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This release is surely a contender for best bluray release of 2019.
Spectacular Arrow Films release. Excellent specs and extras. I wish a CD facsimile of the classic LP soundtrack was included. Amazing work by the legendary Jack Nietzsche. Features John Hiatt, Willy DeVille, a P-Funk spinoff called Mutiny, The Germs(flown to NYC specifically to lay down tracks for this film) and much, much more. Check it out here: ASIN B000YPW626. Great stuff!
Easily the most controversial and maligned film in the last fifty years is finally being re-evaluated after the historical production ended. (The production as interesting as the film.)
The text in quotes are from the commentary track and featurettes.
"His film promises to be the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen, the worst possible nightmare of the most uptight straight and a validation of Anita Bryant's hate campaign [launched against anti-discrimination legislation by the conservative pop singer]," wrote gay columnist Arthur Bell in the Village Voice. He urged readers to give Friedkin and his crew a "terrible time". "Bell's columns were very negative," confirms Friedkin, "and I remember one or two others, like the New York Magazine, at the time, but it wasn't the mainstream press."
When the production hit the West Village in the summer of 1979, so, too, did a large and vocal segment of New York's gay community determined to make filming difficult, if not impossible.
Protesters threw bottles and cans at the cast and crew, blew whistles and chanted anti-Cruising slogans. They gained access to apartments adjacent to where Friedkin was filming and turned stereos up loud to ruin the sound recording. Some even climbed on to rooftops and ingeniously shone mirrors at the sets to disrupt the lighting patterns. Had Friedkin seen any of this coming?
"You never anticipate those sorts of confrontations," he says. "But I didn't know whether [Cruising] would be accepted or not – that's not something I think about when I start a film. It's a story that interests me and, hopefully, it will interest others."
Not everyone was opposed to the film. Patrons of the notorious leather bars (some of which were owned by the Mafia), such as The Anvil and The Mine Shaft, where Friedkin shot the film's most memorable scenes, and "guys that hung around on the West Side", also took to the streets, to protest against the protesters. "They were very upset by the fact that other people of the gay community were picketing, basically, their lifestyle, which they had absolutely no sense of trying to hide," he says.
Indeed, all the extras in the hedonistic, popper-hazed club scenes were real punters. "It never occurred to me that you could get actors to go out and portray those scenes, which I had seen prior to making the film," says Friedkin. "I simply tried to show it as I saw it. I did not try to affect it."
Part of Bell's anxiety was undoubtedly provoked by the thick vein of homophobia running through Gerald Walker's novel, from which the film was adapted. In it a cop sent in pursuit of a murderer of gay men deals with guilt over his own emerging homosexuality by becoming a copycat killer. Friedkin's film (the first for which he received full screenwriting credit) is not a straightforward adaptation of the book, however. In fact, the director says he was not much impressed with it when he was approached to make the film by producer Jerry Weintraub, and turned it down at first. The book was "long outdated in terms of the gay scene in New York," he says, "[and] it was really of another era."
A lot had also changed in the decade since Friedkin made The Boys in the Band, based on Mart Crowley's play about a group of (mostly self-loathing) homosexual men gathered for a party in Manhattan in the 1960s.
"When I made Boys in the Band, gay life was very much in the closet in terms of the work place and... the social scene," says Friedkin. "There were gay men still trying to hide the fact that they were in the gay community. By the time Cruising came along in 1980, there had been the famous Stonewall Riots, and other demonstrations of gay people asserting their rights. So the situation had changed, on a massive level."
The idea of Cruising became more attractive when the Village Voice ran reports about gruesome murders that were taking place on the West Side and Lower West Side of Manhattan. They were "the most evocative stories about these murders that the mainstream journalists and the police were largely ignoring," says Friedkin. "They were mostly unsolved and they were taking place in those clubs and around those areas. I thought, 'This will make an unusual background for a murder mystery.'"
Another factor was a friend, Randy Jurgensen – a policeman who had been technical consultant on Friedkin's The French Connection and also appeared in the film. He had worked on a detail known, says the director, as the "Pussy Posse", in the 1960s, when murders were also happening in the bars. "He was on the undercover police section that dealt with prostitution, male and female, and he was assigned to go into the clubs to see if he could attract the killer."
Jurgensen became the model for Al Pacino's character Steve Burns in Cruising, who swaps his patrolman's uniform for leather duds and poses as a gay man to trap a serial killer stalking New York's S&M bars and peep shows, and undergoes a crisis of identity and apparent sexual disorientation.
"He told me that the experience of being undercover as a heterosexual in the gay bars was very disturbing to him and upsetting, and produced a lot of tension and a lot of questions. I never went into specifically what those were," says Friedkin, "but I understood his anxiety. So I tried to reflect that a little bit in the Burns character."
Whether or not Burns acts on his burgeoning homosexual feelings is open to interpretation. So, too, controversially, is the question of whether he has become a killer by the end. Whereas Walker left his readers in no doubt, Friedkin deliberately creates ambiguity by offering this transgression as a possibility rather than as a certainty. There may even be several killers. Burns appears to get his man, but does he?
