William Friedkin | Cruising / 1980

in absentia: a film obscuring its own character

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Friedkin (based on the fiction by Gerald Walker) (screenwriter and director) Cruising / 1980

 

I have quite purposely waited for several years to review this film, in part to let all the resentment and anger that William Friedkin’s film Cruising produced upon its release to die down, and also because I, myself, wanted to view it with an as objective eye as I might be able to.

    I was there when this film appeared, and I had some New York friends who were actively involved in the protest of the film. Although the LGBTQ+ community had not yet been established, gay liberation and it’s sense of openness had truly evolved, and the gay community were rightfully afraid that focusing on the S&M scene in the context of a murder story would demean not only the leather crowds of bars like Ramrod and the Mineshaft—both of which I had occasionally visited in my year in Manhattan in 1969—would once again confuse a world unacquainted with the gay world into believing that this was what homosexual life was all about, in the same way the previous generation were frustrated by the closeted, quick-witted Noel Coward-like figures in The Boys in the Band had represented the gay experience in the previous decade. Just as importantly, the first reports of AIDS, then described as a gay disease were beginning to be heard by the already embattled male gay community. Was this really the appropriate time to feature a movie in which an BDSM lurker was busy killing off his fellow gay men? As Vito Russo argued a year later in The Celluloid Closet, in the movies all gay men have to die.

   In fact, Freidkin was using the setting primarily for its shock value, to explore how a world in which young men in leather who symbolically play out the most masculine values of the heterosexual work, including torture and punishment, might easily allow, unwillingly, someone into their midst who could actually take just such tropes further, cutting up bodies and tossing them in the Manhattan rivers or literally slashing his victims dozens of times. 

    I recall visiting the art gallery only a few years later (1985) of Andrew Crispo, who after a few moments of discussing their current show of Robert Mapplethorpe’s flower paintings, he began to joke that perhaps he should lock up Howard in one their closets. Howard quickly laughed it off, but I, now wide-eyes and terrified, knew something was amiss and quickly maneuvered our departure.

     A few weeks later, a partially burned body of a 26-year-old man was found in a Rockland County smokehouse clad only in a leather hood. The young man had been drugged under Crispo’s control, and along with Crispo’s friend Bernard LeGeros, demanded that the victim kneel as he shot him, the gun later found in his 57th Street Galley. Crispo was charged with kidnapping, sodomy, assault, coercion, and unlawful imprisonment, but eventually go off when LeGeros took the fall for him, admitting to the crime, Crispo later being jailed simply for tax evasion.

     As the scenes of Friedkin’s movie reveal, those very bars, owned by the mafia, were wild places of open sex in those days, not so when I visited them in 1996, although clearly, as even the bar I regularly attended, there were back rooms with sex orgies. Since I was never into S&M behavior, I didn’t bother to visit them.

     A young cop, who shares the look of one of the gay men who was killed, a Columbia professor, is asked if he might like to temporarily join the detective squad, with a possible promise of advance if he can help catch them. The ambitious young man, Steve Burns (Al Pacino) agrees, although when told when he will have to do, go undercover, leave his girlfriend Nancy Gates (Karen Allen) behind, and act for several months as a S&M gay man, regularly visiting the gay bars such as The Ramrod and the Mineshaft on the lookout for the possible killer, at first does startle him a bit; but he agrees to the assignment, putting his previous life behind as he moves into an apartment in the West Village, not then nearly as tony as it is today, befriending a fellow gay man who down the hall Ted Bailey (Don Scardino), who shares an apartment with an abusive partner.

     In many senses, it is clear that Burns has no comprehension just how much the police are hated. Just previous to his entry into the film we have seen to abusive cops arrest two crossdressers, who they threaten with jail unless their perform sexual acts upon them, meaning presumably offering the copes blowjobs. One of the crossdressers complains to the police, but absolutely nothing comes of it. Clearly the police are heads, including Captain Edelson, who has hired Burns for his job, are willing to take any action against their own.

