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. Today, Cruising is owned by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Poorly reviewed by critics, Cruising was a modest financial success, though the filming and promotion were dogged by gay rights protesters.
Plot
In New York City during the middle of a hot summer, 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 homosexual men at West Village bars like The Eagle's Nest, The Ramrod and The Cock Pit and then taking them to cheap rooming houses or motels and stabbing them to death after tying them up. Officer Steve Burns (Pacino) is sent deep undercover to the urban world of gay S&M Leather bars in the Meatpacking District of the West Village in order to track down the killer. He rents an apartment in the area and befriends a neighbour, Ted Bailey (Don Scardino) a young openly gay struggling playwright. His undercover work takes a toll on his relationship with his girlfriend Nancy (Karen Allen) and leads him to question his own sexual orientation, while also building a close relationship with Ted, who is having relationship issues with his dancer boyfriend Gregory Mellanaise.
Burns mistakenly leads the police to investigate the waiter Skip Lee (Jay Acovone), who is intimidated, beaten, and 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 thinks that he has found the serial killer, a gay music student, who attacks him with a knife in Morningside Park. Burns brings the man into custody, however, soon afterwards, the severely mutilated body of another victim, Ted, the young gay man Burns had befriended early on in the film, is found and the case remains unresolved. The police think of it as a lover's quarrel turned violent and put out an arrest warrant for his boyfriend Gregory (Ted had earlier described to Steve how he could be controlling and possessive). In the ambiguous finale, Nancy tries on Burns' leather peaked cap and he wipes off his make-up and looks directly at the camera.
Production
Philip D'Antoni, who had produced Friedkin's 1971 film The French Connection, approached Friedkin with the idea of directing a film based on The New York Times reporter Gerald Walker's 1970 novel Cruising, about a serial killer targeting New York City's gay community. Friedkin was not particularly interested in the project. D'Antino tried to attach Steven Spielberg but they were not able to interest a studio. A few years later, Jerry Weintraub brought the idea back to Friedkin, who was still not interested. Friedkin changed his mind following a series of unsolved killings in gay leather bars in the early 1970s and the articles written about the murders by Village Voice journalist Arthur Bell. Friedkin also knew a police officer named Randy Jurgenson, who had gone into the same sort of deep cover that Pacino's Steve Burns did to investigate an earlier series of gay murders, and Paul Bateson, a doctor's assistant who had appeared in Friedkin's 1973 film The Exorcist, who confessed to some of those murders. All of these factors gave Friedkin the angle he wanted to pursue in making the film.[1] Jurgenson and Bateson served as consultants on the film, as did Sonny Grosso, who had earlier consulted with Friedkin on The French Connection. Jurgenson and Grosso appear in bit parts in the film.
In researching the film, Friedkin worked with members of the Mafia, who at the time owned many of the city's gay bars.[2] Al Pacino was not Friedkin's first choice for the lead. Richard Gere expressed a strong interest in the part and Friedkin had opened negotiations with Gere's agent. Gere was Friedkin's choice because he believed that Gere would bring an androgynous quality to the role that Pacino could not.[3]
The Motion Picture Association of America originally gave Cruising an X rating. Friedkin claims he took the film before the MPAA board "50 times" at a cost of $50,000 and deleted 40 minutes of footage from the original cut before he secured an R rating.[1] The deleted footage, according to Friedkin, consisted entirely of footage from the clubs in which portions of the film were shot and consisted of "[a]bsolutely graphic sexuality....that material showed the most graphic homosexuality with Pacino watching, and with the intimation that he may have been participating."[2] In some discussions, Friedkin claims that the missing 40 minutes had no effect on the story or the characterizations,[1] but in others he states that the footage created "mysterious twists and turns (which [the film] no longer takes)", that the suspicion that Pacino's character may have himself become a killer was made more clear and that the missing footage simultaneously made the film both more and less ambiguous. When Friedkin sought to restore the missing footage for the film's DVD release, he discovered that United Artists no longer had the footage. He believes that UA destroyed it.[1] Some obscured sexual activity remains visible in the film as released and Friedkin intercut a few frames of gay pornography into the first scene in which a murder is depicted.
The movie 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.
Friedkin asked noted gay author John Rechy, some of whose works were set in the same milieu as the film, to screen Cruising just before its release. Rechy had written an essay defending Friedkin's right to make the film, although not the film itself. At Rechy's suggestion, Friedkin deleted a scene showing the Gay Liberation slogan "We Are Everywhere" as graffiti on a wall just before the first body part is pulled from the river and added a disclaimer:[4]
This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world, which is not meant to be representative of the whole.[5]
Friedkin later claimed that it was the MPAA that required the disclaimer, calling it "part of the dark bargain that was made to get the film released at all" and "a sop to organised gay rights groups".[6] Friedkin claimed that no one involved in making the film thought it would be considered as representative of the entire gay community, but gay film historian Vito Russo disputes that, citing the disclaimer as "an admission of guilt. What director would make such a statement if he truly believed that his film would not be taken to be representative of the whole?"[7]
Protests
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-owned 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.[8]
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 [9]:
- [On the character of the serial killer] "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... [W]e'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. Vito Russo wrote that, "Gays who protested the making of the film maintained that it would show that when Pacino recognized his attraction to the homosexual world, he would become psychotic and begin to kill."[7]
This film was banned in Finland, Iran and South Africa.
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, editor of an encyclopedia of gay and lesbian films titled Images in The Dark, 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."[10]
DVD release
A deluxe collector's edition DVD, distributed by Warner Home Video, was released in Region 1 on September 18, 2007 and Region 2 on 25 Feb 2008. 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. 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. The DVD also includes two featurettes entitled 'The History of Cruising' and 'Exorcising Cruising', the latter being about the controversy the film provoked.
Cast
Awards and nominations
Golden Raspberry Awards:
Notes
- ^ a b c d Simon, Alex (September 2007). "Crusing with Billy". Venice magazine: pp. 68–71. http://www.venicemag.com/pdf/0709/wFriedkin.pdf. Retrieved on 2009-02-10.
- ^ a b Williams, p. 135
- ^ Williams, p. 136
- ^ Rechy, p. 82
- ^ Hadleigh, p. 90
- ^ Williams, p. 138
- ^ a b Russo, p. 238
- ^ Lee, Nathan (2007-08-27). "Gay Old Time". Village Voice. http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0736,lee,77663,20.html. Retrieved on 2009-02-07.
- ^ Movie Review - Cruising - eFilmCritic
- ^ Murray, p. 393
References
- Hadleigh, Boze (2001). The Lavender Screen: The Gay and Lesbian Films: Their Stars, Makers, Characters, and Critics. Citadel Press. ISBN 0806521996.
- Murray, Raymond (1995). Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video. TLA Publications. ISBN 1880707012.
- Rechy, John (2004). Beneath the Skin: The Collected Essays. Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 0786714050.
- Russo, Vito (1987). The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies revised edition. Harper & Row. ISBN 0060961325.
- Williams, Linda Ruth (2005). The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0253347130.
External links
