1980 Week: Cruising

          No one in Hollywood ever sets out to make a dud. Take, for example, Cruising, the notorious William Friedkin thriller starring Al Pacino as a straight cop who infiltrates New York’s gay-nightclub scene while hunting a killer who is targeting homosexuals. It’s easy to imagine why Friedkin and Pacino, both of whom enjoy testing limits, saw the pulpy story as an opportunity to investigate a mysterious subculture. Concurrently, it’s useful to remember that the gender-politics climate of the late ’70s was still rotten with prejudice. Fearful the movie might propagate ugly stereotypes about predatory gays, activists staged noisy protests during filming in Manhattan, thereby creating a widespread perception that Cruising was antigay. These circumstances all but guaranteed a hostile reception from audiences and critics, rendering the filmmakers’ original intentions moot.

          But that was then. In trying to arrive at a modern understanding of Cruising, one must wrestle with the fact that the naysayers who attacked the film before and during its original release were both right and wrong. While Cruising absolutely features the “gay killer” trope, which had become a raw nerve after too many movies along the lines of Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), Cruising is too complex to earn a label as narrow as “antigay.” More than anything, Cruising is perverse. Predicated upon a deliberately unsolvable whodunnit, it is about a man who loses his personal and sexual identity while pretending to be someone else, set against the backdrop of a nightclub community populated by individuals who celebrate their truth and by individuals who disguise themselves.

          Like the best of Friedkin’s films—a category to which Cruising doesn’t necessarily belong—Cruising is designed to get under the viewer’s skin and distort perceptions. Just as The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) revel in moral ambiguity, Cruising revels in sexual ambiguity. In fact, the picture takes Friedkin’s penchant for incertitude to an infuriating extreme by including several moments even the director cannot (or will not) explain. The movie doesn’t play fair, but clearly playing fair was never Friedkin’s intention.

          That leaves unanswered, of course, the burning question: Is Cruising a good movie? That all depends on the kind of experience the viewer wants. Those craving sensitive insights into gay culture will be left wanting, since Cruising focuses almost exclusively on the rough stuff—exhibitionism, leather, S&M, etc. As a mystery, the movie is a total bust.

          Yet buried within the frustrating rhythms of Cruising are moments of great intensity and surprise. Paul Sorvino brings genuine ache to his role as Pacino’s supervisor, a homicide investigator who has seen too much misery in his life. Karen Allen lends sensitivity as the lead character’s long-suffering girlfriend. And Pacino attacks the starring role with his signature go-for-broke intensity. Whether he’s dancing in a nightclub while wearing a black tank top or wrestling with angst about the emotional places his assignment forces him to explore, he’s an open wound of ambition, confusion, and pathos. (Accentuating all of those tonalities and more is Jack Nitzsche’s eerie score, a mixture of pounding rhythms and ethereal waves.)
          Cruising doesn’t “work” in any conventional sense, and many people justifiably find it offensive, but it’s a singular piece of filmmaking. Its worst moments are irresponsible, its best moments are truly haunting—and not infrequently, it straddles both extremes at once.

Cruising: FREAKY

Serpico (1973)

          Serpico occupies such a significant place in film history that it’s difficult to discuss the film without reaching for superlatives so grandiose they lack real meaning. Among other things, Serpico is one of the greatest police movies ever made, Al Pacino’s leading performance stands among the finest accomplishments in ’70s screen acting, and Sidney Lumet’s meticulous direction demonstrates why every other subsequent filmmaker telling a New York-based crime story owes him a huge stylistic debt. Furthermore, the story—which was drawn from a famous real-life saga—perfectly encapsulates the ambivalent attitude Americans had toward cops and criminals in the ’70s. The fact that Serpico is essential cinema on myriad levels creates a challenge when trying to articulate its strengths and weaknesses—the strengths are familiar to most movie fans because the picture has been seen so widely, and the weaknesses don’t matter all that much. Nonetheless, any survey of ’70s cinema is absurdly incomplete without Serpico, so here goes.

