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, of course, is “you must lead a charmed life.”

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 reason. I only know that on Friday, 6.9, HE commenter “The Multiplex” reported that “in Disney’s DCP asset list the currently-streaming [censored] version of The French Connection is listed as ‘2021 William Friedkin v2.’” He also sent visual proof of this.

The absence of the footage first became apparent during a 5.12.23 screening of The French Connection at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre. It was soon after apparent that the edited version was streaming on all the major services, including Criterion, iTunes, Apple, MAX, Amazon and (I think) Netflix. Nobody could get a statement from the ailing 87-year-old Freidkin. He died a couple of months later — 8.7.23. It was thereafter presumed that the mystery of the nonsensical edit would never be solved, and that the censored version would continue to be streamed on all the platforms.

Not true, as it turns out.

Earlier this evening “bentrane” reported that he recently watched The French Connection on MAX, and that the missing N-word scene has been restored. I immediately went to my Sony 65-incher and watched the scene in question on MAX. “Bentrane” is correct — the nine-second N-word excerpt is back, baby! The uncensored version is also showing on Apple TV — great. The film isn’t streaming on Netflix or Criterion as we speak, but the censored version is still streaming on Amazon.

Apparently Disney, which licenses and provides The French Connection to the streamers, dumped the censored version, possibly or presumably because of all the negative press. Maybe Disney felt free to switch it out after Friedkin’s passing. Maybe a Friedkin rep stepped in after he died and asked that the original version be restored. Who knows? No one said jack last May and June, and apparently no one has announced anything about the original.version being back in action.

Below are clips of the raw version vs. the edited version.

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 to what the other is doing. Given the writer is a story editor on the magazine, it’s likely that she just decided to write it up herself.

“Second, the front-of-the-book rubric under which the piece appears, “Screenland,” is strictly an opinion (or wankery) column. It’s not reported as such. It’s just a given writer going off. So the author can’t be faulted for not doing reporting; it’s not a reported column — it’s a thumbsucker. You’re asking something of it that it doesn’t have to be. It’s an op-ed and it’s written as such. I didn’t find Orr’s piece particularly satisfactory, but that’s the way it is.”

HE replies: “Nonetheless Orr, cautiously assigned to write about the the French Connection censorship for an obvious reason, was writing a piece about a still-unsolved and mystifying situation, and she didn’t even attempt the boilerplate option of asking for explanations from Friedkin and Disney. I’m sorry but that’s stunning. How long does it take to make a couple of calls or bang out a couple of emails? What, she couldn’t be bothered?

“Imagine a Times staffer writing a thoughtful essay about the recent disappearance of Amelia Earhart in, say, early August 1937, or only a few weeks after Earhart’s plane was reported missing on 7.2.37. Imagine a Times staffer not even inquiring about the latest findings while putting the piece together.

“As a representative of The N.Y. Times, Orr would have obviously been able to request statements or perhaps even land an interview or two — a request that may have actually elicited a response, given the Paper of Record’s lordly history and cultural standing.

“And yet Orr chose not to go there because…what’s the explanation again? Because she and her editors live inside an elite, cloistered, administrative membrane (i.e., the Times‘ weekly magazine) that apparently derives satisfaction and solace from, among other things, turning off the curiosity switch.

“But hey, at least she was able to exercise her authority (by way of identity and birthright) by typing out the actual N-word. Impressive! I’m sure this got the attention of Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was almost certainly amused.”

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 Classic Films.”

Three aspects are worth noting.

(a) The Times almost certainly dodged this story for several weeks out of squeamishness over the use of the N-word, which is what the censoring of a certain Act One scene in William Friedkin‘s 1971 Oscar-winner (i.e., Gene Hackman‘s Popeye Doyle using the epithet in a discussion with Roy Scheider‘s Cloudy in a police station foyer) was all about.

So when they finally posted a story about it, they had story editor Niela Orr, a youngish woman of color, write it. That gives them a certain political protection.

(b) In describing the scene, Orr uses the actual six-letter N-word — something that no one else writing about this story would ever do. Because she can.

(c) The one mystifying and unfulfilled element in this story is the absence of statements from either director William Friedkin or copyright owner Disney about who ordered the cut.

Was the scene edited at Friedkin’s request, as all available evidence clearly indicates? Orr shrugs her shoulders and wonders like the rest of us. If she reached out to Friedkin and Disney, she isn’t saying.

“We can only guess at the precise reasoning behind this particular change to The French Connection,” Orr writes. “Is it Disney, treating adult audiences like the children it’s used to serving? Or did Friedkin, who once modified the color of the film, approve the change?”

