Cruising (film)

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Cruising
Directed by William Friedkin
Produced by Jerry Weintraub
Written by William Friedkin
Starring Al Pacino
Paul Sorvino
Karen Allen
Distributed by Lorimar Productions / United Artists
Release date(s) February 8, 1980
Running time 106 min.
Language English
IMDb profile

Cruising is a 1980 film directed by William Friedkin and starring Al Pacino. The film is loosely based on the novel of the same name by New York Times reporter Gerald Walker, about a New York City serial killer targeting gay men in the 1970s.

Poorly reviewed by critics, Cruising was a modest financial success, though the filming and promotion were dogged by gay rights protesters.

Contents

[edit] Plot

In New York City, body parts of men are showing up in the Hudson River. Police think it is the work of a serial killer who is picking up gay men at bars and then raping them and mutilating their bodies. Officer Steve Burns (Pacino) is sent deep undercover to the urban world of gay S&M bars in order to track down the killer. His undercover work takes a toll on his relationship with his girlfriend Nancy (Karen Allen) and leads him to question his own sexual orientation.

Burns mistakingly leads the police to investigate the waiter Skip Lea (Jay Acovone), who is forced to strip and masturbate in front of four detectives in order to provide them with a semen sample. Burns is disturbed by this police brutality, and comes to believe that the police are merely motivated by homophobia. Outraged, he almost quits his job. However, he is convinced by his boss (Paul Sorvino) to continue the investigations. In the end of the film, Burns finds the real serial killer, a gay music student, and captures him. However, Burns can not put his undercover work behind him, especially after one of his gay neighbors is murdered by a copycat killer.

[edit] Production

Throughout the summer of 1979, members of New York's gay community protested the production of the film. Gay people were urged to disrupt filming, and gay businesses to bar the film-makers from their premises. People attempted to interfere with shooting by pointing mirrors from rooftops to ruin lighting for scenes, blasting whistles and air horns near locations, and playing loud music. One thousand protesters marched through the East Village demanding the city withdraw support for the film.[1]

[edit] Reaction

The critical reaction to the film was highly negative and gay activists had public protests against the film.

Film critic Jack Sommersby's comments were common of the criticism directed at non-political matters such as character development and the changes made when the film was transferred from a novel to a film [2]:

  • [On the character of the serial killer] "There’s nothing indicative of his fighting his sexual identity, so why does he target gays, then? After first plunging his knife into a victim, he tells them, “You made me do that.” Huh? What about them made him do that? The closest we get to a motivation comes from his imaginary conversations with his deceased, formerly-disapproving father, who tells his boy, “You know what you have to do.”, which sets him off to kill, and, again, we’re baffled as to the connection Friedkin’s trying to make. Was the father’s disapproval pertaining to his son being gay, and is the son trying to win back his father’s approval by killing men of a sexual nature the father has a seething hatred for? If so, there’s no indication of any of this. In fact, we don’t even know if the father knew his son was gay before passing on."
  • [On the character of Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino)] "Gone is the back story of his having harassed gays at an off-base bar when he was in the Army; also gone is his racism, along with his seemingly asexual nature in the first half. Instead, he’s been made a regular, happy-go-lucky guy with a steady girlfriend. One can easily surmise Friedkin’s motivation here: using someone identifiable to lead us into the underworld of black leather and kinky sex. But even here Friedkin fouls up on making the cop’s emotional transitions clear. A mere three to four short scenes after he’s started his assignment, the cop’s moving about in bars with men dressed in policeman’s garb sucking on night sticks, and one lubing his hand up in preparation for a fisting session with a nearly naked man shackled and hanging from the ceiling. Is the cop repulsed? Does he feel the slightest bit turned on? We don’t know. He doesn’t move around in these places with the utmost confidence, and his body language conveys awkwardness, but this isn’t a clear-cut indicator of either approval or disapproval of what he’s seeing. And how far does he in fact go with the men he allows to be picked up by to see if they’ll strike out at him like the killer? We don’t know that either. We see one massaging his chest in a bar, and another one under a park tunnel give him a let’s-go nod before the cop walks off in his direction; but these scenes just end, we’re brought up short, and the cop’s emotional progression seems stunted, as if Friedkin simply didn’t care. We see the cop engaging in some heavy vaginal intercourse with his girlfriend, but we don’t know if he’s normally this semi-rough, if he’s doing so under the pretense that the rougher, the manlier he must be – fucking away any trace of gay, if you will. A week later, the girlfriend complains about his not wanting her any more, and he replies, “What I’m doing, is affecting me.” How? Turning him off sex with women, or off sex altogether in light of what he’s seeing and experiencing every night? Again, we do not know."