          Pacino, in the full bloom of his early-’70s breakout period, brings all of his intellectualized Method intensity to the role of Frank Serpico, a real-life NYPD detective who became a controversial figure by testifying publicly about widespread police corruption; this adaptation of Peter Maas’ best-selling book portrays the hero as an everyman with high principles who finds it harder and harder to survive in an environment rife with officially sanctioned illegality. The picture begins with Serpico’s early days as a uniformed beat cop, when he alienates coworkers by refusing to accept protection money and by refusing to pinch cash that’s taken from crooks. As Serpico’s career continues, he evolves into a longhaired detective adept at undercover work, earning a steady stream of commendations and promotions for his bravery and investigative skill. Alas, Serpico’s rise coincides with a cancerous spread of police corruption, so his unwillingness to play dirty provokes widespread enmity. This culminates with a showdown that the real Serpico claims was an assassination attempt engineered by bad cops who were afraid that Serpico was going to blow the lid on corruption. And, indeed, the finale of the story, as in real life, is Serpico’s public testimony.

          The narrative is fantastically interesting from start to finish, and Pacino’s investment in his work is unquestionable—he’s a live wire in every scene. By the time the actor fidgets and struts through undercover scenes while he’s hidden behind long hair, a shaggy beard, and a floppy hat, his performance has reached the level of incarnation, because the emotional and physical reality Pacino creates by occupying space in a naturalistic way is utterly persuasive. Furthermore, Lumet captures the gritty rhythms of New York life so perfectly that much of Serpico feels like a documentary. If there’s a noteworthy flaw to Serpico, it’s that Lumet and Pacino focus too closely on the details of the main character’s journey through the shadowy world of the NYPD. With the movie covering such a large stretch of time and including so many incidents, supporting characters inevitably seem incidental and interchangeable. As noted earlier, however, criticizing Serpico is a fool’s game, because one could easily counter-argue that the personal nature of Serpico is exactly what makes the film uniquely powerful. (After all, the story’s about one man against the world.) FYI, the movie’s success inspired a short-lived 1976-1977 TV series starring David Birney, though the deeper influence of Serpico can be seen in countless subsequent movies that attempted, with varying degrees of success, to imitate the film’s hyper-realistic texture.

Serpico: RIGHT ON

Scarecrow (1973)

          Given its casting, pedigree, and subject matter, Scarecrow sounds like an automatic addition to the Mount Olympus of ’70s cinema. It’s a downbeat road movie about two vagabonds ineptly pursuing small dreams, the vagabonds are played by Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, the film was directed by adventurous humanist Jerry Schatzberg, and the cinematography is by the extraordinary Vilmos Zsigmond. Yet while the movie has a lovely intimacy, it doesn’t linger in the memory anywhere near as much as it should. That said, Scarecrow is near-essential viewing for fans of this period in American cinema simply because it exudes integrity and contains strong but obscure performances by two of the best actors America has ever produced. Although Hackman and Pacino each did better work in other films (because other films gave them better raw material from which to craft performances), it’s still a tremendous pleasure to watch these remarkable men amplify and complement each other’s talents.

          Hackman plays Max, a volatile ex-con traveling like a hobo from California to Pennsylvania, where he plans to open a car wash. (Whether Max actually has the financial or managerial wherewithal to realize his dream is one of the film’s many richly ambiguous elements.) Max becomes traveling companions with Lionel Delbuchi (Pacino), a former sailor who approaches life with boyish exuberance; barely more than a simpleton, Lionel believes there’s almost no problem a good joke can’t solve. One of the inherent shortcomings of George Michael White’s script is that the Max/Lionel friendship always feels a bit contrived; their bond is more narratively convenient than purely organic. Nonetheless, Hackman and Pacino lend as much credibility to the relationship as possible, even when the characters behave in predictable ways—Lionel rarely steps outside his man-child persona, and Max keeps getting into stupid brawls even though he seems, in other respects, like a mature human being with real self-awareness. The film also suffers from the inherently episodic nature of most road movies.

