Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #89 Just a Gigolo (1978)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like two kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah, and I’m deep into a project on the movies of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie.
Considering that I have been writing a column about notorious flops for THIRTEEN YEARS and fancy myself something of a David Bowie super-fan, the kind who was REALLY sad when he died and still thinks it’s terrible that he’s dead it’s a little weird that up until now I never even thought about writing about Bowie’s 1978 stinkeroo Just a Gigolo.
I did not realize that Just a Gigolo was a huge, high-profile, historic flop because my dumb brain conflated it with Nagisa Oshima’s 1983 Merry Christmas, Mister Lawrence, which similarly cast Bowie as a soldier but got good reviews where the earlier film was roundly and enthusiastically disparaged by critics and its star alike.
In a 1980 interview with New Music Express, Bowie said of actor-turned-director David Hemming’s staggeringly stupid, brutally unfunny anti-war comedy, “Everybody who was involved in that film – when they meet each other now, they look away (covers face with hands, laughs)... Listen, you were disappointed, and you weren’t even in it. Imagine how we felt… It was my 32 Elvis Presley movies rolled into one.”
Needless to say, I got a lot more excited about the film once I discovered it was a flop. I would much rather watch and write about an infamous fiasco than something respectable and dull.
Bowie reportedly only took the role because Hemmings was producing a documentary about his 1978 tour and the irresistible possibility of meeting and working with legendary recluse Marlene Dietrich was dangled tantalizingly in front of the rock icon as bait for taking on the perversely thankless lead role of Lieutenant Paul Ambrosius von Przygodski, a German World War I veteran who meanders into a life of male prostitution after feeling morally adrift after the end of the war.
Alas, the concert film never came to fruition, nor did the collaboration with Dietrich. Dietrich is in Just a Gigolo, alright, but where the rest of the production was filmed on location in Berlin, Dietrich’s two day cameo, for which she picked up a reported quarter million dollars, was filmed in Paris.
Just a Gigolo’s IMDB trivia section adorably assets, "Marlene Dietrich was filmed in Paris but editing makes her seem to be in Berlin with David Bowie." That is excessively generous to the filmmaker, and the filmmaking process.
Though the magic of constructive editing, it should be possible to make it seem like actors in different countries at different times are inhabiting the same space at the same time. In Just a Gigolo, alas, it is achingly, distractingly clear that Dietrich is stiffly reciting dreadful dialogue solely for a gaudy paycheck and a universe and an eternity away from a lost and overwhelmed Bowie, who is apparently trying to make it seem like he’s so starstruck and overwhelmed to be in the presence of a legend like Dietrich that he has completely lost the ability to act.
Bowie and Dietrich’s big scene “together” should be the film’s undeniable highlight. Instead it’s easily its biggest, most crushing disappointment. Even if were not apparent that Dietrich filmed her role separately from the rest of the film the scene would still feel dramatically inert.
Later Dietrich sings the title song in a manner that’s undeniably affecting, even haunting, because even in this sad, sorry and regrettable context a legend is still a legend a standard is still a standard. Dietrich’s rendition of “Just a Gigolo” alone realizes this misbegotten production’s potential as a melancholy elegy for a lost world of glamour and danger and grown-up sophistication.
Just a Gigolo makes the fatal mistake of casting David Bowie, one of the most remarkable and charismatic human beings ever to bless this sad planet with his presence, as an ordinary man, a dolt, a loser.
Bowie injected an element of mystery into everything he did. Unfortunately, in Just a Gigolo the only mystery is what could have attracted Bowie to a project this dire.
What a crime to cast the most interesting rock star, matinee idol and cult God in existence as a schmuck whose defining characteristic is that he is not interesting, or smart, or funny, or any of the other qualities Bowie possessed in real life but that are distressingly from his performance here.
Not only is Just a Gigolo a bad movie but it boasts a legitimately bad performance from David Bowie, who is criminally miscast as a dumb military-loving follower without an original thought in that beautiful head of his.
