A recurring theme in Eric’s Time Capsule is that what was once controversial seems tame by 21st-century standards. This is particularly true of Cruising, released 29 years ago this week and starring Al Pacino as a detective who goes undercover as a gay leather enthusiast to solve a string of murders within the homosexual community. During its filming in 1979 and theatrical release in 1980, the film was plagued with protests from gay activists who feared it would show gays in a negative, sensationalistic light. In 2009, the film probably wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow.

This doesn’t mean the gay groups overreacted at the time. Homosexuality was still very much on the fringe of society in 1980, not nearly as mainstream as it is today, and it wouldn’t have taken much to make moviegoers distrust and dislike gays more than they already did. The fact that Cruising took place within a seedy subset of the gay world only made it worse — surely some viewers would assume ALL homosexuals were as randy and debauched as these characters.

To allay these fears, the film’s writer and director, William Friedkin, added a disclaimer to the beginning: “This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world, which is not meant to be representative of the whole.” If the audiences believed that and understood the film’s depravity to be the exception and not the rule, everything would be fine. But who’s to say they would?

As it turns out, no one needed to worry — not because the audience didn’t let the film color its view of gays, but because there wasn’t much of an audience anyway. The film was widely panned by critics and, despite the controversy, it earned less than $20 million (about $53 million in today’s dollars) and was #36 on 1980′s list of top films. It wasn’t a flop, but it didn’t arouse much interest once the pre-release dust had settled, either.

Today, it’s a curious artifact. Did leather bars really allow such flagrantly sexual behavior among their patrons? (Yes, they did — some New York City bars even let Friedkin film on location, only telling their customers to avoid doing anything in front of the cameras that would get the film an X rating.) Was there really an elaborate code of colored handkerchiefs that gay men would wear to indicate what they were looking for from sexual partners? (Yes — but now you can express your preferences in the subject line of your Craigslist ad.) Cruising represents the last gasp of the pre-AIDS sexual wantonness that was often found in the 1970s.

It also represented, in a way, William Friedkin’s third strike. After back-to-back successes with The French Connection in 1971 and The Exorcist in 1973, the director had high-profile flops with Sorcerer (1977) and The Brink’s Job (1978). Cruising‘s failure to remove the stink from those misfires signified the end of Friedkin’s power in Hollywood. He hasn’t done anything particularly noteworthy since.

Friedkin made Cruising with what appears to be a mixture of fascination and titillation. There are many, many slow tracking shots through sordid leather bars, giving us a non-judgmental, fly-on-the-wall perspective on the seamy proceedings. Then there are the murder scenes, which are bloodier than you might expect, and sleazy dialogue masquerading as matter-of-factness, as when a medical examiner reports that a victim’s “anus was dilated at the time of death.” Thanks, coroner, for that crucial bit of information.

Friedkin has said that he only meant the gay aspects of the film to be the background for a murder mystery, but one need only watch the film to see that the opposite is true. The murder mystery is incoherent and unsolved, and Pacino’s character’s undercover work comes to naught. It’s the gay elements that are at the forefront.

The film began as a novel by Gerald Walker, which is why gay groups were up in arms about it — they’d read the book, and they didn’t like where this was going. Besides, films that dealt directly with homosexuality were rare, and most marginalized groups’ first Hollywood portrayals — from gays to American Indians to Mormons — have tended to be negative caricatures. Little had changed for the gays by the late 1970s, so their nervousness was understandable.

But in their anxiousness, the activist groups fell prey to a common trap: They protested a movie they hadn’t actually seen yet. As history has taught us, blind protests like that turn out to be much ado about nothing about nine times out of ten. Cruising proved to be an absurdly over-the-top exploitation film, and few people took it seriously. Most importantly, no one came out of it thinking gays were all deviant S&M leather fetishists who committed murders in their spare time. Thank goodness we cleared that up!

(For more on the Cruising controversy, read Nathan Lee’s excellent essay in the Village Voice, as well as Peter Debruge’s rebuttal in Variety.

FROM THE TIME CAPSULE: When Cruising was released, 29 years ago this week, on Feb. 8, 1980…

• Kramer vs. Kramer and American Gigolo were doing well in theaters. Fellow new releases with Cruising included The Last Married Couple in America and Hero at Large.
• Black Entertainment Television had just launched as a block of programming on USA Network. (It wouldn’t become its own separate channel until 1983.) Soap opera Love of Life had just ended its 29-year run. 3-2-1 Contact and Mystery! had just premiered, both on PBS.
• The No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart was Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You.” This was 1980, so he was still normal.
• Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A month earlier, Pres. Carter had signed off on a $1.5 billion bailout loan to Chrysler.
• The Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y., were less than a week away. These Games would include, on Feb. 22, the “Miracle on Ice,” in which the U.S. hockey team beat the Soviets.
• Zooey Deschanel, Jason Segel, Alicia Keys, Nick Carter, and Wilmer Valderrama were all less than a month old. Matthew Lawrence, Christina Ricci, Chelsea Clinton, and Jason Ritter were within weeks of breaking free from their respective wombs.

* * * * *

Eric’s Time Capsule appears every Monday at Film.com. You can visit Eric at his website, but please, no cruising.

Tags: al pacino, crusing