          Therefore, it’s almost all about the acting. Hackman is explosive and haunted and tender all at once, demonstrating his unique gift for incarnating emotionally conflicted men, and Pacino—though a bit over the top, thanks to a set of indulgent physical tics—creates many resonant moments. Supporting players Eileen Brennan, Richard Lynch, and Ann Wedgeworth lend strong atmosphere as well, though their characters border on being clichéd movie-hick grotesques. Former photographer Schatzberg and master cinematographer Zsigmond capture all of these lively performances in artful frames that showcase grungy locations and meticulous production design, so the physicality of the movie feels real even when the dramaturgy slips into artificiality.

Scarecrow: GROOVY

The Panic in Needle Park (1971)

          If you’re a fan of ’70s cinema, you owe The Panic in Needle Park a major debt of gratitude—Al Pacino’s performance in this movie convinced director Francis Ford Coppola that Pacino could handle the leading role in The Godfather. So, without this gloomy study of heroin addicts living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, we would never have seen Pacino’s sublime work as Michael Corleone. Yet Needle Park is a worthwhile film beyond its cinema-history significance. Written by the posh literary couple Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (from a novel by James Mills), and directed in a gritty verité style by photographer-turned-filmmaker Jerry Schatzberg, Needle Park is painful and sad, a sonnet to wandering souls who search for themselves in the oblivion of hard drugs. Presented without music and unfolding over a leisurely 110-minute running time, the movie is unrelentingly ugly—characters abuse each other and themselves; injections are shown in excruciating close-ups; and so on. Even by the anything-goes standards of ’70s cinema, this is a brutal depiction of misery without promise of salvation.
          Pacino stars as Bobby, a fast-talking hustler who gets by on dealing, handouts, and petty crime while nursing a heavy habit. One afternoon, he meets a pretty young woman named Helen (Kitty Winn), whom he draws into his orbit with compliments and jokes and kindness. Other characters populating Bobby’s dangerous world include his older brother, Hank (Richard Bright), a professional thief who uses heroin periodically, and a narc named Hotch (Alan Vint), who sees Bobby as a tool for catching major suppliers. Once Helen takes the inevitable step of shooting up for the first time, she starts a spiral down into prostitution. Meanwhile, she and Bobby are so detached from reality they can’t see they’re killing each other—Bobby becomes a full-time dealer in order to keep them both stoned, and Helen sacrifices her dignity by returning to Bobby again and again, despite several near-death experiences.

          Pacino’s performance is alternately explosive and poignant, his streetwise swagger clashing with his tiny physical stature, and he’s persuasive whether he’s sharing tenderness with Winn or simulating drugged states. Winn, a naturalistic, theater-trained actress whose limited filmography also includes a supporting role in The Exorcist (1973), delicately moves between being our window into this depressing world and incarnating the tragic emotions of those who love unwisely. To a certain degree, however, the film’s dirty locations are the main attraction—viewed through Schatzberg’s long lenses during exterior sequences and observed more closely during interior scenes, the sordid textures of low-rent Manhattan speak volumes about the fragile lives of addicts.

The Panic in Needle Park: GROOVY

Bobby Deerfield (1977)

Two Hollywood heavyweights famous for intellectualizing their work succumb to bad habits in Bobby Deerfield, a plodding romantic drama without enough narrative substance to support its heavy themes. Ostensibly the story of a racecar driver mired in existential crisis, the big-budget misfire gets lost in a maze of pretentious dialogue and vague characterization. Despite all their obvious effort to craft something surpassingly sensitive, producer-director Sydney Pollack and director Al Pacino ended up making something utterly artificial: The storytelling lacks the depth found in Pollack’s best dramas, and Pacino’s performance is so internalized it validates every criticism about self-indulgence ever lobbed his way. Bobby Deerfield is especially disappointing because Pacino and Pollack should have comprised a dream team for fans of thoughtful movies. Based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque and written for the screen by the literate humanist Alvin Sargent, Bobby Deerfield begins with narcissistic Formula One driver Bobby Deerfield (Pacino) watching a nasty crash that injures one driver and takes the life of another. Jarred by the realization that his career involves courting death, Bobby starts wandering around in an angst-ridden haze, eventually visiting the hospital where the surviving driver is recuperating. While there, Bobby meets a fellow troubled soul, Lillian (Marthe Keller), who has a whole different set of issues with human mortality. Even with Pollack’s consummate skill for constructing love stories, the dynamic between Bobby and Lillian holds zero interest. Bobby’s such a cipher it’s impossible to care whether he finds love, and Lillian’s an ice queen—thus, since their interaction is the whole movie (aside from a few moderately distracting driving scenes), Bobby Deerfield is a 124-minute spiral into a black hole of downbeat boredom. The movie is skillfully made and the acting is strong, within the limitations set by the murky writing, but who cares? Digging the good stuff from the muck simply isn’t worth the effort.