"I don't know who the killer is," says Friedkin. "And I don't know if Burns is a killer or not. I don't have the answer. But I wanted very much the implication that he might be, because many of these murders, not all, were unsolved."
Friedkin is arguably doing something much more interesting than simply linking homicidal tendencies to latent homosexuality; Cruising appears to be about the slipperiness of human sexuality, and how rigid cultural attitudes to sexuality can create conflicts within individuals and society.
Friedkin's elliptical style, though, leaves many questions unanswered, and opens the film up to multiple interpretations. Inevitably, he found himself facing charges of homophobia. "What can I say about that?" he says, when I ask him about the accusations. "That's like asking someone, 'Are you still beating your wife?' Let me put it to you this way: none of the people who wrote about those aspects of the film knew anything at all about me. They did not know me. You could possibly make a judgment about someone from the films they direct. But I don't much believe in that sort of psychobabble.
"I made a film about a story that was unusual, original and I was very interested in, and that because of my connections in that world I was able to depict it as honestly as possible. But the film does not take a position for or against anybody. Probably the people that come out looking bad are the cops... I did not make the film, contrary to [the opinions of] a very small handful of critics, as a kind of put-down of the gay lifestyle, which I never felt and I don't feel to this day."
The film boasts great character actors, genuine thrills and even some comic (if not surreal) moments. Check out "Powers Booth, Al Pacino handkerchief" on YouTube - you'll see what I mean!
One of Friedkin's best.
One of the strangest events in regards to this film is the execrable Partners(81/82) with Ryan O'Neal and William Hurt. Intended to be an Airplane!/ Naked Gun version of the cop-going-undercover-as-a-gay-man genre. Of course, one uniquely singular film doesn't qualify as a genre. Of course, Partners was simply terrible - and genuinely offensive, a bizzare curiosity.
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From the manufacturer
Cruising (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]
William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) directs Al Pacino as an undercover cop pitched into New York’s seedy underbelly in Cruising.
New York is caught in the grip of a sadistic serial killer who is preying on the patrons of the city’s underground bars. Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino) tasks young rookie Steve Burns (Pacino) with infiltrating the S&M subculture to try and lure the killer out of the shadows – but as he immerses himself deeper and deeper into the underworld, Steve risks losing his own identity in the process.
Taking the premise and title from reporter Gerald Walker’s novel, Cruising was the subject of great controversy at the time of its release and remains a challenging and remarkable movie to this day, with Pacino’s haunted lead performance as its magnetic centrepiece.
Incredible looking transfer of an often confounding film
Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2019
For all the claims of homophobia and outright fear mongering laid against Cruising (1980), its problems don't lie (entirely) within its admittedly dim view of one particular gay lifestyle. The flaws in director William Friedkin's film are much less scandalous than that; think script, editing, pacing, etc. And for all its attempts to shock the audience with hard-R scenes of lubed-up party boys seducing a wide-eyed Al Pacino, the biggest shock, ultimately, is that it lacks the courage of its convictions.In an attempt to catch the "homo killer," beat cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is sent undercover into New York City's underground gay club scene, a hedonistic world of casual sex and kinky fashion. Initially out of his element, Steve hunts down a few likely suspects while trying to maintain his "straight" relationship to Nancy (Karen Allen) on the side. But the perils of the job begin to take their toll, pushing Steve to take chances that will end the investigation one way or the other.Cruising was protested by gay rights activists throughout the entirety of its location shooting, resulting in dubbed dialogue for many scenes to cover up the air horns and chants designed to disrupt what some thought to be an inflammatory piece of exploitation filmmaking. And, indeed, Friedkin's film often feels like just another Italian slasher with an A-list cast and crew (Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper, released two years later, pushes the heterosexual shock factor in similar fashion). But the killings are almost inconsequential, the killer himself purposefully vague and the ending just outré enough to inspire anger and confusion and in equal measure.Reportedly shorn of 40-minutes Friedkin willingly sacrificed to the MPAA, the film feels unfinished, but still fascinates in a darkly, disturbing way. Visually, it's miles away from the gritty New York films of the '70s, shot with Miami Vice slickness (cinematographer James Contner went on the work on the series in 1985) that's as buff and polished as the club patrons themselves. Pacino's naive performance works to a degree; he looks as uncomfortable as the audience feels. But the film goes out of its way to bury essential bits of information and secondary characters (poor Karen Allen is almost non-existent as a love interest). Not to mention the 6-foot black man who inexplicably interrupts an interrogation wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and a jockstrap!Arrow Video's new restoration from a 4K scan is one of those transfers that simply defy description; it's on par with the best work they've ever done. Extras include a pair of audio commentaries and archival featurettes along with original theatrical trailer.
Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2019
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Pierre Desjardins
Great exploration film of an unknown fringe of society.
Reviewed in Canada on May 27, 2022
