A censored version of 1971’s Oscar-winning The French Connection is now part of the Criterion Collection, reported fans of the film.
The movie’s alteration, which appears about 10 minutes into the film, involves a racial slur in a scene between characters Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle played by Gene Hackman and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo played by veteran actor Roy Scheider. Both were cast as tough narcotics detectives and it’s during a sequence as the two exchange dialog, the character of Doyle says the N-word after Scheider’s character is slashed by a black drug pusher.
The change was first noticed and mentioned by a reader of the daily online stream-of-Hollywood-consciousness column Hollywood Elsewhere, created by Jeffrey Wells. The commenter noticed the censored scene while watching the film on the Criterion Channel, a streaming platform designed to be dedicated to preserving classic motion pictures. Wells himself then backed up that claim….