Bobby Deerfield: LAME

. . . And Justice for All (1979)

          After a spectacular run in the early ’70s, Al Pacino slid into a long period of mediocrity beginning with 1977’s racecar-themed dud Bobby Deerfield and continuing with this chaotic comedy-drama. Although Justice did okay at the box office and earned two Oscar nominations (including one for Pacino), it’s a perplexing mixture of farce and social commentary. Pacino plays Arthur Kirkland, a Baltimore lawyer described by everyone around him as both an exceptional litigator and a paragon of legal ethics. Yet we never actually see Kirkland do his job well—instead, he regularly breaks confidentiality, fights with judges, and loses cases. In striving to define Kirkland as a moral island in a sea of corruption, screenwriters Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson ended up treating the character as a symbol of righteous indignation rather than a flesh-and-blood person. Worse, their narrative is contrived and overstuffed.

          The story proper begins when a hard-driving judge, Henry Fleming (John Forsythe), is accused of rape. For convoluted reasons, Fleming asks Kirkland to represent him, even though they’re bitter enemies. Kirkland takes the case because he needs a favorable ruling from Fleming in order to exonerate a wrongly imprisoned client. Other plot elements include a judge contemplating suicide, a lawyer going insane because he helped a killer avoid prosecution, and a transvestite living in terror at the prospect of prison. Funny stuff, right? The fact that Curtin and Levinson treat this dark material with sitcom-style dialogue feels cheap and distasteful, especially since the film’s dramatic scenes work so much better than the comedy bits.

          In particular, the interaction between Forsythe and Pacino, two actors with completely different styles, is surprisingly interesting: Forsythe infuses his customary elegant reserve with an undercurrent of hateful menace, so Pacino’s exasperation in Forsythe’s presence is believable. In fact, all of the movie’s performances are good, with Christine Lahti, Lee Strasberg, and especially Jeffrey Tambor giving formulaic characters a degree of flesh-and-blood reality. However, the great Jack Warden is underused as the suicidal judge, because he’s mostly stuck performing stupid comedy like a wild helicopter ride that, one presumes, was meant to be outrageously funny.

          Director Norman Jewison handles individual scenes with his usual skill, but no filmmaker could stitch these discordant pieces together into a coherent whole. Plus, among its myriad other flaws, Justice is arguably the movie that introduced the world to Screamin’ Al, the latter-day Pacino performance style distinguished by vein-popping volume. “Out of order? You’re out of order!” Indeed you are, sir.

. . . And Justice for All: FUNKY

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

          Riveting from its first frame to its last and infused with equal measures of humor and tragedy, Dog Day Afternoon is a masterpiece of closely observed character dynamics and meticulous dramaturgy. It also contains two of the most powerful performances of the ’70s, from leading man Al Pacino and co-star John Cazale, to say nothing of one of the decade’s most memorable moments, the “Attica, Attica!” bit in which Pacino riles up a crowd gathered around the movie’s central location by invoking a then-recent tragedy at a New York prison.

