Selective Sanitizing

SUNDAY NIGHT, I needed a diversion to keep me awake until 2:30 a.m. so I could watch the U.S. soccer team open up a serious can of whup-ass on Mexico. So, I watched one of Clint Eastwood's classic Dirty Harry movies--1973's "Magnum Force"--on Ted Turner's "Superstation" TBS. I noticed two things about the movie: First, I'd forgotten how inferior it is to the original 1971 "Dirty Harry." But second, I noted for perhaps the third or fourth time in recent months a passing strange television phenomenon that you might call "selective sanitizing." (Bear with me for a moment on this.)

In one scene, Eastwood's character, Detective "Dirty Harry" Callahan, and his partner, Early Smith, walk into police headquarters late at night after thwarting an armed robbery. They encounter a group of four rookie traffic cops who've already impressed Callahan with their lethal accuracy on the police firing range. After a quick exchange of hellos and see-ya-laters, Callahan asks his partner, "So, you know those guys?" Early responds, "Yeah, they came up after me in the academy."

Now here's where things started getting weird. In the original movie, which I've seen perhaps half a dozen times on television, Early--who happens to be black--follows this little tidbit of information about the rookie cops with an additional comment: "You know, those guys were real tight in the academy. They hung out by themselves so much, a lot of us thought they were queer for each other." (I'm paraphrasing from memory here, but I remember the "queer for each other" line distinctly.)

But something was different this time on TBS. Early's crack about the rookie cops possibly being "queer for each other" had vanished--it was totally cut, as the film shifted abruptly to the next scene. Later in the movie, we learn that the seemingly clean-cut rookie cops are part of a vigilante "death squad" assembled by a corrupt police lieutenant (played by the insufferable Hal Holbrook) to assassinate San Francisco's worst criminals.

Of course, the bloody Dirty Harry films tend to be thoroughly sanitized for TV, but I'd never seen that line cut before. I began wondering why it had been removed. The film never offers any other evidence that the traffic cops are gay; Early's throwaway comment simply adds to their characterization as an oddly close-knit circle that keeps to themselves. Could it be that a politically sensitive higher-up at TBS frowned at any suggestion--even in passing--of a relation between the possible homosexuality of the cops and the fact that they turn out to be brutal, lawless killers? Or that the virtuous black detective, Early, who plays the sensible Yin to Dirty Harry's wild Yang, would make an apparently flip remark about some fellow cops possibly being "queer for each other"? Or was it simply too much to allow a non-gay character to use the term "queer"?

An interesting question, to be sure. It occurs to me because I noticed some similarly awkward omissions while watching old "Tom and Jerry" cartoons recently on cable. (Before you start giving me grief about being a grown man who occasionally watches "Tom and Jerry," I will merely note that the new Scooby-Doo movie--Scooby-Doo, for heaven's sake!!--made $56 million at the box office this past weekend.)

Anyway, two "Tom and Jerry" scenes struck me. The first was in the classic toon where Jerry decides to leave boring life with Tom in the suburbs and strike out for Manhattan. Upon Jerry's arrival at Penn Station, a shoeshine man mistakenly grabs the mouse and uses him as a dauber to apply black polish on a shoe. In the original cartoon as I remember it from my childhood, the man stuffs Jerry in the top of the polish bottle when he's finished, and we see Jerry in one of those unsettling, pathetic "blackface" looks that apparently passed for humor in the late 1940s or early '50s. (Unfortunately, this was a fairly standard gag in cartoons of that era--for instance, a character would foolishly stick his head in some opening only to find a lit stick of dynamite; when it exploded, you'd see the bewildered blackface appear.) But in this new version, the blackface bit was completely cut--you see the man using Jerry to slap on the polish, but then the cartoon jumps awkwardly to the next scene.