Cruising

A police officer goes undercover to solve a run of murders in New York's gay leather bars. As the work goes on the question at the centre stops being who the killer is and becomes what he is learning about himself. William Friedkin directed, from Gerald Walker's 1970 novel. He also drew on real unsolved cases and on the undercover experience of his consultant Randy Jurgensen. Al Pacino stars. The 1979 shoot ran through protests. Gay activists believed the film would portray their community as criminal and targeted the locations. Friedkin added a disclaimer at the front: this film is not an indictment of the homosexual world. The activist Vito Russo called that an admission of guilt. The MPAA first gave it an X. Friedkin says he removed 40 minutes of explicit footage to get an R. That material is gone; when restoration was attempted later, United Artists no longer possessed it. On an 11 million dollar budget it grossed between 14.8 and 19.8 million. It was received badly at the time; today directors including Quentin Tarantino and Nicolas Winding Refn name it as an influence. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 50 percent. Who it is for: viewers interested in the dark New York films of the early eighties and in contested cinema. Who it is not for: anyone who will be hurt by the representation. The objections raised in 1979 were fair, and forty years on they have not entirely dissolved.