          The story is a riff on a real-life bank robbery that was comitted by crooks with unusual motivations. Pacino plays Sonny Wortzik, an intense ne’er-do-well who recruits his dim-witted buddy, Sal (Cazale), to help with a brazen heist in broad daylight. The robbery quickly evolves into a hostage situation as cops, led by Sgt. Moretti (Charles Durning), congregate outside the bank. Then, as we watch various communications between Sonny and the outside world, we discover why he planned the heist: for money to pay for his boyfriend’s sex-change operation. So, while the anxious afternoon darkens into an excruciating evening, viewers develop deep compassion for Sonny’s peculiar plight—on top of everything else, he’s married to a woman and doesn’t want to hurt her, even though his heart belongs to Leon (Chris Sarandon).

          Working from a Frank Pierson’s Oscar-winning script and guided by Sidney Lumet’s sure directorial hand, Pacino reveals dimension upon dimension of his offbeat character, never once making a cheap ploy for audience sympathy; the actor illustrates such deep and profound emotional truths, through behavior and dialogue and physical carriage, that Sonny feels like a living and breathing human being in every scene. The performance is not for every taste (the Method-y screaming and general demonstrativeness is a turn-off for some viewers), but it’s impossible not to recognize Pacino’s work as some of the most impassioned and meticulous performance ever committed to film.

          Cazale, the haunted-looking Bostonian who died at age 42 after appearing in just five films (all of which were nominated for Oscars as Best Picture), is terrific as Sal, a slow everyman who can barely grasp what’s happening at any given moment, much less the future implications of his actions; in the classic moment, he’s asked what country he would like to flee to after the robbery, and he says, “Wyoming.” Durning offers humanistic support as a cop trying to keep a bad situation from exploding, Sarandon is funny and sensitive during his brief appearance as Sonny’s lover, and a young Lance Henriksen shows up toward the end of the movie.

          But it’s almost completely Pacino’s show, or, more accurately, Pacino’s and Lumet’s. As they did to an only slightly lesser degree on Serpico (1973), the two men lock into each other’s creative frequencies perfectly—Lumet creates complex, lifelike situations to frame Pacino’s emotional explorations, and Pacino fills Lumet’s frames with as much vitality as they can contain. Detractors might argue that the movie drags a bit in the middle, but because each scene enriches our understanding of Sonny’s inner life and his strange predicament, complaining about too much of a good thing seems petty—few movies offer as much in the way of believable pathos and varied tonalities as Dog Day Afternoon, and few movies sustain such a high level of artistry and craft for the entire running time. Exciting, frightening, moving, surprising, and unique, Dog Day Afternoon is as good as it gets in ’70s cinema.

Dog Day Afternoon: OUTTA SIGHT

The Godfather (1972) & The Godfather: Part II (1974)

          When Paramount decided to make a film of Mario Puzo’s pulpy novel about a Mafia family, the subject matter was considered déclassé at best, the domain of such grimy quickies as The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967). But the success of the novel (something like 2 million copies sold in the first two years after publication) convinced ambitious Paramount boss Robert Evans to give The Godfather the A-list treatment. After the usual dance of overtures to other filmmakers (Peter Bogdanovich, Sergio Leone), Francis Ford Coppola was hired as director and as Puzo’s cowriter on a script about the ascension of crime boss Michael Corelone. Gobs of plot from the novel were cut (and later repurposed for the first sequel), notably patriarch Vito Corleone’s backstory. Getting the movie cast was an ordeal, especially because Paramount hated Al Pacino for Michael even more than they hated Marlon Brando for Vito. The studio pitched such unlikely alternates as Ryan O’Neal for the son and Danny Thomas for the father.

          Making the film was fractious for all involved, with Coppola and Pacino constantly at risk of termination—the director was targeted for overspending, the actor for underplaying. Yet behind-the-scenes disharmony wasn’t enough to inhibit the creative process, because The Godfather represents a career high for everyone involved. As entertaining as it is intelligent and soulful, the picture comfortably ranks among American cinema’s true masterpieces. Working with famed cinematographer Gordon Willis, nicknamed “The Prince of Darkness” for his moody lighting style, Coppola created a unique look that evoked vintage sepia-toned photographs. Drawing on his own Italian American heritage, Coppola blended his cast into a tight unit, thereby creating a sense of familial connection that counterbalances the film’s violent storyline.