For whatever reason Orr doesn’t mention a couple of pertinent facts. A visually confirmed, easily verifiable report that “in Disney’s DCP asset list it says that the currently-streaming version of The French Connection is identified as ‘2021 William Friedkin v2.’” Plus a statement from The Criterion Channel, passed along in “a 6.9.23 HE story,” that “according to our licensor [Disney], this is a ‘Director’s Edit‘ of the film.”

…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 cultures,” it reads. “These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”

Instead of lopping off the racially offensive nine-seconds from its current streaming of The French Connection, Disney censors could have posted the following at the beginning of the film — another hectoring that couldn’t be fast-fowarded:

“This Oscar-winning film, initially released in 1971, includes negative depictions and/or mistreatments of African Americans. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”

Why didn’t Disney simply choose this option? Nobody would’ve squawked if they had.

Here are 12 bullet points about the recently discovered removal of a brief, first-act passage in William Friedkin‘s The French Connection (’71), or more precisely in the Criterion Channel’s streaming of same.

1. 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.

2. It’s 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.”

3a. The nine-second sequence (:52 to :59 in the below video) was obviously censored over Doyle’s racially offensive dialogue, specifically the N-word.

3b. 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.

4. The absence of said passage was also reportedly evident when The French Connection was screened at the American Cinematheque’s Aero theatre on Friday, 5.12.23. HE commenter identified as “The Connection”: “I don’t know if anyone else complained. I should have said something to the manager as I was leaving, but I sent them an email the next day asking who changed it (themselves? the studio? the filmmaker?) and [that] in the future they [should] at least advertise that they’re showing an altered version. Since Criterion is now showing the same version, I’m assuming it was the studio, and I wonder if the Aero was even aware of the change.”

5. HE commenter “Gus Petch” (posted Sunday night): “I have multiple recordings of the movie on my DVR. The versions recorded off TCM 4 and 2 months ago are both the censored versions, but the versions recorded off FXM (Fox Movies) 8 months ago are uncensored. Also FWIW, the TCM versions did not have the title screen in front that you often see that the film has been modified for presentation on TV.”

6. HE commenter “Ken Koc” (posted Sunday night): “That [nine-second sequence] is also gone from my purchased copy of The French Connection on iTunes.”

7. It is nonetheless astonishing that the Criterion Channel is running this version of Friedkin’s Oscar-winning film (Best Picture, Hackman for Best Actor, Friedkin for Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay) without an explanation of some sort. This deletion seriously harms the Criterion brand, which has always been about honoring and representing the original artistic intentions of filmmakers. They need to address this issue ASAP.

8. If in fact Disney is responsible for deleting the nine seconds of footage, they owe an explanation to the film’s fans as well as the industry at large why this was done, and whether or not they consulted Friedkin before doing so, and if they intend to delete other portions of other films that feature the N-word.

9. Over the last couple of days I’ve sent emails to various directors and producers, asking them to please forward yesterday’s HE story about the French Connection censorship to Friedkin. I’m presuming that Friedkin would hit the ceiling when he learns of this, and will post some kind of protest statement or perhaps even a video.

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 — the passage is missing.

Click here or watch below. The excerpt starts at the 52-second mark.

It’s a bit between Doyle and Roy Scheider‘s “Cloudy”, who’s nursing a wounded arm after being slashed 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.”

I’m sorry but cutting out scenes that are racially insensitive is a slippery slope. Once you start editing to spare sensitive ears where do you stop?

If and when The Criterion Channel ever shows Mel Brooks‘ Blazing Saddles (’74), will they edit out all the N-words? (I think the N-word is heard at least five or six times in the hilarious “the sheriff is near” scene.) If you watch Blazing Saddles on Max you’ll be treated to Jacqueline Stewart‘s introductory remarks, which acknowledge Brooks’ satirical intent while attempting to give context to the N-word usage. Why doesn’t the Criterion Channel do the same for The French Connection?

Excepting the scenes with Fernando Rey‘s elegant “Charnier” character, The French Connection has always been a coarse and crude film when focusing upon Doyle and Cloudy, which is at least 80% or 85% of the time. Doyle is a pushy and obstinate lead character who not only uses the N-word (once) but racially harasses the drug dealer who stabbed Cloudy by asking him if he’s ever picked his feet in Poughkeepsie. (Why not cut that scene out also?) Doyle’s barking, pugnacious personality represents the essence of Friedkin’s film, which hits hard in scene after scene and fairly flaunts its lack of sensitivity.

It’s one thing to warn viewers in advance about offensive or insensitive racial content, but eliminating entire passages is crude and uncool, especially in the case of a Best Picture Oscar winner.

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 Pelham One Two Three, Three Days of the Condor, Network, Straight Time. Not to mention True Confessions, Tootsie, Havana, Grand Canyon, Wyatt Earp, etc.

