see it, although you will get extras, criterion will cheat you out of a pristine print.
There’s reportedly a scene in the picture in which Popeye Doyle (real name: Eddie Egan, played by Gene Hackman) says “n----r” to his partner, Buddy Russo (real name: Sonny Grosso, played by Roy Scheider).
One year ago, criterion reportedly censored “n----r” and the sentence it was in. criterion’s fans are diverting the blame to disney, which supposedly bought 20th century fox’ movie vault, but that won’t wash. If criterion is making money off of sales and broadcasts of the picture, based on criterion’s brand, then criterion takes the rap. Then again, I don’t believe the alibi-Ikes asserting that the censorship is Disney’s fault. As far as I can tell, criterion committed the censorship. And I could find no public statement from the corporation denying its responsibility.
The cheap DVD I bought several years ago is thus superior to the criterion version, not that I could even find it at amazon just now.
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2 comments:
Those big strikes been relatively rare recently. Steel workers, auto workers, miners, railroad workers used to be on strike all the time. That sort of thing seems to be passed. This event rare then.
I've seen this,or rather heard this censorship on DVDs of other movies. An assassin known as "The Spic" who killed with an ice pick had his name changed to avoid offending spics. And another had "f8cking" changed to "freaking." Both changes ruined the movie and made me feel like I was watching a dumbed down kids version.
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