1980 Week: A Small Circle of Friends

          While it’s in some ways a well-intentioned film about the worthy subject of how participating in civil disobedience as college students during the late ’60s impacted the students’ later lives, A Small Circle of Friends is a textbook example of Hollywood bludgeoning complex ideas into simplistic scenarios. A Small Circle of Friends mostly concerns a contrived romantic triangle. Nick Baxter (Jameson Parker) is a conservative golden boy pursuing a medical degree, Leonardo DaVinci Rizzo (Brad Davis) is a trouble-making lefty student journalist, and Jessica Bloom (Karen Allen) is the sensitive artist caught between them.

          Ezra Sacks’ story is sufficiently eventful and specific to avoid seeming completely trite, but his basic premise is so obvious—a clash between activism and conformity—that the movie becomes laughably schematic. Here’s a scene about drugs! Here’s a campus riot! Here’s a triumphant moment of sticking it to the uptight college power structure! Oh, and because you knew this was coming, here’s the tastefully understated ménage-a-trios scene! Sacks’ screenplay seems more like a to-do list than a proper narrative. Most of the picture unfolds on the rarified grounds of Harvard and Radcliffe. Nick sympathizes with the antiwar movement, but mostly remains focused on his studies. Leonardo is a wild child determined to change the world one article at a time. He’s also a brazen prankster, so during his introductory scene, he feigns blindness as a way of cutting in line while registering for classes. The idea is that Nick becomes fascinated by Leonardo’s zest for life, while Leonardo secretly respects Nick’s diligence. As for Jessica, she dates Leonardo first, then switches to Nick, and complications ensue.

         Just as Sacks’ script tends toward superficiality, Rob Cohen’s direction is impatient, as if he’s afraid of lingering on human emotion. Not helping to alleviate this problem are the leading men. Davis has a spacey quality, so he seems crazed rather than eccentric, and Parker is hopelessly bland. Allen is uminous, though she’s asked to spend far too much time gazing in wonder at her costars. (Actors playing smaller roles include Shelley Long and Daniel Stern.) Perhaps the weirdest aspect of the picture is the score, composed by rock songwriter Jim Steinman, best known for writing Meat Loaf’s hits. To date, this is the only movie he’s scored, and his music is hilariously overwrought. Some of the melodies are familiar, as well, because tunes he wrote for this movie later became Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing At All” and Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

A Small Circle of Friends: FUNKY

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

The Wanderers (1979)

          New York City novelist/screenwriter Richard Price didn’t truly connect with Hollywood until his script for Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986) announced his expertise at writing tough underworld stories. Yet Price’s association with the movies actually began in the ’70s, when two of his books were adapted into features. First came Bloodbrothers, a small-scale drama released in 1978, and then came The Wanderers, a quasi-epic about Brooklyn street gangs. Co-written and directed by the unpredictable Philip Kaufman, The Wanderers is ostensibly a nostalgic look at teen life in the early ’60s, before the assassination of JFK, the emergence of the counterculture, and the beginning of America’s Vietnam entanglement. The title refers to a gang of Italian-American teenagers who spend their free time chasing girls, fighting with rival gangs, and generally prolonging adolescence. Their exploits are set to a thumping soundtrack filled with tunes by Dion, the Four Seasons, and other doo-wop-influenced groups.

          When Kaufman keeps things simple, focusing on the misadventures of gang leader Richie (Ken Wahl) and his cronies, The Wanderers works well. However, Kaufman takes the movie in strange directions by treating the presence of a gang called the Ducky Boys in an apocalyptic fashion—whenever the Ducky Boys show up to cause trouble, the movie’s tone shifts from playful to terrifying. And since many scenes in The Wanderers approach outright comedy, the presence of the dissonant Ducky Boys vignettes undermines the integrity of the whole piece. And that’s not the only problem with The Wanderers. Much of the picture comprises a romantic triangle involving Richie, his maybe-pregnant girlfriend Despie (Toni Kalem), and Nina (Karen Allen), the new girl who catches Richie’s eye. This coming-of-age material is trite, and a subplot involving Despie’s dad, Chubby (Dolph Sweet), seems overly grim because Chubby’s a wiseguy who does things like dropping a bowling ball onto an enemy’s hand. From start to finish, The Wanderers can’t decide if it’s a wild-youth romp or a gritty portrait of urban violence.

          Nonetheless, the movie has amazing textures. Ace cinematographer Michael Chapman gives the visuals gravitas, and memorable actors add idiosyncratic flavors to the mix. For instance, The Wanderers features diminutive Linda Manz (best known for Terrence Malick’s 1978 mood piece Days of Heaven) and hulking Erland Van Lidth, who plays a massive street tough nicknamed “Terror,” as an unlikely couple. Demonstrating his customary interest in surprising juxtapositions, Kaufman portrays Manz as the tougher of the two, while still leaving room to reveal her character’s fragility. Similarly, Kaufman gets terrific work out of Wahl—a Stallone type with legitimate acting chops—and John Friedrich, who plays the other main Wanderer, Joey. Scenes of these two and their pals cruising the streets of New York are exciting and fun. Alas, for every vivid bit—Terror’s gang memorably threatens the Wanderers during a harrowing trip to a bridge—there’s an improbable moment like the scene in which a teacher (Val Avery) nearly instigates a race war in his classroom. The Wanderers lacks discipline, restraint, and shape, but it explodes with energy and intensity. In modern parlance, the movie’s a hot mess.

The Wanderers: FUNKY