Special credit should be given to Roizman for stepping into that surreal episode when a William Friedkin-approved Bluray of The French Connection came out in ’09. Roizman didn’t tippy-toe around the obvious, which was that the ’09 Bluray’s bizarre color scheme (bleachy, desaturated, high contrasty) was an outright desecration. Three years later a properly remastered, Roizman-approved version was issued on a subsequent Bluray, and thank God for gloriously happy endings.

Posted on 3.8.12: “The new, Owen Roizman-approved French Connection Bluray is a blessing…a pure celluloid capturing of a great New York film experience, some of it luscious, some of it spotty and grainy but all it looking true and right. Some of it looks more lab-fresh than I’ve ever seen. Punchy red neons and such. Other parts look…well, the way they did at Leows’ 86th Street when it opened in the fall of ’71, I’m guessing. Raw, wham-bam, high-impact footage all the way.

“No more bluish bleach. No more splotchy colors and monochrome, high-contrast crap. No more creepy-perverse digital fuckwad action. The guy who mucked up the notorious 2009 Bluray version, director William Friedkin, has come to his senses and re-done his masterwork under Roizman’s influience.

“’The nation’s three-year-long, Freidkin-incited French Connection Bluray nightmare is over,’ I tweeted. ‘The bleachy, splotchy ’09 version has been replaced.’

“On 2.24.09 Roizman spoke to Aaron Aradillas on a blog-radio show called “Back By Midnight,” and he called the transfer “atrocious,” “emasculated” and “horrifying.” He said that he “wasn’t consulted” by Freidkin and he “certainly wants to wash my hands of having had anything to do with [it].”

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 and popped it right in…aaaah. What I’ve been dreaming about for years. A pure celluloid capturing of a great New York film experience, some of it luscious, some of it spotty and grainy but all it looking true and right. Some of it looks more lab-fresh than I’ve ever seen. Punchy red neons and such. Other parts look…well, the way they did at Leows’ 86th Street when it opened in the fall of ’71, I’m guessing. Raw, wham-bam, high-impact footage all the way. All gritty, nothing pretty.

No more bluish bleach. No more splotchy colors and monochrome, high-contrast crap. No more creepy-perverse digital fuckwad action. The guy who mucked up the notorious 2009 Bluray version, director William Friedkin, has come to his senses and re-done his masterwork with dp Owen Roizman.

“The nation’s three-year-long, Freidkin-incited French Connection Bluray nightmare is over,” I tweeted. “The bleachy, splotchy ’09 version has been replaced.”

On 2.24.09 Roizman spoke to Aaron Aradillas on a blog-radio show called “Back By Midnight,” and he called the transfer “atrocious,” “emasculated” and “horrifying.” He said that he “wasn’t consulted” by Freidkin and he “certainly wants to wash my hands of having had anything to do with [it].”

The new Bluray sounds great also. Nice bassy tones. Brassy, clattery.

For whatever reason I noticed for the first time that in footage of Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider tailing Tony Lobianco and “Angie” through Times Square that Get Carter is playing at the Victoria.

Here’s A.O. Scott‘s “Critics Picks” assessment.

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 and blended with black-and-white.

Harris’s fundamental point is that “what one is seeing in this Blu-ray incarnation is no longer the Best Picture of 1971,” he writes. “It is a re-vision. Like many of the Disney animated classics, it has been visually re-imagined.

“What Friedkin, and his colorist have done is to cross-pollinate 1930s and ’40s dye transfer technology with the modern digital world, and the fact that they carried out this experiment shows just how talented Mr. Friedkin remains as a filmmaker and technician.

“Friedkin references John Huston‘s Moby Dick as the precursor to his work on The French Connection, and while true, the reality goes directly back to the mid-1930s and the period up to WWII. Moby Dick was not a Technicolor production. It was photographed on standard Eastman Kodak 5248 color negative, and then printed by Technicolor in dye transfer, but with the extra black & white record. [Note: Referred to in some circles as a “gray negative.”] I’m sure that [Friedkin] knows that.

“What is interesting here is that Friedkin and his colorist have taken things a step further. Not simply wishing to add the extra record, they also extracted the color, de-focused it, reduced it, and laid it back on top of the black & white, to yield a higher contrast with lower chroma.

From the 2005 standard DVD of The French Connection.

From the new Blu-ray version.

“This is not your father’s French Connection, but a very interesting and beautiful one. If I were able to make a single change, it would have been a simple one. I would add a third disc — the film is certainly worth it — with the original Academy Award winning version of the film, as seen in theatres in 1971. I would issue this, the new pasteled French Connection ‘redux’ plus the third disc of extras.”

