New on DVD:

Cruising

In the early 1980s Hollywood made a short-lived effort to make gays and lesbians the central subject of mainstream films. Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean got it on in Arthur Hiller’s Making Love, while Mariel Hemmingway played a bisexual track star in Robert Towne’s Personal Best. Both films are a bit hokey, but at least they present queer characters that are interesting and multifaceted.
And then there was Cruising. Straight director William Friedkin (The Exorcist) wrote and directed this 1980 release about a cop (Al Pacino) who goes undercover in New York City’s leather bars to find a serial killer who targets gay men.
Gay rights groups argued with good reason that Cruising equated gay sex with death, and they sabotaged the production by yelling in the background and blowing loud whistles. As a result Friedkin had to spend three months finessing the sound mix. His perseverance resulted in savagely negative reviews and a pitiful haul at the box office.
After this introduction you’re probably wondering why the hell you’d bother watching Cruising now that Warner Home Video has released it on DVD for the first time. The whole film seems fueled by the idea that gays corrode morality, and as a mystery it stinks because the “resolution” isn’t even remotely satisfying or logical.
Still it’s a fascinating historical document, a nasty portrait of a libidinous gay subculture through the eyes of a heterosexual director. In the DVD featurettes Friedkin maintains that this is a thriller that just happens to take place in leather bars where guys in cop uniforms suck on nightsticks and other fellows grease their arms up to their elbows for fisting fun. You’d at least think he’d have the decency to admit that Cruising wasn’t an especially sensitive ambassador to mainstream audiences at the dawn of the AIDS crisis.
Pacino looks really cute when he first dons a leather vest, but he’s positively frightening by the time he’s wearing full S&M regalia, snorting drugs from a bandana and dancing like someone shoved a cattle prod up his ass. Like Gina Gershon post-Showgirls, he refuses to talk about Cruising to the press, and he’s conspicuously absent from the DVD featurettes.
What was he thinking when he strolled through a set filled with guys waving their bare asses in the air? Did he actually think this was his best career move since The Godfather?