Exploring Taboo: A Bold and Edgy Approach to Valentine’s Day at 45 – Is It Too Much?

The 1980 thriller Cruising was fired up a flashpoint of controversy before even a foot of celluloid was shot. The project, after a long and peculiar gestation period, was instigated by William Friedkin, the director nicknamed “Hurricane Billy.” Aside from his volatility and filmmaking facility, he also tended to favor material of a provocative nature. You’ve heard of The Exorcist, of course. You likely know how he made a hero out of a racist cop who compulsively bent the rules in The French Connection. And so on. 

The seed for Cruising, a very graphic and ultimately very odd thriller about a serial killer preying on the leather-heavy, S&M-leaning anonymous gay sex scene that was thriving and throbbing on the docks of New York City in the pre-AIDS era, were planted in Friedkin in 1979, when he read a series of Village Voice columns by Arthur Bell about real-life murders in what was then the meatpacking district of Manhattan, where rough trade gay bars and clubs were interspersed between beef coolers. Some years prior, producer Jerry Weintraub had presented Friedkin with Gerald Walker’s novel, to which Weintraub had brought the rights, and Friedkin shrugged him off. After reading Bell’s columns, Friedkin was interested again.

In a not entirely incredible irony, it was Bell who sounded an alarm about the movie just before it started shooting, concerned that it would portray the gay community in a way that would amplify homophobia. Several columns were devoted to protesting the movie and organizing demonstrations at its New York locations.

And the movie’s star, Al Pacino, who plays a cop who goes undercover in the gay subculture to find a serial killer, was disinclined to promote the movie after seeing it. In his 2024 memoir Sonny Boy, Pacino recalls his worse-than-ambivalent feelings about the picture: “I took the money, and it was a lot, and I put it in an irrevocable trust fund,” he writes. “I gave it to charities, and with the interest, it was able to last a couple of decades. I don’t know if it eased my conscience, but at least the money did some good.” Friedkin, who died last year, had been disenchanted with Pacino practically from the start, as he details in his very dishy 2013 memoir The Friedkin Connection, complaining about Pacino’s tardiness and lack of commitment to his role.

The movie is now 45 years old, and thanks to Friedkin’s directorial fluency, it’s as uncomfortable and frightening as it’s ever been. The guy knew how to put together a picture. Hitchcock and Welles were the filmmakers he seemed to treasure above all, and he seemed magically able to use their lessons without overtly revealing their influence. The stalking and killing scenes in Cruising are brutal and punishing, but they also crackle with a dreadful tension; they’re Hitchcockian, but you never stop and point and say “That’s a Hitchcock shot,” or cut, or what have you. It’s just plain exciting filmmaking.

So…or is it “but”: Is it homophobic? Well, it’s complicated. Friedkin’s camera never really judges; no matter how outrageous the characters or situations he trains it on, it retains a certain objectivity. He kicks off the movie by objectively rubbing our noses in the fact that we inhabit a fallen world. A couple of skeevy-looking cops in a radio car, played by Joe Spinell (who in the same year would cowrite and star in Maniac, a world-beating Problematic if there ever was one) and Mike Starr (later to achieve immortality as Frenchy in Goodfellas) happen upon a couple of gay men, not in full drag but wearing women’s wigs and makeup, and start hassling them. The beef is resolved by the cops extorting fellatio out of them.  (And later in the film, Spinell turns up again, in mufti, cruising around The Ramble in Central Park, where much of the film’s, um, action is set.) 

So when Pacino makes his entrance, almost shockingly fresh-faced, not to mention bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, you just know he’s gonna go through it on the undercover assignment his police captain, played by Paul Sorvino in voluble mode, foists upon him. “You ever get your cock sucked by a man?” Sorvino demands almost as soon as Pacino’s Steve Burns enters his office. Burns looks properly befuddled and curious. (A friend remarked back in the day that it would have been much funnier had Pacino responded, “When do I start?”) The captain makes an appeal to the patrolman’s ambition — if he cracks this case, he will make detective — and explains that he got picked for the job because he matches the physical characteristics of the other victims. How reassuring. 

Steve’s interactions with girlfriend Nancy (Karen Allen) are depicted at first as oases of normalcy. As Burns finds himself more drawn into his masquerade (this is absolutely a movie about masks, among other things) he becomes adrift and blasé, as Friedkin shows more and more unusual activity at the clubs, including one man greasing his fist with Crisco as another man chained up to a wooden X awaits ministrations. IF you’ve seen Fred Halsted’s L.A. Plays Itself (and I have!) you know what’s coming, which certainly can’t be shown in an R -rated film. Anyway, all this tends to alienate him from his cis-het normative civilian life.

So, yes, there is a fair amount of “othering” in the movie, and the early bits of dialogue insisting that this stuff is “outside the mainstream” of actual gay life don’t really cut it in terms of “balance.” But again, Friedkin’s point, for better or worse — and this is true of many of his films — is that the whole world is sick. Once it’s established that the weapon in the murders is a steak knife, he takes us to a restaurant and presents a montage of a series of such knives cutting into medium rare meat. We are all implicated, unless we’re vegan. (One of the movie’s most passionate champions was the film critic Robin Wood, himself a gay man; Wood who devoted almost a whole chapter of his book Hollywood From Vietnam To Reagan to the movie, which he argues is “radical and subversive.”)

Friedkin works a similar vein with respect to the killer, never really nailing down his identity. While clearly seen in the first murder, when poor Loren Lukas gets killed at the St. James Hotel, he’s obscured in other killings. And the character the cops pick up at the end after Pacino’s character is almost offed by him, Stuart Richards, is played by a completely different actor (Richard Cox) than the first murderer (played by Larry Atlas). In another Central Park scene, the killer-to-be’s face is obscured by a veil of cigarette smoke, but he’s a completely different actor than those others. And so on. 

Steve Inwood, the director in Staying Alive who tells Travolta that he’s not the greatest dancer to come down Broadway, play one murder victim who’s killed by his gay porno loop booth companion. As he’s stabbed, we see that one of the actors in the loop is first victim Loren Lukas, who was a college professor, not a porn actor. (Loren, incidentally, is played by Armando Santana, who was a friend of Pacino’s; he turns up three years later in Pacino and De Palma’s Scarface, about a hundred pounds heavier, as Ernie, the guy Tony Montana doesn’t kill after dispatching Robert Loggia and Harris Yulin.) So again, no one is quite who they seem. Friedkin’s frequent use of dissolves when Pacino’s character is going undercover suggest that Burns in entering a netherworld for real. And the only “normal” gay in the movie, Ted Bailey (played by Don Scardino, who would later go on to becoming a wildly successful TV director) ends up slaughtered — Friedkin’s camera lingers over his bloodied body, as Friedkin’s camera tends to do — possibly, we are led to believe, by Burns himself. A fallen world indeed.

If you can detach yourself from the picture’s insinuating creepiness, the bit parts from future famous actors including Ed O’Neill (a cranky — imagine that! — plainclothes cop) and Powers Boothe (a gay paraphernalia salesmen) are pretty diverting. But detachment isn’t something Friedkin’s interested in providing. He wants the viewer to hang on the same hook that Pacino’s character ultimately does. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.