Word: friedkin
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...register of emoting-angry shrugs, haughty profiles, spat-out defiance-and stays there. The result is that Bancroft has nowhere to go when, at the end of each act, she needs to escalate into the play's most demanding scenes. Surely her approach is the one Director William Friedkin wanted; his work in films (The French Connection, The Exorcist) is notable for its harrowing power, not its subtlety. This leaves Max von Sydow, as the doctor, to prowl the set like a lion tamer confronting an unpredictable new beast. He need not worry. Bancroft's lioness...
...sadomasochistic taste. Along with some bathhouses, sex-gadget shops, magazines and private clubs, they make an increasingly visible subculture in the gay world. That leather fringe is now also visible on movie screens, as the backdrop for a film that has been denounced and picketed by homosexuals: William Friedkin's Cruising, the story of a gay murderer in New York City...
Some patrons of the leather bars do not seem to mind Friedkin's deadpan, nonjudgmental look at their world; hundreds of them hired on as extras and played themselves onscreen. "The most positive benefit of Cruising," says one extra, "would be for it to make gay men examine their promiscuity, the areas they frequent, the type of sex they seek out, even the thrill of danger. The life we save...
...Friedkin closets his film in ambiguity and elliptical action (he apparently cut several shocking scenes to appease viewers). Though it is superbly photographed in threatening shades of black, grey, blue and purple with effective use of moving and hand-held cameras, neither the characters nor the plot hold enough weight. Pacino has barely 100 lines. He is fine, as usual, but he is little more than Friedkin's pawn; the script never explores his relationships with Allen or Ted beyond a superficial level...
...brilliant moments of cinematic tension get lost in a rush of misguided, Puritan moralism. Pacino's shave in his final sequence connotes the removal of Cain's permanent scar or Hester Prynne's letter, as if homosexuality were a blight on American society that must be removed through violence. Friedkin claims Cruising "is not an indictment of the homosexual community," yet tacked-on words cannot temper his dangerously powerful images. There are real demons to exorcise--beyond Christopher...