William Friedkin, who passed away last week at age 87, was a provocateur who enjoyed nothing more than to make movies that would push people’s buttons. In that regard, perhaps no project of his was more challenging than Cruising. The subject of intense criticism and controversy in its day, the film is still a hard watch even four decades later. Honestly, I’m not sure how to evaluate it.

During the 1970s, Friedkin experienced the extremes of both success and failure in Hollywood. He followed an Oscar win for The French Connection by making the highest-grossing movie of all time (briefly) with The Exorcist, only to then watch his next two films flop miserably. While it might seem ridiculous for a director to need a comeback just a few years after his biggest hit, Friedkin no doubt felt he had something to prove as the new decade kicked off. By returning to the police thriller genre that had worked so well for him before, and casting one of the biggest stars in the world at the time, Cruising must have looked, on paper, like a surefire slam dunk. Unfortunately, as soon as people got wind of what the movie would actually be about, all hell broke loose.

Title:	Cruising
Year of Release:	1980
Director:	William Friedkin
Watched On:	Blu-ray
Also Available On:	Cinemax Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

If you believe the director (not always a safe assumption, in this case), William Friedkin maintained that he had no ill intent when making Cruising, and merely wanted to tell a murder mystery story in a provocative and atmospheric setting. However, the specific setting in question was the underground gay nightlife scene in late 1970s-era New York City, which he went out of his way to depict in the most lurid and graphic terms he could get away with while just barely avoiding an X rating. With a story about a gay serial killer who targets gay victims and chops them up into pieces, the film sparked a firestorm of controversy among the actual gay community, who felt they were being maligned and exploited by a straight filmmaker trying to shock and terrify straight audiences.

Friedkin shot back at those accusations by insisting that his movie wasn’t saying that all gay men were sicko perverts or psycho killers, just the ones in this particular story. That defense is pretty hard to buy when almost every gay character in the film falls into one of those two categories. Moreover, when production of the movie was disrupted by protestors, Friedkin made no attempt to listen to or address their complaints, instead defiantly pushing through with the project as he originally planned it, expecting that he’d be vindicated later if the picture were a box office hit.

It wasn’t. If not quite as big a bomb as Sorcerer had been, Cruising was excoriated by critics and disappointed financially. It then drifted into relative obscurity for many years, remembered mostly as a wrongheaded misfire, until experiencing some small measure of re-evaluation decades later.

Al Pacino – coming off a string of iconic performances in The Godfather and its sequel, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and …And Justice for All – stars as NYPD beat cop Steve Burns, who is quietly recruited into the detective division after the discovery of multiple sets of mutilated body parts points to the work of a serial killer preying on gay men. Although Steve himself isn’t gay, he fits the physical profile of most of the victims, and his captain (Paul Sorvino) wants to use him to set a trap for the killer. To do this, he’ll have to go undercover, cruise the bars and clubs the other victims frequented, and set himself up as a target.

As he had in The French Connection, Friedkin pulls no punches in depicting New York police as corrupt, abusive, and bigoted. The film opens with two slimy cops bullying a pair of transvestite streetwalkers into giving them sexual favors in their squad car. When he accepts the job, Steve is explicitly told that he’ll have no backup in the field – the implication being that other cops can’t be trusted, and frankly have no interest in catching a killer who’s been clearing out undesirables they couldn’t care about in the first place.

Forgive the minor spoiler, but the most shocking moment in the movie comes near the end, after the police have arrested a man they believe to be the killer, and the captain immediately tells him that the District Attorney has already (without any hesitation) authorized a plea deal of just eight years in prison if he’ll confess to murdering multiple people. No real justice would ever be served for this crime, because the victims were not considered worth the effort of fighting to avenge. The arrest is mostly just for show, to present the illusion that something was being done about a homicidal maniac. When he refuses the plea, the killer is allowed bail and quickly released back onto the streets.

A more interesting and morally complex movie could be made to better explore that aspect of the story. Regrettably, Friedkin’s primary interest seems to have been to portray the seediness and depravity of the era’s infamous leather bars, where (as he shows it) sweaty, mostly-naked men bedecked in S&M gear grind against one another and openly fuck – complete with bondage play and fisting – in front of crowds of onlookers.

In interviews, Friedkin claimed to have visited such places and seen this type of activity with his own eyes. Maybe he did. Maybe he was just fascinated with this subculture and wanted to be the first mainstream filmmaker to capture it in a wide-release movie. Nevertheless, coming from a straight director with a straight leading man, the way it plays on screen conveys an unmistakable message to hetero viewers that: “This is what the gays are into. Isn’t it so perverse?” Having been warned how that would be taken, the fact that he refused to seriously consider any of the complaints suggests that his motives and agenda were less than noble.

The shame of all this is that Cruising is actually a very well-made, fascinating thriller in many respects. Famed for his showboating antics in other movies, Al Pacino dials the theatrics way down in this one and delivers a very understated, introspective performance. Backing him up is Karen Allen as the girlfriend he has to leave behind. Other notable faces in smaller roles include James Remar and Powers Boothe.

