Interior: Leather Bar

I was so sure I’d written about Cruising recently, but apparently I have not. Other than a brief mention of the film while discussing William Friedkin’s death back in 2023, I can’t find any sign of having tackled the director’s most controversial picture – which is really saying something, given how aggressively Friedkin courted controversy over his career.

I don’t even seem to have covered Arrow’s 2019 Blu-ray release, though I certainly watched it. And weirdly enough, that recent viewing gave me the perfect perspective on Arrow’s new 4K upgrade, which arrived last month and is a goddamn revelation.

Have you seen Cruising? You should see Cruising. Friedkin’s thriller – starring Al Pacino as a straight New York cop sent into the city’s queer leather scene to draw out a serial killer who’s been preying on gay men – is, on one hand, a Highly Problematic Work, a film made by a straight director about a world he does not fully understand, and is inclined to sensationalize, at a point in time when public antipathy towards the queer community was almost as bad as it is now. (It would get worse when AIDS arrived, stigmatizing gay men even further, but when Cruising opened the virus wasn’t on anyone’s radar.)

But Friedkin does understand the demands of a police procedural, and Pacino’s Steve Burns isn’t depicted as a homophobe: As is traditional in this genre, his fellow cops are presented as Neanderthals, so Steve can seem enlightened by comparison. Like any undercover cop, part of Steve’s assignment is to be bait – he’s chosen because he’s of similar coloring and build to the killer’s victim – and he plays his role well. His commitment even distances himself from his “old” life, estranging him from his very nice girlfriend Nancy (Karen Allen).

Despite Steve’s best efforts, though, the killer keeps right on killing, Friedkin showing him walking through the Meatpacking district, stalking his victims in crowded clubs, discos and steak joints while Steve grows increasingly paranoid and unhinged, desperate to find someone to arrest even as the rest of the NYPD would rather just ignore the carnage. The only exception here is Steve’s captain, played by Paul Sorvino as the human incarnation of impatience.

Opposed by the gay community as soon as it was announced, and dogged by crowds of protestors during its shoot in much the same way Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct would be pre-emptively pilloried by queer groups a decade later – though in that case they kinda had a point – Cruising now looks a lot less lurid and a lot more respectable, if not entirely respectful. Friedkin’s not out to other his subjects; only the killer is seen as a monster, and I’d argue the various gay men Steve meets in the course of his duties are given more depth and complexity than Steve himself is allowed.

Sure, Powers Boothe goes a little big as a vaguely sinister handkerchief salesman, but contrast his performative menace with the quiet tenderness of Don Scardino as Ted, a young writer Steve befriends … and then contrast that against the immature anger of James Remar as Ted’s jealous boyfriend. There’s a whole range of queer experience available here, none of it caricatured or sensationalized – at least, not to my eyes. Obviously I don’t get the last word on representation, but when viewed through a present-day lens – and compared to other contemporaneous depictions of queer characters – Cruising feels downright thoughtful.

Arrow’s new disc also lets us see those characters, and their world, as they were originally meant to be seen. Friedkin famously messed with the presentation of his films on home video, mandating full-frame transfers well into the age of 16:9 televisions and obsessively reworking the color timing and soundtracks. 20^th Century Fox Home Entertainment had to create an entire “Filmmakers Signature Series” line of Blu-rays as cover to release an authentic version of The French Connection after Friedkin approved a sharpened, desaturated master for the initial BD three years earlier.  

Cruising was no different, with Friedkin creating a new HD master in 2006 for a DVD release that pushed the colors and sharpness of his 1980 film into a slicker, more contemporary aesthetic. There’s an almost digital quality to some of the darker scenes, as though they’ve been brightened and then turned back down again in an attempt at grain reduction. The artifice is just as obvious in Arrow’s Blu-ray, which was billed as a “restoration from a scan of the original camera negative” – but one that was supervised and approved by the director in 2018.

