Just a Gigolo Review

Here it is! David Bowie's 30-odd Elvis movies rolled into one. Not my words: Bowie's. To be fair I think Bowie is being very harsh: I love it for how can such a cast oozing quality and iconography be anything other than watchable? Oh, this is so nearly Art. It's a must-see for all Bowie & Dietrich fans and at the moment this is really the only thing apart from an Aussie release available on Dvd. Further tech info: Dutch Import [ Region 2 - Europe ] Audio : German ( 95 min ) or English ( 101 min ) / subtitles : Dutch ( removeable ) - Anamorphic widescreen.

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July 2011: Just found a great selection of Just A Gigolo reproduction posters. More details can be found here.
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Just a Gigolo, handsomely photographed in Berlin and directed with finesse by David Hemmings, sees David Bowie as a Prussian war vet back from the dead who drifts from one demeaning job to another and finally into employment as a gigolo.

The fascinating casting includes Marlene Dietrich and the return of Kim Novak. Sydne Rome is an appealing revelation.

Dietrich, so long away from the screen, is perforce hypnotic in what amounts to a cameo (she also touchingly croons the evergreen title song), in which she adds Bowie to her gigolo stable. Novak also makes a strong impression.

The film delivers a lot of bittersweet entertainment and is never less than engrossing. Period mood is a great strength, with an effective visual mixture of sepia and soft colour tints, and a music track of period ballads and jolly ragtime tunes.

February 1978

Few people in or out of the film industry found it easy to believe producer Joshua Sinclair when he announced to the press, late in 1977, that Marlene Dietrich was about to break her retirement and self-imposed isolation within her Paris apartment. She had, Sinclair continued, agreed to appear on screen in her first speaking role in eighteen years, in the German-English film Just a Gigolo, with rock star David Bowie. Lonely for precisely the human contact she paradoxically but insistently rejected, she also found irresistible a salary of $250,000 for two half-days of work in a Paris studio, where the sets for her scene were transported from Berlin.

On a bitterly cold morning in February 1978, she arrived on time for work, 'her jaw set and her shoulders hunched with determination,' as an eyewitness recalled. Dietrich walked slowly, unsteadily, because of her failing eyesight, clinging constantly to the arm of make-up artist Anthony Clavet. She looked, quite simply, like a wizened old lady.

Two hours later, her make-up painstakingly applied, she emerged from a makeshift dressing room wearing a costume of her own design: a wide-brimmed black hat with a delicate but strategically concealing veil, shiny black boots, white gloves and a black skirt and jacket - everything just right for her brief appearance as the Baroness von Semering, manager of a ring of Berlin gigolos just after the First World War. Director David Hemmings, producer Sinclair and a small crew awaited, and in a few moments one of her two brief scenes were easily photographed.

Next morning, Dietrich returned for the more difficult second task - to sing the film's title song, which was to be heard near the end of the picture. 'I will sing one chorus of that horrible old German song in two seconds flat,' she told Hemmings and Sinclair. Everyone stood by nervously, for it was uncertain she had the strangth or the breath to fulfil the promise.

But an astonishing transformation then occurred, attested by all who were present in the studio that wintry day. First she was photographed in close-up, the hat and veil deliberately almost hiding her eyes as she stood to one side of the set, an empty hotel dining room. Then she walked - cautiously but unaided - towards pianist Raymond Bernard, and standing proudly, she began to sing. Far from offering the perfunctory delivery of a song she disliked, Marlene Dietrich sang with heart-rending simplicity:

Just a gigolo: everywhere I go
People know the part I'm playing
Paid for every dance, selling each romance
Every night some heart betraying.
There will come a day youth will pass away,
Then what will they say about me?
When the end comes, I know,
They'll say 'Just a gigolo,'
And life goes on without me

Nothing she had done on stage or screen over a period of sixty years could have prepared witnesses that day (or viewers of Just a Gigolo since then) for her astonishing rendition of this simple confessional songs. On the words 'youth will pass away,' there may be heard a tremor of sadness in her voice that was without precedent in any prior recording or theatrical appearance - a moment of exquisite pathos too genuine to have been concorted from the usual counterfeit emotion.

And when she came to 'life goes on', the voice became plangent, almost a whisper as she managed, to poignant effect, an octave. In only one take, the scene and the song were captured for ever. There was a moment of reverential silence round her, and then the bystanders broke into applause; many of those who knew her films, recordings and live stage appearances could be seen brushing away tears.

Unable to see them across the bright studio lights, Marlene Dietrich, in her seventy-seventh year, nodded and found her way back to the cramped dressing room. An hour later she was alone again, back at her apartment on the fashionable Avenue Montaigne, just opposite the grand Plaza-Athenee Hotel. Except for a very few visits to doctors and hospitals, she never again left this residence.

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Germany 1978
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Colour
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Dutch subtitles (removable)
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Enhanced for widescreen TVs
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Original German & English
Uncut version
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101 mins. approx.
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