The French Connection and the trouble with streaming censorship

We are ten minutes into William Friedkin’s The French Connection and we’ve just seen our two heroes beat the shit out of a black guy. Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle (Gene Hackman) is a hard, cynical New York City police detective, a proto Dirty Harry who shoots first and asks questions never. His partner, Buddy ‘Cloudy’ Russo (Roy Scheider), is no less tough but more grounded, often having to pull Popeye back from the brink. They patrol an urban hellscape awash with drugs and crime and have identified the black guy (Alan Weeks) as a pusher. He earns his beating by pulling a blade and slashing Cloudy’s arm. 

After they book him, Popeye chides his partner for being caught off-guard:

Cloudy: ‘How the hell did I know he had a knife?’

Popeye ‘Never trust a n****r.’

Cloudy: ‘He could have been white.’

Popeye: ‘Never trust anyone.’

It’s an exchange that tells us everything we need to know about Popeye. Unless, that is, we are watching the movie on the Criterion Channel, a US streaming platform that specialises in artistically and culturally important cinema.