Just a Gigolo opens at the very end of what was known as The Great War, the trauma that defines Paul’s directionless existence and instills in him a tragic longing for more war, for another chance to prove himself and his manliness on the bloody field of battle.
Life is something that just sort of happens to Paul. As a catalyst, he is terribly inert, a passive protagonist who drifts through life.
Paul’s family and friends think he died in the war. When Paul sees his mother again for the first time since fighting ended, they fall into vaudevillian banter so hokey it angrily demands either a drummer’s rimshot for emphasis or the phantom approval of a laugh track.
Paul’s mother gasps in astonishment, “We thought you were dead!” to which her son responds, "No, I’m very much alive!”
When mom inquires, “How long have you been alive?” her prodigal son quips, “Ever since I can remember!”
As that unfortunate bit of banter unfortunately conveys, the humor in Just a Gigolo falls unmistakably on the broad and wacky side and while Bowie was many things to many people, one thing he most assuredly was not was zany.
Funny? Of course. Droll? Definitely? Witty and clever and campy? For sure. But he was not wacky and Just a Gigolo, to its eternal detriment, is wacky in a way that obscures Bowie’s extraordinary gifts.
Just a Gigolo’s tone is so big and zany that David Lee Roth would be a more appropriate choice for the lead role and we know just how much he loves the song that gives the film its title and appears on the soundtrack twice, first with Dietrich’s rendition and finally with the Village People’s disco version.
Disco version! There is a fucking Village People disco song in this period piece! The Village People aren’t the only WTF artists on a soundtrack where Bowie contributes only background vocals and songwriting on a single track while the Manhattan Transfer, The Pasadena Roof Orchestra, the Gunther Fischer Orchestra and Pasadena Roof Orchestra all have three songs apiece.
Because when audiences went to see a movie starring David Bowie in 1978 what they really wanted to experience was the music of something called Pasadena Roof Orchestra.
Life for officers is so bleak after the war that our hero is reduced to dressing up like a giant champagne bottle to promote bubbly. Paul desperately misses the war and longs for a cause to throw himself into, for something to give him a sense of identity and purpose the way being a soldier did.
Women, of course, cannot resist Paul. A series of gorgeous women pursue the handsome idiot with single-minded intensity, including a sexy and exotic singer who rises to stardom in the decadent era between the end of World War I and the rise of Nazism and a wealthy widow played by Kim Novak, who looks every bit as good as she did nearly two decades earlier in Vertigo but, like Bowie, is given absolutely nothing to do other than be gorgeous and glamorous and radiate mega-watt movie star magnetism in a vacuum.
It’s hard to describe Just a Gigolo in detail in a way that doesn’t make it seem infinitely better and more fascinating than it actually is. A satirical comedy about how Fascism and Nazism might appeal to a generation of lost men looking for a sense of identity and belonging after the emotional devastation of World War I starring David Bowie, Kim Novak and Marlene Dietrich in her first credited role since 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg sounds, at the very least, utterly fascinating.
The maddeningly under-developed themes of Just a Gigolo, such as Fascism, Christopher Isherwood, man’s search for meaning in an insane and an often cruel world, sex, sensuality, ego, Berlin, and glamour undoubtedly appealed to Bowie as an artist, as he dealt with them all much more satisfyingly in his music. But it would be hard to imagine a clumsier or less compelling vessel for such concerns.
Other than Dietrich’s rendition of the title song, Just a Gigolo has only one thing going for it: Bowie’s beauty.
It’s no exaggeration to say that at his late 1970s height, David Bowie was literally the most beautiful man in the world. It is joy and a pleasure just to look at Bowie here but that’s the only pleasure to be had from this complete misfire, this out and out stinkeroo.
Just a Gigolo has a muddled point to make about how war and male prostitution both exploit the bodies of earnest young men for their own selfish purposes but like all of the film’s good intentions, this goes thoroughly and completely awry.
#Thirst trap
So look at the above pictures of David Bowie and watch that clip of Dietrich investing a lifetime of sadness, longing and regret into “Just a Gigolo” and you will have experienced everything this movie has to offer and spared yourself 105 minutes of misery.
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