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Created Jun 10, 2012 02:29AM PST • Edited Feb 14, 2019 10:48PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   American Gigolo kickstarted the Eighties. It made the Seventies suddenly – instantly – yesterday. Unkempt & brassy gave way to sleek & sophisticated, disco to New Wave. How? Gere wearing Armani, driving a Mercedes, listening to Blondie in Schrader’s glimmering California masterpiece, that’s how.

   Oh yeah, it’s also a romantic thriller about an impossibly sexy guy who gets rich L.A. ladies to pay for sex. It succeeds as that, yet would have faded into the mist of time but for its musical and sartorial significance.

   The movie starts off perfectly, as shown in the nearby video, after which it remains really great until becoming less than great. So all together it rounds to merely great. Still, as a great thriller with cultural significance, American Gigolo remains a style icon for the ages.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   American Gigolo turned the sinuous Richard Gere into a leading man and sex symbol. He spends most of the movie strutting, pouting and posing, all to create the illusion that fucking women for money is an honorable profession. Much of his career since has been a variation on the sex-money-power theme.

   Lauren Hutton transitioned from supermodel to moviestar as the married woman he falls for. While she never became a bankable moviestar, she became a quality one: credible, nuanced and naturally gorgeous.

   Their tres séduisant first encounter is a stunner – two fabulous-looking LA denizens fake the other into thinking they’re French, a mutual mind-fuck if you will. Gere and Hutton pull it off, merci beaucoup.

   The strong supporting cast includes -

   • Hector Elizondo as a dumpy dick who takes Gere’s style tips while investigating him for murder.
   • Nina Van Pallandt as his Madam and style guru. Interestingly, Baroness Van Pallandt was more famous as a singer and lover of hoax-meister Clifford Irving than as an actress.
   • Bill Duke as his malevolent pimp.
   • Brian Davies as a California Senator.
   • Carole Cook, Carol Bruce and Frances Bergen as his sophisticated clients.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    The two Giorgios – Armani and Moroder – imbue Paul Schrader’s film with modern Italian sleekness.
    The Armani clad gigolo turned GA into Hollywood’s iconic designer label. Moroder – having just orchestrated disco’s dominance of the club world via his partnership with disco diva Donna Summer – now took Blondie under his wing, producing Call Me and cowriting it with Debbie Harry. “Roll me in designer sheets, I’ll never get enough” became a defining lyric of the materialism that characterized the Eighties.

    Musical and sartorial significance don’t get much bigger, making American Gigolo a film of some cultural significance.

    Former movie critic Paul Shrader – the man who wrote Taxi Driver – wrote and directed American Gigolo, which rightly remains one of the four Known For movies on his IMDb profile. Atmospheric and musical, it anticipated MTV’s arrival 18 months later.

11. Direction Great 4.0

12. Play Good 3.0

    Banal pillow talk.

13. Music Perfect 5.0

    Perfect music: Call Me opens the film. More than just a hit song, it becomes the theme.

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0

    Gere laying out his Armani wardrobe galvanized men’s fashion. Skinny ties, skinny collars, skinny lapels, everything tailored and in earth tones became stylistic essentials. This would have been an improvement in any age, but was essentially stark compared to the awful fashion sense of the Seventies.

15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 3.1

    Movies get no sexier than American Gigolo, though its language is significantly edgier than its sex. So notwithstanding its R rating, it’s more like PG porn. For instance, Lauren Hutton saying she’s come over to Richard Gere’s apartment to get, well, you know, Gratified, with an F, kinda pegs the fantasy meter for men and women. The fact that most of their subsequent encounter is off camera proves the PG porn point.

17. Sex Erotic 3.0

18. Violence Fierce 2.4

19. Rudeness Nasty 4.0

21. Reality

    Glib 1.4

    Materialism reached new heights in the Eighties, with designer labels defining status for most urban elites. Armani’s Hollywood set the style for this great wave of design consciousness, most of which was simply reduced to label consciousness. Of course, labels are easy for the masses to understand, a reality that Armani himself exploited better than anyone.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.1

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0