It's amazing that a movie released in 1980 was so able to encapsulate the entire decade that would follow. Or perhaps this film gave the decade something to aspire to: the veneration of image and surface over substance. The film is so flat that it lulls you into a trance. Richard Gere is the perfect actor to portray an impenetrable blank slate. Only in the end do we start to see cracks and see what is underneath. No matter how hard you try to look a part, the real you is still in there somewhere. Could have stood to be much shorter though.

A strange prototypical erotic thriller, the eroticism here is rather forced while the murder plot is totally undercooked. But it's what's under the surface here that makes American Gigolo substantial. There's some excellent gay subtext throughout. While Richard Gere is always proudly proclaiming he won't have sex with men, it's clear he has before and there's some underlying reason for his homophobia. It's Paul Schaefer's shortcoming that he shows a gay bar as a hotbed of sexual deviance while heterosexual encounters are mostly glorified to the point of being lame softcore. Nevertheless, he objectifies Gere, albeit overstating his sex appeal in the process. The bold choices, like Gere's unnecessary frontal, almost all pay off. Any pornographic film older than twenty years might have this Giorgio Moroder score.

Richard Gere plays a Gigolo who is good with the ladies. Things go a bit awry however when one of his clients dies. Who is trying to set him up?

Loved the photography and you really can't go wrong with a Giorgio Moroder score.

Surprisingly not as cheesebally as most led me to presume...except for the film's last 10 minutes.

The pleasures of American Gigolo are pretty much all surface. The score, the clothes, the cool LA locales. Beyond that its a mystery-thriller that's a little undercooked. It's sort of a proto-90s erotic thriller without (much) sex.

On third viewing I'm surprised at how well it's holding up. Gere and Hutton are great, and it captures its time better than most films of the entire 1980s. Yeah, its all surface, but what fine surface.

Decent film, Schrader is an under rated director. Gere was good, only problem was that even though he's playing a male escort, the character still feels a little too normal.

It's amazing that a movie released in 1980 was so able to encapsulate the entire decade that would follow. Or perhaps this film gave the decade something to aspire to: the veneration of image and surface over substance. The film is so flat that it lulls you into a trance. Richard Gere is the perfect actor to portray an impenetrable blank slate. Only in the end do we start to see cracks and see what is underneath. No matter how hard you try to look a part, the real you is still in there somewhere. Could have stood to be much shorter though.

A strange prototypical erotic thriller, the eroticism here is rather forced while the murder plot is totally undercooked. But it's what's under the surface here that makes American Gigolo substantial. There's some excellent gay subtext throughout. While Richard Gere is always proudly proclaiming he won't have sex with men, it's clear he has before and there's some underlying reason for his homophobia. It's Paul Schaefer's shortcoming that he shows a gay bar as a hotbed of sexual deviance while heterosexual encounters are mostly glorified to the point of being lame softcore. Nevertheless, he objectifies Gere, albeit overstating his sex appeal in the process. The bold choices, like Gere's unnecessary frontal, almost all pay off. Any pornographic film older than twenty years might have this Giorgio Moroder score.