Genre Crime

Cruising (1980)

Item: Cruising
Rating: 2.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★½ — Cruising (1980)

By 1980, William Friedkin had already cemented himself as one of Hollywood's most visceral directors. The French Connection (1971) had won him the Academy Award for Best Director, and The Exorcist (1973) had become a genuine cultural event. Cruising arrived, then, with enormous expectation attached to it, and enormous controversy before a single frame had even been released. Based loosely on Gerald Walker's 1970 novel of the same name, and drawing on real unsolved murders in New York's West Village during the late 1970s, the film puts a rookie police officer undercover inside the city's leather bar and S&M subculture to track a serial killer preying on gay men. The premise alone was enough to generate protests, with activists picketing location shoots throughout Greenwich Village and attempting to disrupt production wherever possible. That friction between the film and the community it portrays has coloured its reputation ever since.

The production was a joint venture between Jerry Weintraub Productions, Lorimar Motion Pictures, and German co-producer CiP Europäische Treuhand, and came in at 102 minutes, though Friedkin has spoken over the years about considerably more footage that was cut. Whether those cuts were editorial decisions, concessions to ratings pressures, or simply the shape the film needed to take, the finished version has always carried the feeling of something slightly incomplete. Al Pacino, at this point one of the most in-demand actors in American cinema, takes the central role of Steve Burns. He brings the coiled, watchful quality that he carried through many of his best roles of the era, supported by Paul Sorvino as his supervising officer, Karen Allen as his girlfriend, Richard Cox and Don Scardino in key supporting parts. Pacino's presence gives the film a gravitational centre even when the material around him resists coherence. For a sense of how differently that same intensity can land when the script matches it, it is worth looking at Scarecrow (1973), where Pacino is simply electric from start to finish. Meanwhile, Friedkin's own career trajectory after this point, including the equally abrasive and morally slippery To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), suggests a director consistently drawn to worlds operating outside conventional law and morality, though not always with the same results.

Cruising sits in an awkward position in film history, neither comfortably reclaimed nor entirely dismissed, a film that people return to with real curiosity and often leave with real frustration. Whether that frustration is earned or whether the film rewards a more patient reading is exactly the kind of question that makes it worth discussing.

Cruising (1980), directed by William Friedkin, is a strange, uneasy hybrid, part police procedural, part psychological descent, part controversial immersion into the leather-and-denim gay subculture of late-1970s New York. Al Pacino stars as Steve Burns, an undercover cop assigned to infiltrate the S&M bar scene in search of a serial killer targeting gay men. On paper, it sounds like classic Friedkin: gritty realism, moral ambiguity, urban decay. And sure enough, there are flashes of his signature style, the moody cinematography, the throbbing electronic score, the handheld urgency that made The French Connection feel so alive. But Cruising never coheres. The crime plot feels half-formed, the killer’s identity muddled, and the investigation lacks real momentum. Instead, the film lingers in shadowy backrooms, bathhouses, and cruising zones with a voyeuristic unease that borders on exploitative, especially given its historical context and the backlash it received from LGBTQ+ communities at the time. It’s less a thriller than a disorienting plunge into a world the film seems both fascinated by and afraid of, without offering clarity, empathy, or narrative payoff. Pacino gives it his all (intense, twitchy, increasingly unhinged) but even he can’t anchor a story that feels structurally unfinished. Scenes end abruptly, character arcs vanish, and the final act dissolves into ambiguity that feels less like artistic choice and more like editorial collapse. Historically significant, visually striking, and undeniably provocative, but ultimately unsatisfying as both a crime film and a character study. Friedkin captures atmosphere brilliantly, but the story beneath it never fully ignites. A fascinating misfire, not a forgotten masterpiece.

For me, that frustration is the honest response, and I don't think patience changes the equation much. There is something genuinely arresting about the way Friedkin photographs this world, and the period atmosphere is unmistakable, but atmosphere alone can only carry a film so far. When the story underneath keeps slipping out of your hands, no amount of mood or provocation fills the gap. I have seen Friedkin work in conditions just as morally murky and pull something genuinely unsettling out of them, so the disappointment here is real rather than reflexive. Some films earn their ambiguity. This one just sort of runs out of road.

Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1980 | Watched: 2026-02-15

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Trailer

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