Early in William Friedkin’s classic film “The French Connection,” Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) argues with his partner, Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider) regarding Russo recently sustaining a knife wound in a confrontation with a black drug-dealer:

Doyle: You dumb guinea.
Cloudy: How the hell did I know he had a knife?
Doyle: Never trust a nigger.
Cloudy: He coulda been white!
Doyle: Never trust anyone.

That exchange has been excised from the versions of the film used on Turner Classic Movies, iTunes and Criterion. The film’s distributor, 20^th Century Fox, was acquired by Disney before the scene disappeared. It is artistic censorship, straight up; no more acceptable than painting over the breasts Reubens paintings, or bleeping out “damn” is Rhett Butler’s famous kiss-off to Scarlet (as was done regularly when the movie began being shown on network television.)

Again, we are faced with deciding whether the motives here were stupid or sinister. I probably vote for both. The accelerating effort to declare the word “nigger” as taboo regardless of intent, use or context is pure attempted mind-control and Orwellian WrongThink totalitarianism—now embraced, as in other totalitarian tactics, by most of the Left and the Democratic Party. It is also unprincipled pandering to Critical Race Theory extremism. The rational mind boggles at what canonical works of art and literature face permanent scarring if the practice is allowed to take hold. Just off the top of my recently repaired head, I can think of several superb films that include “nigger” in the dialogue, like “The Shining,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Mississippi Burning,” “Pulp Fiction,” and of course, “Blazing Saddles.”

In “The French Connection,” “nigger” is used to mark Doyle, the film’s protagonist, as an anti-hero, as well as to make the point that some police detectives are racists or misanthropes. Taking out the scene weakens the film. That a creative organization would sanction such a thing is chilling, but then so is the anti-free speech, anti-democratic lurch of the political Left generally, and that is where Disney is these days.

Christian Toto recalls the time not so long ago when film critics unanimously condemned such bowdlerizing:

The King’s Speech,” starring Colin Firth as the man who would be known as King George VI…won four Oscars, including Best Picture, and scored $138 million at the U.S. box office.The Weinstein Company, hoping to lure even more movie goers to watch it, released a PG:13 version of “Speech” which clipped several “F-bombs.” The studio sought out families who might cherish the movie’s hopeful messaging.

The response was swift and furious.Time Magazine reported that the decision “stoked spasms of outrage in the college of critics,” including famed movie reviewer Roger Ebert.The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips called the PG:13 version “pointless.”The PG:13 version would not supplant the original, R-rated model. Still, Firth fumed over the decision to release a sanitized version of his film oh, so briefly.“I don’t support it. I think the film has integrity as it stands. I think that scene belongs where it is. I think it serves a purpose.”

Then-Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman raged against the “new” version as well: “In the past, you might have thought that winning an Academy Award for Best Picture would be enough to save a movie from being censored by its own distributor. And you would have been right.” He wasn’t done. The critic savaged Harvey Weinstein (yeah, that Harvey Weinstein) for approving the cinematic nip and tuck: “The Weinstein Company, like Miramax before it, is a brand that means something. The quality, and integrity, of the movies it distributes is the cornerstone of what the company’s name signifies in Hollywood. Is the gain in short-term profit via a PG-13 version of The King’s Speech really worth monkeying with the film’s essence?”

Then Toto adds, “Gleiberman, a rock-ribbed liberal, now works for Variety. Does anyone think he’ll spare a syllable to defend ‘The French Connection’ from woke censors?” Nobody paying attention. The Woke circle the wagons in such episodes, and independent thought (you know, integrity) will get you cancelled. “This guy is defending the use of the N-word! Racist!”

Toto concludes,

Conservatives, by and large, are leading the fight against free speech suppression in 2023. The Left’s embrace of the woke mind virus, and the fact that the vast majority of modern film critics, lean to the Left means films like “The French Connection” may have few defenders.

The times, they are a-changin’ and not for the better.

Ya think?

The  Ethics Alarms discussions of the censoring of “nigger” are here; the many “fuck” posts are here.