I had these friends in high school. It was the weekend and one of them told me they wanted to go to a movie. I said I was going to a Marx Brothers movie playing at the university. He smirked like he had far more sophisticated tastes than I did. He and this other guy, Ed, wanted to see Cruising. I vaguely remember being aware of the controversy around it at the time, but I don't know how much I knew about it.
So I went with them. There were police cars parked outside the theater as we walked up.
"Free shotguns!" Ed quipped. The unattended police cars had shotguns mounted on the dashboards.
The girl at the ticket counter warned us there were no refunds. People had been walking out and demanding their money back.
"We can always just blow the place up," Ed said. It wasn't as good as his first joke, but it was normal for him. The girl froze and Ed had to ask her for his ticket.
I was a bit of a naif. There were things in the movie I didn't understand at all. Al Pacino goes undercover to find a serial killer preying on gay men frequenting New York leather bars. It seemed about the same as other excessively gritty police movies they made back then. The cops were subhuman. A lot of scenes with dead bodies and pieces of dead bodies in a morgue and police brutalizing suspects. I had no feeling one way or the other about all the gay stuff.
I still have no idea why my friends wanted to see it. Maybe they wanted to see a lot of gay content in what was regarded as an anti-gay movie. It gave them plausible deniability.
The film stopped in the middle and everyone had to leave the theater. We milled around outside for a bit then were ushered back in for the rest of the movie.
When it was over, Ed went to the men's room before we left. As he tried to leave, a cop blocked his way.
"Uh, excuse me," Ed said.
The cop said he heard that he made a little joke back there on the way in. It was good he recognized it as a joke.
The cop wanted to see ID. Ed had a driver's license, but he showed the cop what was left of his school library card which had gone through the wash. The cop let him go.
I can't remember what we did afterward. The other guy observed that making jokes about blowing up a building when there were police cars outside was ill-advised. There had obviously been a bomb threat. Usually Ed was the smart one.
The movie is now available on the Criterion Channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment