Search Results for: french connection

My beloved elephant-hide wallet was waiting for me in the Metro North lost & found office — room #100 in Grand Central. I lost it 11 days ago, and they called me yesterday with the good news. I didn’t listen to the message but whatever. And the cash was still there! Unbelievable. The correct phrase, … Read more

We all recall last summer’s French Connection deleted-footage brouhaha, which involved the deletion of nine seconds of footage from a police-preinct scene featuring Gene Hackkman and Roy Scheider. It was presumably deleted because Hackman’s detective character, Popeye Doyle, blurts out the N-word. Perhaps some Woke Central pearl-clutcher complained and director William Friedkin acquiesced for some … Read more

Unfriendly friendo: “I figured I’d clarify the situation on that recent French Connection piece that you’re so riled about. The one written by the N.Y. Times Magazine‘s Neila Orr, I mean. “First off, the New York Times Magazine operates from a completely different staff than the daily paper does. One hand is never informed as … Read more

Five weeks after the Great French Connection Censorship Intrigue was first reported by yours truly (and which resulted in many articles worldwide along with no fewer than six HE articles between 6.3 and 6.20), The New York Times Magazine has boldly jumped into the fray with an article titled “What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With … Read more

…but chose the meat-cleaver approach instead. According to “The Little Mermaid is Disney Propaganda,” a 6.5 Unherd article by Kat Rosenfeld, old-fashioned, shamefully un-woke Disney cartoons and animated features on Disney + “come affixed with a hectoring title card that you cannot fast forward through.” “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or … Read more

Earlier today HE commenter Benjamin Wayne reported that a racially offensive passage in William Friedkin‘s The French Connection (one that contains two ethnic slurs, both spoken by Gene Hackman‘s “Popeye Doyle”) has been stricken from the Criterion Channel’s version of this 1971 classic. I went on the Criterion Channel to verify and Wayne is correct … Read more

This is a fairly absurd hypothetical, but let’s imagine that somehow the raw, abrasive verite cop genre (Serpico, Report to the Commissioner, Busting, Prince of the City) never manifested in force during in the ’70s and ’80s, and that The French Connection was an explosive new film in 2023. Same style, same story, younger cast. … Read more

By HE standards Owen Roizman, who passed today at age 86, was and always will be one of Hollywood’s greatest cinematographers, certainly within the zeitgeist of the ’70s and ’80s. God, the streak Roizman was on between ’71 and ’78 alone! The French Connection, Play It Again, The Heartbreak Kid, The Exorcist, The Taking of … Read more

A couple of hours after hearing this morning about Best Buy’s French Connection surprise — i.e., a newly remastered, Owen Roizman-approved Bluray that looks like the original 1971 Oscar-winner — I drove down to a Best Buy at La Brea and Santa Monica Blvd. and sure enough, there it was. I took it right home … Read more

Restoration guru and all-around film expert Robert Harris has seen and spoken out about William Freidkin‘s notorious visual re-imagining of The French Connection (’71), which will be viewable on Fox Home Video’s upcoming Blu-ray of this classic Oscar-winning film, due on 2.24.09. Captured from the forthcoming Blu-ray French Connection — the color extracted, de-focused, reduced … Read more

Director Sidney Lumet and dp Owen Roizman, both wearing feathered wings and playing harps in heaven, have just heard about Criterion’s forthcoming 4K Network Bluray (due 2.24.26), and are almost certainly feeling very concerned about their classic 1976 satire being teal-colored. Remember how Roizman freaked and pretty much hit the ceiling when William Friedkin played … Read more