As a serial killer hunts down gay men in New York’s leather scene, Al Pacino’s naïve cop is sent undercover into an alien world of hyper-sexual debauchery. As he immerses himself in the anonymity of the cruising scene, fantasy and reality begin to blur. Boycotted by the queer community on release, but reevaluated for its authentic portrait of a lost subculture, William Friedkin’s grime-smeared, dive-bar drama remains vivid and provocative.
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Right from the start, Cruising was a hated film. William Friedkin took a 1970 pulp fiction serial-killer thriller by Gerald Walker set in New York’s gay scene, transferred it into the city’s S&M leather bars and cast Al Pacino as Steve, a cop who works undercover to unmask the murderer. Friedkin has talked about working with the S&M community, but at the time many gay men were horrified, believing their lives were being sensationalised, and they disrupted filming in a number of innovative ways. The film opened to negative reviews and underperformed at the box office.
It’s still a shocking film, whose influence can be seen in trashy erotic thrillers (Basic Instinct, 1992) as well as in provocative works by queer filmmakers such as Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake, 2013) and Yann Gonzalez (Knife+Heart, 2018). James Franco even made a mediocre vanity project, Interior. Leather Bar. (2013), in which he imagined the legendary lost 40 minutes of sexually explicit footage that Friedkin cut from the film – Friedkin’s anecdote about how the first cut of Cruising was received by the head of the ratings board is a commentary highlight [from the Blu-ray release]. The first murder is particularly harrowing, reminiscent of the first on-screen killing in Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972).
Cruising channels a palpable terror of men. Almost all of the male characters are at best unlikeable, at worst detestable, particularly those who work in law enforcement. The very few male characters depicted sympathetically end up being violently killed. Serial-killer films with exclusively male victims are still very rare. Putting men at the mercy of other men who want to fuck them and kill them put a rare spin on the tropes of slasher films from the previous two decades, in which female characters generally fell prey to vicious sex killers. There is only one woman of note in Cruising; Steve’s girlfriend, an underwritten role for Karen Allen, exists solely to serve as a question mark over his sexuality.
Despite the prevalent gloom and horrific violence, some of the scenes in Cruising topple into full-blown camp. Sequences of Pacino huffing an amyl nitrate-soaked handkerchief and boogieing frantically on the dancefloor, howling ‘Yes! Yes!’ as he pumps iron and, in a surreal moment, being punched in the middle of a police interview by a cop wearing only a cowboy hat and a jockstrap, are ridiculous, if unsettling. The film is at its best when it flirts with black comedy – the set piece where Pacino enters a club under cover, in full leather attire, only to discover it’s ‘cop night’, as horny fake detectives writhe around him, is a smart, droll take on identity and performance.
Friedkin is characteristically frank about working with Pacino, claiming he did not know his lines and favouring the original choice for the role, Richard Gere. Friedkin is right to suggest that Pacino’s rather awkward performance works for a character who is completely out of his element. It was a risky choice for a popular actor to play such an ambiguous and heavily sexualised character. A scene where Pacino, trussed up naked on a bed in an attempt to trap the killer, scolds police officers for breaking in too early before the sexual encounter has progressed, is unusually blatant in suggesting the character’s confused sexuality.
The film may not be coy about showing gay sex but it is far from celebratory. Sex ends in grisly death – subliminal shots of gay porn are even intercut in the murder sequences. Lessons in the meanings behind the handkerchief code, doled out by a sex shop salesman (an early role for Powers Boothe), send Steve fleeing for the exit. Violent scenes of whipping and fisting are seen in the bars. Cruising revels in city sleaze, enhanced by James Contner’s cinematography (done full justice in this 4K restoration) and Jack Nitzsche’s chilling score. The depiction of a deadly force killing the gay community seems particularly disquieting today, as the film was released the year before the first Aids-related deaths began to make headlines. While seeing film depictions of gay men as violent and villainous was nothing new, they were rarely as sinister, and never as eroticised, as in Cruising.
As frenzied as the action gets, it has sensitive representations not just of gay self-loathing (a theme Friedkin had previously explored in 1970’s The Boys in the Band) but, more interestingly, the reasons behind it. While the killer(s) may be the enemy within the community, the police department’s brutality towards queer men (the film opens with the sexual abuse of two LGBTQ+ clubbers) and the icy homophobia of a suspect’s father make clear the hatred gay men faced, even in a city as nominally liberal as New York. Cruising may not be a great film, but it’s always a fascinating one and remains deeply unsettling. Although the resolution was derided by contemporary critics as unsatisfactory, even lazy, the ending image of a black stare to camera is chillingly effective.
Alex Davidson, Sight and Sound, October 2019
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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