What’s interesting about the new 4K release – which Arrow is also advertising as a “brand-new restoration from the original camera negative,” though without the intermediary step of a scan  (and, of course, without Friedkin’s participation) –  is that the film itself is a slightly different cut. The evocative black-and-white opening of men gathering outside a club, which was added for the 2006 version and remained in the 2018 master, is gone, replaced by the infamous disclaimer about Cruising “not being intended as an indictment of the homosexual world” that screened with the film on its initial release.

Friedkin’s other tweaks to the image and sound have been walked back as well; the distracting and obviously digital blurring of a drug sequence, toned down in the 2018 master, has been removed entirely, which is a relief. And though the remixed 2.0 and 5.1 soundtracks created for various home releases are included, the film can finally be watched with its original mono audio. (There’s also an option to watch Cruising with an unsettling new score by the UK synth artist Pentagram Home Video that drips with the menace of a John Carpenter joint. (You can hear a sample on their Instagram page.)

Seriously, if all it did was restore the movie, this new edition of Cruising would be an essential release. But rather than just porting over the supplemental package from the Blu-ray, Arrow has commissioned a wealth of new material that expands and illuminates the picture – starting with “The Backroom,” a comprehensive collection of additions, deletions and alterations that also includes on-set audio recordings and comparisons of four censored sequences.

The audio commentaries Friedkin recorded for the DVD and Blu-ray releases – the latter moderated by Mark Kermode – are both here, as well as a new track called “There Were Cops, a Dark Bar, and Al Pacino” featuring soundtrack contributors Don Bolles (Germs), Louis X. Erlanger (Mink de Ville), Kenny Margolis (Cracker), Carole Pope (Rough Trade), Shawn Casey O’Brien (The Cripples) and Madelynn Von Ritz along with Fun City Editions founder Jonathan Hertzberg.

Other archival material includes two featurettes produced for Warner’s 2007 DVD, “The History of Cruising” and “Exorcising Cruising,” marketing galleries featuring trailers, TV spots and multiple image collections.

And that’s just the first disc. The package also includes a bonus Blu-ray with hours of additional material – some newly produced by Arrow, and some created in 2017 but never released anywhere until now, as far as I can determine.

The new stuff stars with “I Want to Be the Curator,” a 40-minute conversation with Karen Allen about the shoot and the film’s legacy. She only worked on the film for a week, and exclusively with Pacino, but still has a lot to say about the experience – and she’s Karen Allen, she’s a ray of damn sunshine, so it’s a pleasure to see her here. Video of Friedkin talking about Cruising and answering audience questions after the film’s BeyondFest screening in 2022 runs about as long, and there’s also “Walking the Line,” a much shorter interview with Randy Jurgensen, an ex-cop and frequent technical adviser who turns up as one of the detectives working with Steve.

“Breaking the Codes” is a video essay explaining the handkerchief code specific to New York’s gay subculture, and “Stop the Movie” is a compilation of silent footage of the protests, presented with optional audio commentary by director Jim Hubbard.

The 2017 material includes an hour-long interview with editor Bud S. Smith (“Cut Offs”), who died this past January, and nearly two hours of interviews with co-stars Jay Acovone (“Who’s That Guy?”), Mark Zecca (“The Boy on the Bus”) and the late Mike Starr (“Pounding the Beat”). And Wally Wallace, manager of one of the nightclubs depicted in the film, discusses the milieu in “Mineshaft Memories.”

Whether or not you actually like Cruising, this is one of the year’s best discs – an exceptional package that places the film in its proper historical and political context. Arrow’s team should be very proud of their work.

The 4K limited edition of Cruising is available now from Arrow Video. In Canada, you can find it at Unobstructed View. Grab it before it sells out.

Up next: Werewolves, thugs and Y2K crowd the new-release shelf, and Criterion gives Gene Hackman the sendoff he deserves. And of course if you upgrade your subscription you can get on board with my weekly What's Worth Watching guides! Sometimes I even include a podcast! That's cool, right?