   The confusion between the abuse by police and men who prey upon the gay community, accordingly, merely helps those such as the killer hide out in the shadows, which might in the shadows, which might be anywhere from the bars downtown to the Rambles in Central Park, or even Columbia University itself.

     For a long while, the movie simply settles in to watch Burns’ slow assimilation on the gay scene he attempting to impersonate. But gradually, as he subtly queries bartenders and others, he begins to discover the dangers and joys of the scene, not only that of killers, who in fact in those days were not just singular, but the police themselves. 

     One might say that he slowly gets sucked into the world he is investigating. And he feels uncomfortable with what he is experiencing, running back, against the strictures, to his lover and their comfortable apartment in several instances, just to remind himself of who he really is—or at least used to be.

     The major trouble with this film is not its lurid presentation of the S&M gay world, of which there are several glimpses, but the fact that, perhaps because of the backlash of the gay community, the director was terrified of actually showing his character in any real involvement in the scene. We have to simply assume that in some of his meet-ups, with gay men in the Rambles and elsewhere result in sex, but Friedman dare not show any real relationships, but simply hint at them, which even further alienates both his character and his audiences from feeling any true sympathy, which does in fact make this a film simply about a community which he and his character can never penetrate, even if we sense he is now firmly entrenched. He even bothers to learn from a local purveyor (played by Powers Boothe, who later played a true gay true monster Jim Jones, who killed most of his religious followers in Jim Jones in Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones that very same year) about the meaning of the various colored hankies worn in various pockets. And his friendship with his neighbor Bailey deepens. But we get no sense of how he describes on his various trips back home to his increasingly confused girlfriend, whom he cannot tell of his undercover job, is truly changing him, which would have turned this film into a perhaps much more profound work.   

  In his 1980 review Roger Ebert detected the problem and put it quite simply—he was never as profound reviewer as he was imagined to be:

 

The validity of these arguments [those of the protesters against the film] is questionable and I plan to discuss them in another article. For the purposes of this review, however, let it be said that the dramatic power of “Cruising” seems to have been very negatively affected by the protests against the movie. There’s evidence here that key elements of Al Pacino’s central role were altered or compromised so that Pacino’s own involvement in the events of the plot is deliberately left unclear. Since the movie is about his involvement – much more than it’s ‘about’ the challenge of solving the killings – what we’re left with is a movie without the courage to declare itself.”

     Keith Phillips in a 2022 review, summarizes the entire situation much more fully, and I quote at length accordingly:

 

   “….We’re never shown what happens when Steve wanders off with other men at the end of scenes, and Steve seemingly never admits his new (?) feelings to himself. If you’re not paying attention, you might miss this subtext entirely. Friedkin bakes ambiguity into the film in ways that are stylistically fascinating but also kind of gross. Though they speak in the same overdubbed voice, different actors play the killer in each murder scene. (Shades of Zodiac.) Is there more than one killer? Is it a comment on the way participants in the scene lose their identities in the roles they play? Or is it a not-so-subtle equation with the leather scene—and homosexuality in general—with death? The film’s infamous climax—and, yes, spoilers ahead—suggests that Steve might have become a killer. Or maybe he was the killer all along?

     Ultimately, Cruising ambiguous-es itself to death. It makes villains of homophobic cops who harass cross-dressing sex workers (and demand sexual favors of them) and depicts Steve’s gay neighbor (and maybe love interest?) Ted…with tremendous sympathy— if not enough sympathy to avoid turning him into the trope of a tragic, doomed gay man. But it mostly wants to gawp at what it sees, lingering on lurid details in ways that feel designed to shock rather than invite consideration. As Phil Nobile Jr. put it in a 2012 look at the film, the ‘extreme subculture is more exploited than explored.’ In 1980, depictions of gay sexuality of any kind in mainstream films were pretty rare and usually pretty tame. Though less explicit in the released version than in Friedkin’s original cut, Cruising drops viewers in the deep end with explicit depictions of an intentionally insular gay subculture. Today, a thriller set in a gay nightclub scene would be one of many depictions of LGBTQ+ existence. Unschooled viewers in 1980 with no point of comparison were given no reason not to mistake it for the whole of LGBTQ+ existence by a film that invited them to view it with, at best, wariness and suspicion. (Even the terminology making distinctions between L, G, B, T, Q, and + wasn’t in place yet.)” 

