From: An Anonymous Movie Fan [Email him]

Over the holidays my wife and I had settled down on the couch and were scanning through the TV for something to watch and settled on the classic western movie  El Dorado (1967) with John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and James Caan. There is a part in the film where James Caan's character improvises a subterfuge to get close to a guard to knock him out.

Caan wraps a blanket around his shoulders and takes the flat base of a flower pot and puts it on his head as a hat. He then shuffles over to the guard with his head down muttering fake Chinese and pretending to be a Chinaman. He puzzles the guard just long enough to get close and clobber him. Imagine my surprise when the film stopped at him touching the flower pot and jumped to Caan without his costume standing at the door telling everyone to come along.

 Anyone who had never seen this film would have no idea what happened, and that of course was the purpose. It appears that the new trend in censorship on television will consist of protecting us from any pre-Big-Brother era entertainment. This incident may seem small to some but for me it was a warning sign that a pernicious evil has gotten its foot in the door and is doing its best to barge all the way in.

My past is systematically being erased like a bad dream that has to be got rid of. All of us have to fight this however we can.

James Fulford writes: A blogger also noticed this (on AMCTV [Email them]), and captured a picture of Caan’s impersonation here.

The point is that there were Chinese in the Old West who looked like this, with round hats and robes. That's who Caan was impersonating.