Word: pacino
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...most delicate hint of sarcasm. Marion Dougherty, who has been in the business 31 years, gave Warren Beatty his first TV role, in the old Kraft Theater. Says she: "He was a terrible actor then-we laugh about it now-and totally charming." Dougherty also turned up Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman. Stalmaster's finds include Jon Voight (four lines in Hour of the Gun), James Caan (a silent reaction in Irma La Douce) and Gilda Radner (an other silent bit in The Last Detail...
...Friedkin's unjustifiable massacre of sensibility reels on Ted, Pacino's neighbor, is murdered and while all clues point to Ted's jealous roommate as the culprit, Friedkin knows better. In an ambiguous series of elliptical shots, the director hints that Pacino has butchered Ted in a bizarre exorcism of his homosexual passion. Like the priests who die to save Regan in Friedkin's last sensationalist film, Ted dies to save Pacino's heterosexual soul...
...sick conclusion. Pacino emerges from the close, dark den on Christopher St. into the airy, white space of his girlfriend's apartment. Having finally shed his leather garb, he shaves, staring at his image in the ubiquitous mirror, confronting his self a last time, peeling away his homosexual mask. His ordeal has ended, the beast has been crushed, he is again normal...
...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...
Cruising is unsatisfying as drama and disturbing as a sexual statement. Several 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...