Everything Action Theater: The French Connection
With the passing of the great William Friedkin this past week, a number of his classic are being revisited, including 1971’s The French Connection, which you can watch here in the latest Everything Action Theater. Starring Gene Hackman as NYPD detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, he and his partner Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider) are after a French heroin smuggler, played by Fernando Rey. The French Connection has what many consider one of the greatest, if not the greatest, car chase sequences in film history and its considered one of the greatest movies of all time, appearing on the AFI 100 Films list and being included in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. It recently garnered some controversy when Criterion and Apple featured a censored version of the film, removing a scene featuring a racial slur, which many believe was a decision by Disney, who owns the rights to the movie following their purchase of 20th Century Fox. The version below from the Internet Archive seems to be uncensored and you can check it out below.