The second major criticism of the film came from gay activists that felt that the film had a homophobic political message that would lead to a rise in hate crimes against gay men. The gay film critic Vito Russo wrote in his book The Celluloid Closet that, "Gays who protested the making of the film maintained that it (the film) would show that when Pacino recognized his attraction to the homosexual world, he would become psychotic and begin to kill." (Vito Russo The Celluloid Closet p. 238, 1987). In the DVD version of The Celluloid Closet documentary one of the film clips included shows that a few seconds of gay pornography was inserted into a scene where the serial killer is stabbing a victim with a knife. Gay activists felt that the film portrayed homosexuals as sexual predators morally akin to vampires and that mixing in gay pornography into a murder scene along with the film's exclusive focus on gay leather bars suggested an intent to make a political connection between gay sex and violence.

[edit] Positive criticism

The negative criticism of the film hurt its box office sales, but since the 1990s the film has generated some positive criticism. Today, the film is something of a cult classic among fans of horror films and even gay audiences. Some view the film as somewhat of a time capsule of the post-Stonewall pre-AIDS era of decadence in gay culture that was commonplace in many major urban centers in the 1970s and early 1980s. Some gay activists point to it as a historical film that prompted a gradual shift in how Hollywood films depicted gay people.[citation needed]

Raymond Murray, the editor of an encyclopedia of gay and lesbian films titled Images in The Dark (p. 393, 1994), writes that "the film proves to be an entertaining and (for those born too late to enjoy the sexual excesses of pre-AIDS gay life) fascinating if ridiculous glimpse into gay life - albeit Hollywood's version of gay life." He goes on to say "the film is now part of queer history and a testament to how a frightened Hollywood treated a disenfranchised minority."

[edit] Behind the scenes

Over 40 minutes of footage were cut from the original release. Friedkin delivered the original cut to the studio, which was found by the MPAA to have provocative content.[citation needed] In an effort to make the scenes of gay "leather bars" as real as possible, actual gay bars were used in the film that existed in New York City at that time. Movie extras in full black leather and chaps and other leather subcultural erotic attire were actual gay patrons of the bar recruited for the scenes a few days before filming began. Extras were instructed to act as they would normally act in gay bars but to tone down sexually-oriented activities because of the likelihood these acts would give the film an "X" rating.[citation needed]

The movie also represents the only film soundtrack work by the seminal Los Angeles punk rock band The Germs. The band recorded a number of songs for the film, of which one, "Lion's Share" appeared.

[edit] DVD Release

A deluxe collector's edition on Region 1 DVD was distributed by Warner Home Video on September 18, 2007. This release is not in its original director's cut, but does include some extra scenes not seen in the original VHS release and additional visual effects added by Friedkin. Friedkin also added a commentary track to accompany the DVD. In the commentary, Friedkin states that much of the 40 unused minutes in the theatrical release have been lost. The only visible omission in this re-release, as compared to the theatrical and VHS releases, is the absence of the disclaimer at the beginning of the film stating that Cruising depicts a gay S&M subculture and is not representative of mainstream gay life.

Friedkin was interviewed by French DVD resources about releasing the uncut version of Cruising. [3]

[edit] Cast and crew

[edit] Awards and nominations

Golden Raspberry Awards:

[edit] References

  1. ^ village voice > film > Cruising: Gay Old Time by Nathan Lee
  2. ^ Movie Review - Cruising - eFilmCritic
  3. ^ http://www.online-translator.com/url/tran_url.asp?lang=en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dvdrama.com%2Fnews.php%3F18803%26page%3D6&direction=fe&template=General&cp1=NO&cp2=NO&autotranslate=on&psubmit2.x=60&psubmit2.y=13

[edit] External links


v • d • e
Films directed by William Friedkin
Good Times (1967) • The Birthday Party (1968) • The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968) • The Boys in the Band (1970) • The French Connection (1971) • The Exorcist (1973) • Sorcerer (1977) • The Brink's Job (1978) • Cruising (1980) • Deal of the Century (1983) • To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) • Rampage (1988) • The Guardian (1990) • Blue Chips (1994) • Jade (1995) • Rules of Engagement (2000) • The Hunted (2003) • Bug (2007)