“Who Censored ‘The French Connection’?” Is A Case That Only Popeye Doyle Can Solve

It all started a couple of weeks ago. Okay, actually it all started in 2021, but we’ll get to that. On June 3, the colorful internet columnist Jeffrey Wells posted a bit of information he’d received from a reader pointing out that a dialogue exchange — not an entire scene, but several lines — from the 1971 crime thriller The French Connection had been unceremoniously cut from a digital file of the film that is showing on streaming service The Criterion Channel.  

It is, or was, a dialogue exchange between gritty NYPD detectives Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider). Popeye’s just left some paperwork at the police station’s inbox and is hanging out in the lobby waiting for Cloudy, whose hand has been slashed by an irate suspect. As Cloudy enters, he struggles to get his overcoat on. Popeye japes, “Need a little help there?” The movie cuts to a reverse angle of the two-shot. 

The exchange is done in a single medium shot, as Cloudy continues to wrestle with his coat, standing in front of a cigarette vending machine. Popeye chortles more, saying, “You dumb guinea.” Cloudy responds, “How the hell did I know he had a knife?” Popeye spits back, “Never trust a ni**er.” Cloudy, peeved, says “He coulda been white.” The guy with an answer for everything, Popeye says, “Never trust anyone,” an adage he definitely honors for the rest of the movie. Friedkin cuts again, to the precinct door to the right of the cigarette machine, as Doyle goads Cloudy into pursuing a lead despite his wounded hand. 

The version now streaming on the Criterion Channel, and everywhere else in the U.S. where it’s streaming or is available on demand, cuts as Cloudy approaches the cigarette machine, before Popeye even says, “Need a little help there.” It jump cuts from the wide shot to the medium shot in which Popeye asks Cloudy if he’s going on sick leave. Now The French Connection has been called gritty and documentary-like, and those descriptors are accurate up to a point, but it’s not sloppy. And this cut is very sloppy. 

On the February 25, 2016 episode of the podcast WTF, the film’s director, William Friedkin enthuses about digital film in no uncertain terms: “It’s great! When they release the picture, it has no dirt, no scratches, no splices, You can go into a frame of film and tune the color. You can make the sky bluer. R lighter blue. You can make people’s faces warmer or colder. Stuff you could never do, with frame to frame, from 35 millimeter. So yes, I love it.” He then avers “Most 35 millimeter films are not in good enough shape to be seen.” He gently mocks his pal Quentin Tarantino’s 35MM preference, and concludes, citing the oodles of spliced-up prints out in the wild, “I want the film to be seen as I see it through the viewfinder of the camera. I don’t want the projectionist to have final cut.”

Here’s the thing about the new version of The French Connection: whatever your opinion of the dialogue — and I think, as do many others, that as offensive as its content may be, it’s meaningfully offensive, and key to the movie — that scene now does look like it’s been spliced together from a damaged print, with a projectionist taking final cut. It puts a noticeably bad edit in a movie that doesn’t make a habit of having noticeably bad edis. 

Jeffrey Wells, as mentioned, first brought the issue up on June 3^rd, in a post titled “Criterion’s ‘French Connection’ Censorship.” Wells likes to cultivate a barrel-chested, combative, curmudgeonly air in his writings. (Commenting on the blanket of orange wildfire smoke that recently enveloped Manhattan, he shrugged it off, stating, “You should try breathing Hanoi air on a shitty day. Tough guys only.”) He’s long had differences with Criterion’s physical product practices, over issues like aspect-ratios and color timing. He almost invariably couches his complaints in ad hominem terms, and this French Connection business allowed him to really go to town in that respect; in one of several subsequent posts commemorating the Twitter rage over what many were still calling Criterion’s censorship of Friedkin’s film, Wells instructed the company’s president to “blow it out your ass,” never specifying the “it” to which he referred. (As with the inference that Criterion is some kind of “woke” company, Wells believes that the label represents what he calls a “dweeb” sensibility, and is populated by people who would more than likely snub him at receptions and on movie queues. And honestly, on the latter count, he’s probably not wrong, although not necessarily for the reasons he thinks.) (And while we’re on the subject, full disclosure: I regularly contribute written material to Criterion editions and am friendly with many of the company’s staffers.)

