CHRISTIAN TOTO: Film Preservation Groups Silent on French Connection Censorship.

Martin Scorsese is more than just a world-class filmmaker.

The Oscar winner has used his clout to promote films across the culture, understanding how his voice can move the medium forward. He also helped create The Film Foundation in 1990, a group dedicated to “protecting and preserving motion picture history,” according to its mission statement.

It’s one of several groups devoted to that cause, one that secures the legacy of not just specific films but maintains a valuable part of western culture.

Organizations like The Film Foundation would be the most obvious source of outrage for a recent case of film censorship. Multiple versions of 1971’s “The French Connection,” which won the Best Picture Oscar, have trimmed a sequence for airing racially insensitive slurs.

The scene doesn’t celebrate that ignorance. It’s the filmmaker’s way of describing why the film’s anti-hero, Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle, is such a complicated soul.

So far, few people have spoken out against the overt censorship. The mainstream Hollywood press has aggressively ignored the issue. Celebrities, so often vocal on social media, have stood down on the matter.

As John Nolte adds: If They’ll Censor The French Connection, They’ll Censor Anything.

You see, great art—truly great art—forces us to deal with complicated emotions. I know I’ve said this before, but it’s an important point. Great art confronts us with all the complications, contradictions, and gray areas we find in real life. Great art forces us to work through those complications, to ruminate, confront, consider, and face up to them. This is a wonderful exercise for the human spirit because, in the end, we come out a little wiser and with a thicker skin.

And that’s why Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle is one of the movie’s greatest characters. Like so many of us, he’s a walking contradiction—an immoral man doing a righteous, selfless, and brave thing. After being confronted with this, we walk out of the theater carrying this confusion. We ask ourselves why, even with his glaring flaws, we still admire him. Working through that is a healthy exercise. Disney and its fellow Woke Nazis want to stop Americans from conducting that exercise, so they dumbed down The French Connection.

“Ask yourself: What else have they tried to sneak past us…? What other movies and TV shows are being quietly vandalized, censored, and infantilized that we don’t know about?,” Nolte adds. “Buy hard copies. Buy them now. Because that’s the goal, you know… These acts of vandalism have nothing to do with sensitivity. Nope, these acts of vandalism are all about keeping us simple-minded.”