     There are moments when the film almost redeems itself, as when Burns, mistakenly it appears, focuses on a young local waiter Skip Lee (Jay Acovone), who working at a steak restaurant uses knives quite similar to those which killed the victims actually lures him into bed, with talk of tying the policeman up and having sex. Losing reception outside in a police truck, the cops get terrified about the situation and come rushing to Burns rescue before he is even able to begin any sexual contact or discover whether or not the young man is dangerous. Still, he is arrested and beaten by the police and to protect Burn’s identity, he two is roughed up by a near-naked black cop who enters and punches him in the face, a sort of marvelous role, given the justification it proposes of a black man hired to thump dirty white boys for just who they are.

     Finally, disgusted by the police’s gay bashing, Burns threatens to quit the job. He is convinced by Edelson to continue as he reprimands the officers involved with Lee’s interrogation. But still, he doesn’t seek out other street cops who have long been abusing gay figures.

     Nonetheless, Burns returns to his job, focusing now on a student of the Columbia professor, one of the first to be murdered. Burns now suspects, through searches of class pictures, Stuart Richards, a graduate music student whom Burns has seen previously at one of the bars. Richards seems outwardly ordinary, but when Burns breaks into his apartment he discovers S&M attire, and a box of highly disturbing letters he has written to his deceased father. He also discovers a knife in his closet, again matching the one used by the murderer.

     Luring the young man out of his apartment, he follows him later to the park where he cruises for sex. Richards, now knowing Burns is on to him, cannot help but play the sexual game, as Burns asks Richards to lower his pants. Richards pulls out his knife, but the policeman quickly disarms him. Later, taken into police custody, medical figures argue that the letters indicate schizophrenia, and forensic specialists determine that his fingerprints on the knife match those discovered at other murder sites.

     In a sense Burns becomes a sort of “hero” whom Edelson can finally congratulate. That is until

 Ted Bailey, Burns’ friend down the hall is found to be brutally stabbed, perceived a lover’s quarrel with his abusive partner Gregory (James Remar). But when Edelson discovers that his own man lived just down the hall, he has now his own suspicions that change the entire film.

     I don’t see that there is any evidence of Burns’ involvement. Just a few days previously, he has almost violently confronted Gregory for his abuse of Bailey, and throughout the film Bailey is one of his only true friends.

     Why the director suddenly wanted to shift blame to Burns himself is more than someone inexplicable and almost disgusting, suggesting perhaps that anyone into S&M can quickly move into violent territory.

      If nothing else, there is now clear evidence that Burns has changed his sexual identification, which again is something that the directorial team has not quite figured out. Is sexuality simply a matter of being exposed to it, or is it inborn. In 1980 there were no clear answers which increasingly, of course, we now see to be inborn with perhaps some social-parental issues also playing a role.

      In the film, however, Burns, having finally made up with Nancy, promising now to tell her about his role after he shaves, discovers Nancy dressed in his leather jacket, hat, and aviator glasses, while he looks off blankly into the mirror. He appears he will not find it easy going back to regular heteronormative live.

      In short, Cruising in 2026 is not the monstrous film it was once seen to be, but just a failed and confused film by a talented director who should have done far more research on his subjects and locations before even imagining the he might be able to capture the issues it attempts to explore. Cruising might have been a far better film if only it wasn’t shot in 1980, at a time when the gay movement was coming into its identity, and was understandably nervous about how it was portrayed, particularly given the S&M focus of this work. Friedkin’s arguments that his film was never really about the gay world but was a murder mystery are rather lame in retrospect. But had he fully embraced his themes, expanded some of his characters and made them truly human, with his directorial talents he might have made a brilliant gay film long before such a work was even imagined. This movie merely escapes from really exploring its own subject.     

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).