The story, such as it was, was picked up by Breitbart writer John Nolte. Nolte, like Wells, has a gallery of betes noires he seems to summon upon waking every morning, and his account was titled “Woke Fascists Censor Best Picture Winner ‘The French Connection.’” As if winning a Best Picture Oscar were some form of ostensible inoculation. By the time Nolte got around to writing his column, it had been revealed — through reader comments, not any reportorial follow-up by Wells — that the version Criterion had on its service was identical to versions on other streaming services, to a DCP that had been screened theatrically, and more. Film writer Drew McWeeny observed that anybody who had purchased a digital file of French Connection for home ownership now owned an expurgated version. Clearly the culprit had to be Disney, which recently took ownership of 20^th Century Fox and its film catalog. The only way to see the uncut version now, apparently, is via a Blu-ray issued by Fox in 2011, well before Fox was absorbed into Disney. This Blu-ray now commands a price of about $150 on Amazon. 

This information allowed Nolte to pounce on one of his current favorite villains. Nolte held accountable not merely Disney itself but “the child groomers at Disney,” which creates an interesting correlation/causation narrative if you’re inclined to follow it that way. He winds up his account in full General Ripper mode, stating “Disney is evil. Disney is only interested in corrupting the innocence of your children.”

Soon enough the larger world of cinema commentary was chiming in, including film writers of ostensibly more mainstream mien than Wells and Nolte. Slate critic Sam Adams observed “At the risk of being like, ‘nooo, my precious n-word,’ the uncensored FRENCH CONNECTION should be the only one in circulation, whether on TV or in theaters. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Friedkin knew exactly what having his detective protagonist use it said about him.”

At the risk of being like "nooo, my precious n-word," the uncensored FRENCH CONNECTION should be the only one in circulation, whether on TV or in theaters. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Friedkin knew exactly what having his detective protagonist use it said about him. https://t.co/F4CgIl1j1i

— Sam Adams (@SamuelAAdams) June 6, 2023

Now, to go by Friedkin’s interviews, maybe that’s the case, maybe not. On the aforementioned 2016 episode of the podcast WTF, Friedkin characterized Eddie Egan, the real-life cop upon whom Popeye Doyle was based, as a “vulnerable” man who played the bigot during procedures and interrogations in order to look tougher than he actually was. Well, I’ll take his word for it, I guess. But in Friedkin’s film, Doyle is a genuine creep who practices policing as a form of atavistic, obsessive-compulsive zero-sum competition. 

There are several interviews that recount contemporary audience reaction to the movie — that Black audiences were exhilarated by Popeye’s use of a racial slur, because here was a Hollywood movie that showed white cops as they really were, for instance. So the idea that the excising of the dialogue had some contemporary instructional value (never a solid position on the face of it, even), doesn’t quite hold. 

So who exactly made the cut and why? This was where the story became, as the saying goes, curiouser and curiouser. The Criterion Channel sent me a statement that the company has been sending to subscribers who’ve complained about the expurgated version: 

Thanks for your feedback regarding FRENCH CONNECTION, which is currently streaming on Criterion Channel (https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-french-connection)

We do not censor any content presented on Criterion Channel, though in some instances we present a content warning in the description of select films. We also frequently present films in directors’ cuts and other alternate versions as their makers and our licensors may require.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION is a 20th Century Fox film title that we have under license from Disney, its current owners. This is the only version that has ever been available to us for streaming. The question you raise has come up when we have played the film in the past, and according to our licensor, this is a “Director’s Edit” of the film.

Several items of note reside in that statement, one particularly standing out: “The question you raise has come up when we have played the film in the past.” Wells’ “scoop” was not a new development after all. Something that Wells himself had to cop to when a commentor sent him a film list from Fox that described a file available to streamers and theaters as “2021 William Friedkin V2.” This squares with Criterion’s assertion that the version it’s streaming — the only version it has indeed been able to screen, since it did not add the film to its service until after 2021 — is a “Director’s Edit.”

