Word: film
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...coated cat-and-mouse story, Friedkin's strange perceptions of New York cops become clearer. They are crass morons as he presents them, maligning the cruisers and transvestites, raiding apartments at the wrong time, busting the wrong guys, torturing criminals and failing miserably to prevent the killings. Throughout the film, however, Friedkin casts them as good guys. They are the New York cops of 1977, paralyzed and pressured by a maniac who hears voices that tell him to kill...
...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...
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...
Still, Cruising's most crucial matters are hopelessly fouled up. As a simple detective story, the film is defeated by narrative loopholes, unconvincing plot twists and the last-minute injection of a demon who seems to have drifted in, half-baked, from The Exorcist. The psychological drama is forfeited by the handling of the central character. Though Pacino is in sensitive, even witty, form, he just does not have enough to do. Except for a few costume changes and some brief, cryptic conversations with his girlfriend (Karen Allen), his personality transformation is left undramatized. There are no scenes that...
DIED. Ray Heindorf, 71, Hollywood composer and longtime music director for Warner Bros., who won Oscars for his scores of Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), This Is the Army (1943) and the film adaptation of The Music Man (1962); in Los Angeles...