Do you remember “Cruisin‘ “? The notorious and hyper homophobic 1980 film where Al Pacino plays an undercover cop who has to infiltrate the late ’70s New York Village People-esque S&M gay scene to find a homosexual-targeting serial-killer?
Directed by notable ’70s aggrandizer and Academy Award winner William Friedkin (whose career went straight in the shitter post – “The Exorcist”), “Cruisin’ ” was wildly reviled and vilified by every non-straight person who saw it at the time for being grossly bigoted, homophobic and intolerant (in Friedkin’s world the gay scene is full of mustachioed, ultra-macho gay stereotype ever – see the bar scene in “The Police Academy” franchise.
As Time Out New York writes, “every bar scene is crawling with extras kissing, fisting, groping, sucking (whether poppers, ethyl chloride or nightsticks).” If anything, if you haven’t seen it, it’s major gone-wrong historic curiosity. It’s shocking, offensive and even unintentionally funny all at the same time (unfortunately). Or as TONY eloquently puts it, “exploitative in a way that [still] remains remarkably repellent.”
Basically it’s a hot mess of wrong.
The film is finally being made available for DVD on September 18 and is making and limited theatrical re-release run in select cities (the New York run is small, so that means it might even be non-existent most other places). The film was actually protested by the gay community: “[Its] seedy ambience and dubious sexual politics inflamed the gay community, leading to protests throughout its filming in the summer of 1979, and continuing outside movie theaters when it opened in February of 1980,” wrote the Village Voice recently.
In 1979, aware of the film’s impending homophobia, the same Alternative Weekly implored readers to “give Friedkin and his production crew a terrible time if you spot them in your neighborhoods.” And readers obliged by pointing mirrors to fuck with lights and blasting airhorns and whistles around the set while the crew filmed.
Earlier this year, Friedkin self-deprecatingly commented on the film to Time Out New York, insisting that the film wasn’t homophobic, but “if you were going to send out a film to illustrate the necessity for gay rights, it wouldn’t be ‘Cruising.’ ”
A very recent San Franciso Bay Guardian interview with Friedkin can be read here. We don’t honestly remember the “Cruisin'” soundtrack, it’s been years, but a lot of it is produced by the always-excellent Jack Nitzsche and features tracks by the Germs, Willy DeVille and John Hiatt.
This is the 2nd semi-obscure Pacino film to become re-released on DVD this year. In June, Pacino’s first major role – Jerry Schaztberg‘s 1971 classic, “The Panic In Needle Park” – was finally made widely available on DVD after years of having been awol.