Cruising is a 1980 crime thriller film written and directed by William Friedkin, and starring Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino and Karen Allen.

The film's open-ended finale was criticized by Robin Wood and Bill Krohn as further complicating what they felt were the director's incoherent changes to the rough cut and synopsis, as well as other production issues.

The police suspect it to be the work of a serial killer who is picking up gay men at West Village bars such as the Eagle's Nest, the Ramrod and the Cock Pit, and taking them to cheap rooming houses or motels, tying them up and stabbing them to death.

Captain Edelson asks officer Steve Burns, who is slim and dark-haired like the victims, to go deep undercover into the world of gay S&M and leather bars in the Meatpacking District to track down the killer.

Burns is disturbed by the brutality, and tells Captain Edelson that he did not agree to the assignment so that people could be beaten simply for being gay.

Burns thinks that he has found the serial killer: Stuart Richards, a gay music graduate student who has schizophrenia.

As Burns shaves his beard in the bathroom, Nancy dresses in his leather jacket, cap and aviator sunglasses—exactly what the killer wore.

However, Friedkin changed his mind following a series of unsolved killings in gay leather bars in the 1970s and the articles written about the murders by Village Voice journalist Arthur Bell.

Friedkin claims that he presented the film to the MPAA board "50 times" at a cost of $50,000 and deleted 40 minutes of footage from the original cut before he secured an R rating.

When Friedkin sought to restore the missing footage for the film's DVD release, he discovered that United Artists no longer possessed it.

[3] Some obscured sexual activity remains visible in the film as released,[9] and Friedkin intercut a few frames of gay pornography into the first scene, in which a murder is depicted.

[10] Soundtrack director Jack Nitzsche had initially attempted to include two songs—"Endless Night" and "Devil's Sidewalk"—by Graham Parker and the Rumour in the film, but legal issues prevented the songs from being used.

Friedkin asked gay author John Rechy, some of whose works are set in the same milieu as the film, to screen Cruising before its release.

At Rechy's suggestion, Friedkin deleted a scene showing the Gay Liberation slogan "We Are Everywhere" as graffiti on a wall before the first body part is pulled from the river, and added a disclaimer:[12] This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world.

[13]Friedkin later claimed that it was the MPAA and United Artists that required the disclaimer, calling it "part of the dark bargain that was made to get the film released at all" and "a sop to organized gay rights groups".

"[16] In his autobiography, Friedkin says that a single shot can change the whole plot of a movie when talking about Cruising, implying that the ambiguous ending might not have been planned from the start.

Protests started at the urging of journalist Arthur Bell, whose series of articles on unsolved murders of gay men inspired the film.

People attempted to interfere with shooting by pointing mirrors from rooftops to ruin lighting for scenes, blasting whistles and air horns near locations, and playing loud music.

[21] However, in 2024, Pacino admitted in his memoir Sonny Boy that he viewed the film as "exploitative" after seeing the finished product, and refused to promote it.

The site's consensus states: "Cruising glides along confidently thanks to filmmaking craft and Al Pacino's committed performance, but this hot button thriller struggles to engage its subject matter sensitively or justify its brutality.

"[28] On its original release, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave Cruising two-and-a-half stars out of four, describing it as well-filmed and suspenseful, but unwilling to reveal the true feelings of Steve Burns about the S&M subculture, which Ebert said frustrates the viewer because the film is much more focused on Burns's immersion into that subculture than it is on his pursuit of the killer.

[29] Critic Jack Sommersby likewise commented that the film frustratingly suggests that Burns is affected by his experiences in the S&M subculture while giving no real indications as to how or why.

He additionally criticized the lack of a clear motive for the killer, the exploitive nature of some of the directorial choices, the weakness of Al Pacino's performance, and the generally poor adaptation of the novel.

Although the film contains a disclaimer saying that it does not intend to be "an indictment of the homosexual world", Juergens states that certain elements in the plot—especially the fact that it is hinted that several gay male killers are operating simultaneously—"makes a clear statement (however unintended the filmmakers may maintain it is) about a community as a whole".

[38] In the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet (adapted from Vito Russo's book), Ron Nyswaner, screenwriter for Philadelphia, says that he and a boyfriend were threatened with violence by a group of men who claimed that Cruising was their motivation.

This attack, which occurred November 19, 1980 (nine months after the film was released), was carried out by Ronald K. Crumpley, formerly an officer with the New York City Transit Police.

He was found "not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect", and spent the rest of his life at a psychiatric hospital until his death on April 30, 2015, at age 73.

The brutal 1981 murder of gay Sydney man Gerald Cuthbert following a sexual liaison was linked to the film in contemporary media reports.