          As for the narrative itself, that should be familiar to all ’70s-cinema fans, so here’s a brief sketch for those who haven’t yet had the pleasure. As aging Mafia boss Vito Corleone struggles to maintain old codes of conduct during the changing times of the World War II era, his three sons follow different paths. Heir apparent Sonny (James Caan) is a hothead who advocates violence, ne’er-do-well Fredo (John Cazale) evinces cowardice, and golden boy Michael (Pacino) avoids the family business until circumstances force him to embrace his destiny. Standing to the side of the action is lawyer Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), an outsider who’s nearly a fourth son to Vito, and Kay Adams (Diane Keaton), Michael’s WASP fiancée.

          The genius of The Godfather is that internal friction causes as much trouble for the Corleones as external forces, so the film becomes a meditation on betrayal, disappointment, family, honor, and countless other epic themes. The acting is amazing, from the stars to the perfectly selected bit players whom Coppola employs to imbue every scene with gritty flavor. And although it’s essentially Pacino’s movie, no one actor dominates, since The Godfather is an egalitarian ensemble piece. It also features more classic scenes than nearly any other single movie, from the canoli to the horse’s head and beyond. It’s not enough to describe The Godfather as one of the essential films of the ’70s, because The Godfather is one of the essential films of all time.

          Astonishingly, Coppola and co. nearly topped themselves with the sequel. Both ’70s Godfather films won Oscars as Best Picture, a feat that’s unlikely to ever be repeated. In fact, many fans argue that The Godfather, Part II is the rare sequel to surpass its predecessor, though I don’t share that opinion. Make no mistake, The Godfather, Part II is remarkable in both ambition and execution, with artistic and technical aspects either matching or exceeding those of the original film. Moreover, the film’s painful storyline about a battle between brothers cuts as deeply as the first picture’s depiction of a father trying and failing to save his favorite son from a life of crime. So when I offer my opinion that The Godfather, Part II is incrementally inferior to The Godfather, it’s with the caveat that nearly all films, even great ones, are inferior to The Godfather.

          As has been analyzed and celebrated by countless people before me, the big play that Coppola made in The Godfather Part II was telling two stories at once. In present-day scenes, hapless Fredo makes a series of foolish decisions, forcing Michael to exercise his authority over the family in heartbreaking ways. Meanwhile, in operatic flashbacks, Robert De Niro plays the younger version of Brando’s character from the first film. As such, The Godfather, Part II parallels the formation of the Corleone family with its ultimate damnation, brilliantly illustrating how the fateful choices that Vito made as a young man triggered a chain of events continuing through generations. For my taste, the nettlesome flaw of The Godfather, Part II stems from directorial self-indulgence, which would eventually become a major problem in Coppola’s career. As gorgeous and poetic as they are, the De Niro scenes linger a bit too long, since it feels as if Coppola fell in love with every artistic composition and balletic camera move that he and Willis created together. Even the presence of famed acting teacher Lee Strasberg in a crucial supporting role feels a bit precious, as if The Godfather, Part II is overly aware of its own significance as a compendium of extraordinary performance techniques. That said, we should all be so lucky as to suffer from an embarrassment of riches, and the highest points of The Godfather, Part II (“I know it was you, Fredo”) are breathtaking.

          Regarding the subject of the much-maligned cash-grab threequel The Godfather, Part III (1990), I choose to pretend there are only two movies about the Corleone family. FYI, compendium releases bearing titles including The Godfather Saga and The Godfather: A Novel for Television put all the scenes from the first two pictures, alongside previously unseen footage, into chronological order. Yet another version, The Godfather Trilogy: 1901–1980, integrates the third film and its attendant deleted scenes. The running time on that version is a whopping 583 minutes.

The Godfather: OUTTA SIGHT

The Godfather, Part II: OUTTA SIGHT