Just a Gigolo

Berlin, 1921. A young aristocrat presumed dead on the last day of the Great War reappears three years later at his family home, which has been turned into a boarding house. In the (rather inconsistent) screenplay for Just a Gigolo (or, in its German title, Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo, the same as an Austrian tango from 1929), written by Ennio De Concini and Joshua Sinclair (who came from Italian comedy, spaghetti westerns, and even science fiction), the idea is to show Weimar Germany (1918–33) as it is often portrayed, first and foremost addressing the atmosphere of sexual freedom that was indeed emerging, only to reduce it to the prostitution of the main character, taken almost as an aesthetic experience. The historical environment is one of moral (which the film does not celebrate as a sign of freedom, but as a sign of decadence), economic, and political decline, in a slow descent into the hell of Nazism. The chronological references (the passage of the winters between 1921 and 1928) noted in the film do not refer to any specific event; the growing threat of Nazism, one of the film's leitmotifs, plausible only from 1930 onwards, therefore appears out of time. Produced in 1978, the film is a kind of pastiche of references, characters, and settings from two other films, then recent, that took Berlin and interwar Germany as their subject. As in Visconti's La caduta degli dei (1969), the narrative centers on a young man from a good family (David Bowie in Just a Gigolo; Helmut Berger in Visconti's film) who, without really knowing why, ends up transgressing the moral rules that would have been in force in a past for which he still feels nostalgia. Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972), in addition to the boarding house where part of the narrative takes place and the Nazi threat, features a character (played by Michael York) who, in a somewhat similar journey, searches for himself in a sexual ambiguity that, in Fosse's film, is as convincing as the “recruitment” (the term used) to which Marlene Dietrich subjects Bowie is not in this film. Bowie, then in his Berlin phase during the Heroes era (1977), is subjected to an aesthetic adaptation that makes him (deliberately?) resemble Michael York in Cabaret. There is even a Liza Minnelli in Just a Gigolo: Sydne Rome plays an emancipated singer married to a wealthy aristocrat, who manages to feel more comfortable in the role than Bowie himself, who is always uncomfortable. It is to her that we owe the only convincing musical excerpt in the entire film: “Don't Let It Be Too Long.”

David Hemmings' film was unanimously panned by critics from the moment it was released, both the original version and the shorter version prepared shortly afterwards. In a 1980 interview, Bowie said that even the actors themselves were not proud of the film. For him, it was as if “the 32 [bad] Elvis Presley films had been amalgamated into one.” At 31, in one of the most creative phases of his musical life, Bowie seems to have accepted the role in exchange for Hemmings' interest in filming his concerts for a documentary. If he ever imagined acting opposite Dietrich, he was sorely disappointed. The actress refused to go to Berlin with the rest of the crew, so the scenes in which she appears were all shot in Paris with only extras. The editing did the rest.

Just a Gigolo, however, has a few things that will go down in cinema history. Not because of its director; Hemmings was one of those actors whose role (the photographer in Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) created expectations far beyond what he could fulfill, both as an actor and, above all, when he moved into directing. But because it is Marlene Dietrich's last film, in which, at the age of 76, she appears “with pride” (as specified in the opening credits) in the midst of a rather unusual cast of actors. In Hemmings' overly ambitious project, calling on the singer from Von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930) must have been irresistible. Getting her to sing a song from the 1920s (“Just a Gigolo”) that she didn't like must not have been easy. The Marlene Dietrich we hear, however, is no longer the ironic diva she had been during 20 years of concerts, in a cycle that had ended years before.

Hemmings knew how to bring together (in order to waste them) two classic actors (Maria Schell and Curd Jürgens) from German and Austrian cinema, and above all Kim Novak, who, at 45, had already begun to feel frustrated with what she was being offered in cinema. That must surely have been the case.

For all these reasons, Just a Gigolo is a curious object—but more as a historical object than a cinematic one.