alr

Cruising

Directed by William Friedkin

The Boys in the Band

Directed by William Friedkin
Screening on Film
  • Cruising

    Directed by William Friedkin.
    With Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, Karen Allen.
    US, 1980, 35mm, color, 102 min.
    Print source: Warner Bros.

As word spread that Friedkin was working on a crime drama set in New York's gay leather subculture, vociferous protests were staged throughout the film’s production by gay activists who feared that the film would negatively represent homosexual life in America. As usual, Friedkin simultaneously courted and rose above the controversy to produce the dark chronicle of an ambitious young detective (an intense Al Pacino in one his most important mid-career roles) who discovers previously unknown fears and desires within himself when he goes undercover to catch a vicious killer of gay men. Like its hero, Cruising is both voyeuristically intense and alienating, alternately probing the secret shadows of the S&M club world while upholding the institutional perspective of the police procedural genre.

  • The Boys in the Band

    Directed by William Friedkin.
    With Kenneth Nelson, Leonard Frey, Cliff Gorman.
    US, 1970, digital video, color, 118 min.
    Copy source: CBS

One of the first films to reflect the Motion Picture Association of America's newly permissive rating system – which nevertheless slapped it with an “R” rating solely for its theme – The Boys in the Band went into production on the eve of the Stonewall riots, and was released with the emergence of the Gay Liberation movement. Friedkin's chronicle of a Greenwich Village birthday party attended by a group of gay men, one of whom just might be heterosexual, is both a time capsule and a celebratory anthem. Relentlessly quotable, and earnestly performed by the show’s original 1968 off-Broadway cast, Boys is a deeply satisfying cinematic reinvention of a stage drama that preserves the claustrophobia and bittersweet qualities of the source material.

Part of film series

Read more

The Uncanny Cinema of William Friedkin

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Practice (and Other Works) By Martín Rejtman

Read more

Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang

Read more
Gene Hackman crouched beside a toilet with audio equipment

From the HFA Collection...

Read more

Being In a Place. Rediscovering Margaret Tait