Part of Freidkin’s commentary on the process he applied to the French Connection Blu-ray version has been quoted as follows: “The main reason, I think, I was drawn to this process is because of the skin tones. The skin tones on an average color film are usually too warm. The makeup look, pancake makeup, tends to make the skin look darker, richer, warmer, rather than pale.

“In The French Connection, nobody wore makeup. I wanted to say that a lot of you might look at this and say, ‘Gee, the normal version of that looked just as good.’ Well, it may, to your eye. But to my eye, and what I’m looking for here is less color, because, to my mind, bright and extravagant is associated more with a comedy or a musical. And for dramatic purposes, I wanted the pastel color that is achieved by this process.”

Here are two pieces I wrote about the Blu-ray French Connection in early January — posted on 1.8.09 and on 1.9.09.

Who isn’t jarred and saddened by the idea of suicide (I am anyway), and doubly so by the idea of a possible joint suicide between an older husband and younger wife, and even more so when you throw the couple’s dog into the equation?

The first impulse is to avoid dwelling on this or that death and instead celebrate the glow of life…in particular the admirable, fascinating, glorious life of the departed.

So let’s do that — Gene Hackman was absolutely among the greatest actors of the 20th Century, and this is what needs focusing upon and will be focused upon today, tomorrow and for a long time to come.

And yet this is the apparent truth of it: Sometime yesterday the 95 year-old Hackman, presumably dealing with diminished terms of life and apparently as an act of decisive agency and dignity, decided to go to sleep of his own volition, and his 63 year-old pianist wife, Betsy Arakawa, decided to take the journey with him.

And somehow or in some way their dog also died, the thinking presumably being that love and devotion are more important than the mere fact of aliveness. The dog would have been devastated to have been left alone so Gene and Betsy took him/her along.

A few details are known at this stage, but here’s hoping the final moments were gentle or peaceful or something in that vein.

N.Y. Times: “Before entering the [Hackman] home, the sheriff’s department received confirmation from the fire department and the gas company that it was safe to enter. ‘We’re not going to guess this was an accident or natural causes,” a spokesperson said. ‘It wasn’t typical.’ A previous statement sent out early Thursday by the sheriff’s office said that foul play was not suspected.”

AP: “Hackman, 95, Betsy Arakawa, 63, and their dog were all dead when deputies entered their home to check on their welfare around 1:45 p.m. Wednesday, Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Denise Avila said.”

There will be no end to the negativity if the Academy Award telecast producers fail to insert Hackman into the death reel, and I mean at the very end of it.

“Stoplight with Hackman,” posted on 1.28.21: Sometime in the summer or early fall of ’94 (can’t remember which) I visited the Culver Studios set of Crimson Tide. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer had invited me. I hung around in a low-key way for two or three hours. No chit-chats with “talent” or anyone except Jerry — basically an opportunity to see the nuclear submarine set, which was built to tilt and lean and shake around. I watched Tony Scott guide Gene Hackman through a confrontation scene over and over. I was maybe 100 feet away.

When you first arrive on a big movie set there’s nothing more exciting. And then you hang around for a while, doing nothing but watching and maybe shooting the shit with whomever and taking notes and sipping soft drinks and nibbling bagels, and you’re eventually bored stiff.

Eventually it was time to leave. I took a last look at the set, thanked Jerry, shook hands and briskly walked off the sound stage and back to my black 240SX Nissan. I eased out of the parking lot and drove north on Ince Blvd. I stopped at a red light at the corner of Ince and Culver Blvd.

Just to my left was a large black limo, idling like me. I looked over and damned if it wasn’t Hackman in the back seat, just sitting there, three or four feet away.

“And so what?” you might ask. I’d just been watching him play the tough submarine captain, saying the same lines over and over. But I was nonetheless fascinated by my close-up view of the guy, and immediately I was telling myself “Jesus, don’t look…don’t be an asshole! They can feel it when fans are staring at them, even if it’s through glass.”

So I snuck a quick peek and turned away. And then another quickie. And then another. Not once did Hackman look in my direction. Maybe he knew I was sneaking peeks but decided not to confront me because I had the decency not to stare. I know that if I’d quickly turned and found him staring right at me it would have been mortifying. Thank God he didn’t.

Several months later I schmoozed with the whole Crimson Tide crew (Hackman, Denzel, Scott, Don and Jerry) at a Marina del Rey junket. A lot of fun, lots of food…a splendid time was had by all.

I remember asking Denzel about the Silver Surfer scene and asking if he had a preference for the Jack Kirby or Moebius version, or whether it had been discussed between takes or whatever. He looked at me, smirked, shook his head and opened his hands, palms up. He was basically saying “I didn’t ask, and I didn’t care.”