BUY. PHYSICAL. MEDIA.

In one of the ugliest scenes in movie history, tough-guy cop Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) and his partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) roughly confront and interrogate a black drug dealer on his no-BS way to finding The French Connection delivering heroin to the streets of New York.

Doyle is angry, impatient, violent, and in a hurry to get "Pusher" (played with genuine terror by veteran stage actor Alan Weeks) to flip on his supplier. Doyle uses all that aggression — plus a nonsense accusation — to unsettle Pusher and force the truth out of him.

"All right! You put a shiv in my partner. You know what that means? G**dammit! All winter long, I got to listen to him gripe about his bowling scores. Now I'm gonna bust your a** for those three bags and I'm gonna nail you for picking your feet in Poughkeepsie."

Doyle was based on real-life NYC cop Eddie Egan, who used non sequiturs like "You still pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?" as part of his and his partner's good-cop/bad-cop routine.

Weeks is right to look terrified, and audiences are terrified for him, even though he's hardly a sympathetic character. He honestly doesn't know if Doyle is going to murder him right out there on the street — two white cops acting with impunity against a black man in an age before smartphones and TikTok.

Doyle, you see, is "bad news but a good cop." That's what it says, right there on the original movie poster. That same poster promised that "The time is just right for an out and out thriller like this," and it's exactly what director William Friedkin and Hackman delivered.

But it's the context from Doyle and Russo's next scene that informs audiences what kind of man Doyle is.

A smirking Doyle tells Russo he's a "dumb guinea" for letting himself get shivved. "How the hell did I know he had a knife?" Russo replies, but Doyle shuts that down fast with an n-bomb dropped with deadly efficiency.

"Never trust a n*****r."

Doyle is still smirking when he says it, and you could hear a pin drop. Or at least it feels like you could.

Doyle is bad news, indeed, and audiences see that before and after he chases down and drags a suspect into a back-alley interrogation/beating. The "after" is what sells it, because that six-second exchange forces viewers to revisit Pusher's alley beating with a better perspective...

...but modern audiences aren't supposed to see it.

Somebody — nobody seems to know exactly who — cut six pivotal seconds from Hackman's Oscar-winning performance. The cut was discovered in 2023 by viewers watching the movie on the Criterion Channel. That's shocking because Criterion has a reputation for restoring classic movies as close to the original as digital video can present.

Hackman, by the way, hated the n-word and balked at doing the scene. Friedkin had to remind him that this movie was a quasi-documentary-style look at the '70s drug war and the cops who waged it.

And Another Thing: That scene finishes with Russo protesting, "He could have been white." To which Doyle says, "Never trust anyone." The whole exchange is key to Doyle's character, but it had to go because somebody didn't want to trigger some precious snowflake born decades after the film's 1971 release.

They weren't nice guys. Some, like Doyle/Egan, weren't good or even very likable guys. The French Connection didn't flinch from showing us the truth, but somebody did.

I went into so much detail here for three reasons. The first is that The French Connection isn't just a favorite movie, it's an important film — and neither Friedkin nor Hackman is around any longer to defend their work.

The second is that The French Connection is hardly alone in getting scrubbed clean or prefaced with a mandatory trigger warning for "modern audiences."

A sampling, courtesy of Grok (and verified by Yours Truly):

• The Office (U.S.) In 2020, Peacock (NBCUniversal's streamer) removed a brief blackface scene from Season 9's "Dwight Christmas" episode, where a character appears in it as part of a German holiday skit.
• Gone with the Wind (1939) For HBO Max's 2020 relaunch amid racial reckoning, the film was temporarily pulled and re-added with a contextual disclaimer video from historian Jacqueline Stewart discussing its racist stereotypes and glorification of slavery. While not edited, the "alteration" via added framing changed how modern audiences engage with it.
• The "Bloodless Version" of Splash (1984). A brief glimpse of Daryl Hannah’s lovely backside in the iconic beach scene is digitally blurred, and off-putting CGI hair extensions cover even her 1960s James Bond-style near-nudity. All of which was totally innocent, by the way.
• The BBC tried to memory-hole "The Germans" episode of Fawlty Towers, which might be the funniest episode of anything ever.

You want more? I've got more.

Disney+ added "This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now" to classics like Dumbo, Peter Pan, and The Jungle Book, and altered their in-house parental settings so that kids can't stream them without parents' permission. Then there's Netflix's "Harmful Language" warning in front of Blazing Saddles (be still, my heart), Breakfast at Tiffany's, and even The Goonies.

And don't even get me started on what George Lucas did to the original Star Wars trilogy. Han didn't just shoot first, dammit — he shot only.

Sorry, I got started on it.

Anyway, my third reason for today's article is that Netflix — which will soon own The French Connection and countless other classics from the Warner Bros. library — is so comically woke that the Obamas are happy to call it home. Not only is Netflix one of the worst offenders, but the company will also soon own one of the largest back-catalogs of classic American entertainment.

Audiences used to know the distinction between an “offensive depiction” and a “depiction of offensive people.” Younger audiences aren't supposed to learn the difference, robbing them of some of the very best that American culture has to offer, particularly from take-no-prisoners directors like Friedkin.

My Blu-Ray edition of The French Connection is intact, but it's also an older copy and not from Criterion. The unedited version is now restored on most streamers, but you can bet I'll never let go of my Blu-Ray disc. You never know when some blue-haired Hollywood twentysomething will get it into their well-pierced head that grownups mustn't be allowed to see anything that might offend xher genderfluid life-partner.

Filmmakers make movies for moviegoers. The 1984-type gatekeepers need to take their stinking paws off them — those damn dirty apes!

So let me repeat something I wrote in Monday's column about the Netflix/Warner Bros. buyout, something that resonated with more readers than I could count.

I cannot stress this enough: Go to Amazon, eBay, wherever, and buy physical media while you still can. Netflix only cares about getting you to pay the monthly subscription fee, forever. The company will likely stop selling DVD/Blu-Ray/4K versions of every single IP under its control. They'll also be free to do whatever else they want with those properties, including altering them for "modern audiences."

BUY. PHYSICAL. MEDIA.

I'm begging you, before it's too late.

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