New in PJ Media:
Leftist publishers have recently taken it upon themselves to rewrite the works of Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie to bring them into line with contemporary woke sensibilities, and now movies are starting to get the same treatment. The first to go under the knife has been William Friedkin’s gritty 1971 flick The French Connection, in which Gene Hackman plays Popeye Doyle, a tough, cynical cop of a kind that wouldn’t last five minutes on any big-city police force today. At one point in the movie (exactly ten minutes and five seconds in, if you want to check), Doyle dares to utter the forbidden word of all forbidden words, the racial epithet that can end careers and destroy lives in the blink of an eye. We see early on in the film that Popeye is not exactly cuddly, or even fully likeable. But if you get a new copy of the movie, you won’t see that at all. The Most Offensive of All Words has been removed without a trace.
Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere wrote Sunday, “The absence of this sequence can be confirmed by anyone who streams the Criterion Channel’s version of the Oscar-winning feature. The messed-with sequence begins at the 9:42 mark, during the film’s first act. Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle enters the brightly-lighted main lobby of the police station. He drops off paperwork, puts on his overcoat, walks over to the main door and flexes his hand. Roy Scheider’s Cloudy follows but at exactly 10:05 a passage that used to be part of the film is no longer there.”
The missing piece is “a bit between Doyle and Cloudy, who’s nursing a wounded arm after being stabbed by a drug dealer. Doyle: ‘You dumb guinea.’ Cloudy: ‘How the hell did I know he had a knife?’ Doyle: ‘Never trust a [ethnic slur].’ Cloudy: ‘He coulda been white.’ Doyle: ‘Never trust anyone.’” To avoid wounding the fragile sensibilities of contemporary wokesters, who are much more likely to be watching some new movie about transgender superheroes defeating MAGA-hat-wearing bigots, this small section doesn’t appear in new copies of the film. Wells notes, “It is presumed that the sequence was removed by Disney, which bought the film’s original owner, 20th Century Fox, on 3.20.19, and not The Criterion Channel.”
The woke censors are evil, but they’re not stupid. They know that few people are going to be upset by the removal of the magic life-destroying word from a fifty-year-old movie. Most people won’t notice at all, except for a handful of movie geeks who love to memorize scenes and repeat lines from them in every conceivable situation. Most who do notice will not dare to say anything about the edit. They don’t want to appear to be or be portrayed as someone who would go around saying That Word or approve of its use.
There is more. Read the rest here.
John Allan says
I’d be VERY surprised, were copyright to permit them to DO that.
I suspect that a legal challenge would bring a halt, to ANY such ‘wokefying’.
mike says
this has always been the problem when one buys all the rights to movies and music
they own it all
just look at Michael Jackson bought all the rights to the Beetles entire music collection
starving the Beetles of any copy rights and royalties
greed lives on
Vicky says
Do you mean the Beatles?
Peter Gunning says
I think he means The Beetles, those four amazing insects that wrote legendary music !
bill says
If one buys something it means someone has old it so somebody makes money, The Beatles must have given or sold somebody the rights in the first place.
simon m says
This has been happening for a while and it completely skews the plot. ( spoiler alert)
In Dirty Harry, the psychopath killer, Scorpio, kills an innocent girl with a high velocity rifle fired from a rooftop. He sends an extortion note to the Mayor’s office. In the original film the mayor reads it out loud and says ‘….it will by next pleasure to kill a Catholic priest or a ….’ his voice tails off without saying the word because we see it written on the note . What the censors have done in the latest copy is to digitally remove the word. However, by doing this they muck up the premise because Scorpio’s next potential victim, that he targets from the rooftop, is a black man. Because they have removed the word they ruin the narrative of the killer’s motivation.
This censorship is the memory hole so perfectly described in Orwell’s 1984 and it is a descent into a nightmare world of lies and distortion.
gravenimage says
This brings up another point, Simon. It doesn’t even matter if the words and behavior are presented as positive or not. Obviously the unhinged murderer Scorpio is not considered a positive figure–he is happy to murder people. Fare from showing that the film in general or Dirty Harry are racist, this shows that the killer he is trying to stop is racist, as well as being a savage killer.
Sir Peter says
Are they being niggardly with the truth?
Sir Peter says
Niggardly with the truth
Crusades Were Right says
Could have been much worse:
They might have picked their feet in Poughkeepsie.
lol
Crusades Were Right says
Took a bit of a while for my comment to appear. Am guessing JW mods are scrutinizing comments thoroughly for… well, you know what.
Crusades Were Right says
Yup, my second comment also took some time to appear. More or less confirms it, I think.
Kinda ironic though, don’t you think? lol
Patriotliz says
I’ve lost track of my comments that were pending “wokeification” scrutiny by JW.
gravenimage says
Some posts just get hung up in moderation–I have had posts wind up in moderation because I have more than two links. Then, if you are a new poster, using a new email or a new username, your posts automatically go to moderation initially. Some posters have never signed in, and so their comments go to moderation even if they post regularly.
Then, you have to wait for someone from JW moderation to get to your posts–that can happen very quickly, or can take hours, depending.
And there is nothing ironic about this. Jihad Watch regularly gets death threats, including those aimed at other posters. It also get fake posts from trolls that call for violence against Islam. Some comments are pornographic. Then there is just a lot of off-topic spam. Jihad Watch is a privately run forum, even if it is read publicly.
By these standards Jihad Watch would not be supporting freedom of speech unless it served as a platform for the Islamic State. Is that *really* what you are advocating?
FYI says
I used to be a fan of Enid Blyton’s NODDY before it became politically incorrect.
It never occurred to me as a child that Gilbert Golly might somehow be offensive:I thought he was a likeable chap with the most fantastic pair of pants.In fact i thought he was one of the Jackson Five who somehow ended up in Toytown.I never ever thought ‘aha so this is what black people are like”.I liked Gilbert Golly.
PC plod i thought seemed to be drawn from real life.
Phil Copson says
Exactly – Gilbert Golly ran the local garage and fixed Noddy’s car on one occasion – and was therefore far more interesting than most of the other characters.
(in fact, it may be down to Mr Golly that I developed an abiding interest in cars of all sorts and have spent far too much time and money on them. I wonder if I could claim reparations for my fuel bill…?)
gravenimage says
My English mother had a Golliwog doll when she was growing up.
gravenimage says
The Wokeification of Movies Begins as ‘The French Connection’ Goes Under the Knife
……………………………………..
Just appalling–editing these works of art is even worse than issuing “trigger warnings” for content.