Aside from the inherent sleaziness of the milieu, the movie is less sensationalized than it might have been, especially coming from the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist. An argument can even be made that the filmmaker is less judgmental toward the lifestyle shown than merely titillated by it. To keep viewers off-balance, Friedkin employs some very interesting narrative and stylistic devices, such as clearly showing the killer’s face in multiple scenes, in each case played by a similar-looking yet different actor. The story also closes with a very ambiguous ending.

For some movies, controversy can spur ticket sales by audiences curious to see what the fuss is about. Sadly, that wasn’t the case with Cruising. The protests and negative reviews scared off most of the prospective moviegoers who weren’t already too appalled by the subject matter. Looking back on it with decades of hindsight, the film’s legacy is still extremely complicated. In my own estimation, I don’t believe it’s a bad movie, so much as a misguided one that probably shouldn’t have been made, at least not during the time and circumstances it was. Whether it’s truly offensive, or just misunderstood, is perhaps something I’m not qualified to judge.

The Blu-ray

Arrow Video released Cruising as a Special Edition Blu-ray in both the United States and the UK in 2019. I wound up purchasing a UK copy as part of a sale from Arrow’s web site. Although both the case art and disc label show only a Region B logo, the movie functions fine with my Blu-ray player set to its Region A default. I have to assume that Arrow used the exact same disc in both territories, distinguished only by differences to the packaging.

The Blu-ray boasts a “Brand new restoration from a 4K scan of the original camera negative, supervised and approved by writer-director William Friedkin.” With most other filmmakers, a “director approved” video transfer is a positive selling point, but the matter is more complicated with Friedkin, who had a history of making huge revisionist changes to his old movies, usually for the worse. I won’t pretend to be intimately familiar with what Cruising looked liked during its original theatrical release (I was 6-years-old at the time), but just from looking at the Blu-ray, I can tell that the director took a very heavy hand mucking around with every video setting he felt he could get away with.

Thankfully, the Cruising Blu-ray is nowhere near the disaster (nor the desecration) that the first Friedkin-supervised Blu-ray for The French Connection was. Having had his hand smacked very firmly by both critics and the film’s own cinematographer over that fiasco, the director backed down from plans to give all his movies a hideous “pastel” color makeover. (Sadly, his 1970 The Boys in the Band had already been marred before that happened.) I expect that many viewers watching on moderate-sized televisions may even think this Cruising disc looks pretty good. Unfortunately, its problems become more evident on a large screen.

One of the supplemental features on the disc includes an old interview with cinematographer James Contner, who claims that he shot the movie in a desaturated, monochromatic style. That’s hardly evident on the Blu-ray, for which Friedkin frequently cranked up the color dial. The opening scene, for instance, features a tug boat in a very vivid, oversaturated shade of red that buzzes with chroma noise and doesn’t look natural at all. While the actors have been spared the atrocity of weird, glowing purple flesh tones like those in The French Connection suffered, many colors throughout the film look artificially pumped up, especially the blue tint that permeates most dark scenes.

Contrast also appears to have been boosted, which makes bright parts of the picture look too bright and video-ish. The 1.85:1 image is heavily grainy at times, while many other scenes have definitely been smoothed-over with a layer of Digital Noise Reduction and then electronically sharpened afterward. The effects of that are frustratingly inconsistent. In all, the movie has a very over-processed appearance. I fear that the “director approved” stamp will likely result in this master standing as the definitive version of the movie going forward, likely forever. I doubt any other video label will have enough interest to redo it at this point.

Freidkin is also credited with supervising a new DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, yet Arrow’s disc still defaults to a PCM 2.0 option instead. I tried to compare them, but honestly couldn’t hear all that much difference. Neither has much noticeable surround activity. Fidelity is pretty good on both.

Dialogue throughout most of the film has very obviously been overdubbed with ADR, and the sound mix makes almost no attempt to disguise that. One of the bonus features on the disc explains that protesters chanting and making other loud noises near the set made live dialogue recording virtually impossible. Rather than hide the ADR, Friedkin decided to lean into it. The fact that so many of the actors’ voices sound disconnected from the visuals on screen has a disorienting effect that adds to the tension. (In fact, he even went so far as to have some characters’ voices dubbed by actors who also play other roles in the movie.) The sound design makes very unsettling use of quiet, weird music and ambient tones, and subtle sound effects such as the jangling of chains hanging from the leather jackets and S&M gear.

Recorded in 2019, Arrow’s only exclusive extra was a new audio commentary between William Friedkin and critic Mark Kermode. An older solo commentary by Friedkin himself was carried over from a prior DVD release, along with a pair of informative 20-minute featurettes and a trailer. The booklet enclosed with the Blu-ray provides an essay by critic F.X. Feeney.

2025 Update

Since I first wrote and published this article in 2023, Arrow Video unexpectedly released a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray edition of Cruising with a new video transfer that undoes much of William Friedkin’s revisionism. Unfortunately, I don’t feel that I care enough for this particular movie to purchase another copy of it, no matter the improvement.

Related

• William Friedkin (director)
  • A Public Advisory Regarding The French Connection on Blu-ray
  • Jade (1995)
  • The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023)
• Karen Allen (star)
  • Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
  • The Sandlot (1993)
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
  • Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
• Powers Boothe (star)
  • Southern Comfort (1981)
  • Tombstone (1993)