This ostensibly puts the ball in Friedkin’s court. Wells has stated that he’s contacted the director via his personal e-mail. He’s gotten no response. I’ve reached out to Friedkin through CAA and received no response. A film asset manager I’ve asked about this matter has reached out to Friedkin personally, and received a response from Friedkin’s personal assistant saying basically nothing, and that’s where it stands as I write this. 

It’s worth noting that Friedkin has revised The French Connection before. Not quite in the strikingly egregious manner George Lucas employed when he re-cut Star Wars so that “Greedo shot first,” but in 2009, Friedkin radically revised the movie’s color timing for a Blu-ray that elicited howls of outrage from a few cinephiles — some found the revision “interesting,” which it was — and a small protest from the film’s cinematographer, Owen Roizman, who apparently had not been consulted on the work. In 2011 an entirely new signature Blu-ray was released, looking more like the theatrical release of the movie, and it made everybody happy. But this revision is of a different caliber and character altogether.

On June 10, the YouTuber Dan Murrell, on his show Streaming Charts, recounted the tale, noted that for whatever reason, an unexpurgated French Connection still played on Disney + in Europe, and concluded, “You cannot just take the original version away.”

The thing is — sure they can. And they have, many times before. For the 1991 video release of the Disney animated milestone Fantasia, digital craftsmen removed some African-American caricatures from the “Pastoral” Symphony segment — little Black flying centaurettes polishing hooves and helping a drunken Bacchus take a seat. The animators themselves dubbed these depictions “pickaninny centaurettes.” For the home video release and subsequent theatrical revivals, the images removed, far more artfully than the cut to The French Connection was executed, as the great Steve Daly explained in Entertainment Weekly back when the video release happened. The thing about such edits is that aficionados will subsequently fetishize the excised footage. “Hey, my film collector friend has a 16mm print of Fantasia!” “Does it have the pickaninny centaurettes?” “Yes!” (See also the notorious Looney Tunes short, “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarves,”  a racist work that will never see release by any Warner entity, but which is bootlegged to the extent that it’s easily seen by those with a real yen for such, um, content.) 

Sometimes Disney will censor things and change its corporate mind, as was the case with the “Pecos Bill” cartoon in the Fantasia sort-of follow-up, Melody Time (1948). As this side-by-side video comparison shows, the 2000 U.S. DVD release digitally removed the tobacco products from Pecos Bill’s yap…and reinstated them for the 2021 Blu-ray. 

All this is certainly useful to know, but the question remains as to why Criterion, given its larger commitment to film preservation, doesn’t run some kind of disclaimer prior to showing this version of Friedkin’s film? I’ve reached out to some folks there with that question and have yet to get a response. I suspect it may be because doing so could place the company on shaky legal ground. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know any, but I do know that every now and then when I’m preparing to do an audio commentary for a film that’s been licensed by a small company from a larger mega-corporation, I’m mildly cautioned about steering clear from one or two potentially sensitive topics for fear of eliciting the displeasure of the licensor. Were Criterion to signal that it was showing a “censored” version of The French Connection, Fox might respond “You can’t say that; this is William Friedkin’s preferred edit, it even says that on the listing from which you selected the film.” Something of a mess could conceivably ensue.

When preparing a film for a physical media release, Criterion can clean up the materials, adjust the color timing, and more, in-house; for its director-approved editions, the work is done in consultation with the filmmakers. For its streaming channel, Criterion is obliged to take what it gets from the licensing studio. Criterion did run a disclaimer, ahead of several John Ford films featuring African-American stereotype enactor Lincoln Perry, who performed and achieved stardom as Stepin Fetchit. But the objectionability of Stepin Fetchit is a cultural commonplace practically universally agreed on; it’s conventional wisdom, so to speak. That doesn’t apply to the decision made to excise nasty dialogue from The French Connection. As of this writing, we’re still not clear on who made the cut, how it was made, and why this version has the stamp of Friedkin approval attached. We will update if and when more is revealed. In the meantime, if you’ve got the aforementioned Blu-ray edition of the movie, KEEP IT. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.