Trailer
Plot summary
Over a hot summer, the dismembered remains of men are found in the Hudson River, and the police connect them to a killer who targets patrons of West Village leather bars, binding them in cheap hotel rooms and stabbing them. Captain Edelson, under pressure to close the case, chooses officer Steve Burns to infiltrate the scene because he resembles the victims. Burns rents an apartment in the Meatpacking District under the name John Forbes. His neighbor Ted Bailey, a playwright, becomes a friend, and Burns grows familiar with the clubs' customs. The need to keep the assignment secret strains his relationship with Nancy.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cruising (1980)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Motion Picture Association of America originally gave Cruising an X rating. William Friedkin claims that he presented the film to the MPAA board "50 times" at a cost of $50,000 and deleted 40 minutes of footage from the original cut before he secured an R rating.
- Protesters attempted to interfere with shooting by pointing mirrors from rooftops to ruin lighting for scenes, blasting whistles and air horns near locations and playing loud music, and one thousand of them marched through the East Village demanding that the city withdraw support for the film. The interference meant the movie's audio often had to be overdubbed.
- William Friedkin knew a police officer named Randy Jurgensen who had gone into the same sort of deep cover that Pacino's Steve Burns did, to investigate an earlier series of gay murders. A radiology technician who had appeared in Friedkin's film The Exorcist was implicated, but never charged, in six of the leather bar murders.
- Al Pacino was not William Friedkin's first choice for the lead: Richard Gere had expressed a strong interest in the part and Friedkin had opened negotiations with Gere's agent, because he believed that Gere would bring an androgynous quality to the role that Pacino could not.
- Some obscured sexual activity remains visible in the film as released, and William Friedkin intercut a few frames of gay pornography into the first scene, in which a murder is depicted.
- Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's initial interest in the Black male form was inspired by the interrogation scene in Cruising, in which an unknown black character, wearing only a jockstrap and cowboy hat, enters the interrogation room and slaps the protagonist across the face.
- Two months after the film's release, a bar prominently displayed in the movie came under attack by a man with a submachine gun, killing two patrons and wounding 12 others. William Friedkin refused to comment on the attack.
- This movie represents the only film soundtrack work by the punk rock band the Germs: they recorded six songs for the film, of which one, "Lion's Share", appeared.
