8 Times Movie Censorship Backfired

7. A Gritty Classic Gets Undermined - The French Connection

The French Connection
20th Century Fox

William Friedkin's The French Connection is one of many masterpieces the late, great filmmaker crafted over the 1970s and '80s. A gritty police drama starring Gene Hackman in arguably his most iconic performance, the film took home three Academy Awards and is widely considered one of the defining pictures of the New Hollywood era.

The French Connection was one of many films that got hoovered up by Disney when the Mouse House purchased 20th Century Fox in 2019. There were plenty of anxieties over what would become of Fox's library, mainly due to Disney's seeming lack of commitment to film preservation, among other things. That said, it seemed as if Disney was content to leave well enough alone, with The French Connection one of many Fox movies to find a home on the company's streaming service, Disney+.

Sadly, that doesn't seem to have been the case. Earlier in 2023, viewers based in the U.S. noted that The French Connection had been censored on both The Criterion Channel and Disney+, with digital copies also receiving the change in question. The offending scene? A moment where Popeye (Hackman) uses a racial slur when talking to Cloudy (Roy Scheider) before they head out for the evening. This moment has been jarringly removed for American viewers, but - perhaps bizarrely - has been left undisturbed in the UK and Europe (at least at the time of writing).

Unsurprisingly, the removal of the moment in question sparked a significant backlash, with many rightly (and, some in full crank mode, disingenuously) questioning why the dialogue had been cut. Popeye and Cloudy are not meant to be nice men, and the scene in question emphasises the casual ugliness of their brand of policing. Such a change undermines the original vision of The French Connection, and raises awkward questions that have yet to be answered - namely, who implemented the change, and if it will ever be reversed.

In any case, the removal of the dialogue led to a surge in purchases of The French Connection Blu-ray, with the risk being that new printings may also include the incongruous removal of the aforementioned scene.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.