If you’re a movie buff, like me, there’s a good reason to buy physical media – DVDs and Blu-Ray disks. Yes, this is the age of streaming, and yes, streaming is easy and convenient. But if you, again like me, like old movies and prefer to see them un-fucked-with – well, buy a Blu-Ray. My colleague and occasional drinking buddy Stephen Green has some thoughts on this, and some precautionary examples.

In one of the ugliest scenes in movie history, tough-guy cop Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) and his partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) roughly confront and interrogate a black drug dealer on his no-BS way to finding The French Connection delivering heroin to the streets of New York.

Doyle is angry, impatient, violent, and in a hurry to get “Pusher” (played with genuine terror by veteran stage actor Alan Weeks) to flip on his supplier. Doyle uses all that aggression — plus a nonsense accusation — to unsettle Pusher and force the truth out of him.

“All right! You put a shiv in my partner. You know what that means? G**dammit! All winter long, I got to listen to him gripe about his bowling scores. Now I’m gonna bust your a** for those three bags and I’m gonna nail you for picking your feet in Poughkeepsie.”

Here’s why that matters:

Doyle is bad news, indeed, and audiences see that before and after he chases down and drags a suspect into a back-alley interrogation/beating. The “after” is what sells it, because that six-second exchange forces viewers to revisit Pusher’s alley beating with a better perspective…

…but modern audiences aren’t supposed to see it.

Somebody — nobody seems to know exactly who — cut six pivotal seconds from Hackman’s Oscar-winning performance. The cut was discovered in 2023 by viewers watching the movie on the Criterion Channel. That’s shocking because Criterion has a reputation for restoring classic movies as close to the original as digital video can present.

Hackman, by the way, hated the n-word and balked at doing the scene. Friedkin had to remind him that this movie was a quasi-documentary-style look at the ’70s drug war and the cops who waged it.

And Another Thing: That scene finishes with Russo protesting, “He could have been white.” To which Doyle says, “Never trust anyone.” The whole exchange is key to Doyle’s character, but it had to go because somebody didn’t want to trigger some precious snowflake born decades after the film’s 1971 release.

Vodkapundit has a lot more at the link above, and some of it is just unexplainable – like blurring Daryl Hannah’s shapely buttocks in Disney’s 1984 film Splash, the appearance of which was momentary and perfectly innocent. Splash, which not many people seem to realize was a live-action, much more optimistic telling of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 story of The Little Mermaid.  (Forget Disney. The original story is actually pretty dark.)

But, I digress.

It seems so many people have grown so weak, so hyper-sensitive, that even Mel Brooks’ masterpiece, Blazing Saddles, probably the most side-splitting comedy movie ever made, now comes pre-loaded with a trigger warning. What utter horseshit.

Steve’s right. If there are any great old movies you enjoy, buy the originals, while you still can.