Curator Watchlist
A stylish, chilly neo-noir that works best as a portrait of loneliness, status anxiety, and self-invention in early-80s Los Angeles. It’s more compelling as mood and character study than as a tightly engineered mystery, but the visual polish, Moroder pulse, and Richard Gere’s star-making performance make it an easy… Read more
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 1h 57m
Director: Paul Schrader
Starring: Richard Gere, Lauren Hutton, Héctor Elizondo
Julian makes a lucrative living as an escort to older women in the Los Angeles area. He begins a relationship with Michelle, a local politician's wife, without expecting any pay. One of his clients is murdered and Detective Sunday begins pumping him for details on his different clients, something he is reluctant to do considering the nature of his work. Julian begins to suspect he's being framed. Meanwhile Michelle begins to fall in love with him.
Paul Schrader
Richard Gere, Lauren Hutton, Héctor Elizondo
A stylish, chilly neo-noir that works best as a portrait of loneliness, status anxiety, and self-invention in early-80s Los Angeles. It’s more compelling as mood and character study than as a tightly engineered mystery, but the visual polish, Moroder pulse, and Richard Gere’s star-making performance make it an easy recommendation for the right viewer.
American Gigolo is a sleek, anxious movie about a man who sells intimacy while remaining fundamentally untouchable. Paul Schrader frames Julian Kay as both object and observer: a beautiful surface moving through a world of money, desire, and suspicion, always aware that his value is temporary. The result is less a whodunit than a study of commodified masculinity and spiritual vacancy.
What lingers is the atmosphere: Los Angeles as a showroom of glass, leather, and neon; Giorgio Moroder’s synths; the cool precision of the tailoring; the sense that every relationship is transactional until it suddenly isn’t. Richard Gere is perfectly cast because he can seem both self-possessed and strangely exposed, a man whose confidence is inseparable from panic.
The mystery plot is functional, but the film’s real charge comes from its surfaces and contradictions. It’s glossy and melancholy, erotic and detached, glamorous and faintly sad. Even when it stumbles, it remains a defining artifact of early-80s style cinema and one of Schrader’s clearest statements about loneliness in a marketplace of desire.
mia lee vicino (4★) · 1361 likes
told friend that richard gere goes full-frontal here and he said “oh, you see his Gere Shaft?” haven’t stopped thinking about this
Paul Schrader · 915 likes
Clarification. AMERICAN GIGOLO. After the Showtime trailer appeared online I've been asked if I am involved. The answser is No. Some years ago I received a call from Paramount asking about remaking American Gigolo as a series. I replied that I thought it was a terrible idea--times had changed, internet porn had redefined male sex work, viruses, etc. I couldn't imagine Julian Kay working a Hen Party. (Scorsese and I had fought off similar attempts to redo Taxi Driver for
Wilson (5★) · 691 likes
American Gigolo is another of Paul Schrader's "God's lonely man" films. His quartet being Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and The Walker. They are a fascinating set of films, as much for their flaws, as for their successes. They are character studies of opaque, egotistical demons, increasingly pathetic and less dangerous with age. They mirror Schrader himself, and his own career. American Gigolo is the second of quartet and the first directed by Schrader. The film is built around
Patrick Willems (3.5★) · 565 likes
Every time Hector Elizondo showed up as the cop I thought he was Billy Crystal
Chris Feil (5★) · 562 likes
Fellas, is it gay to go antique shopping with the old lady paying you for sex??
A foundational lonely-man character study with urban paranoia, moral drift, and a corrosive sense of isolation.
Another Schrader portrait of a drifting man in a nocturnal city, even more inward and spiritually bruised.
A cool, haunted crime film about obligation, masculinity, and the emotional cost of living by codes.
If the appeal is glossy 80s Los Angeles, erotic charge, and voyeuristic unease, this is a strong companion piece.
A sleek, sensual neo-noir where desire and manipulation are inseparable from the plot mechanics.
For the hard-edged style, nocturnal mood, and a protagonist defined by professionalism and emotional distance.
A stylish, melancholy crime film that turns identity into a performance and suspense into atmosphere.
A paranoid character study about surveillance, guilt, and isolation, with a similarly controlled, uneasy tone.
Minimalist, cool, and nocturnal, with a protagonist whose identity is built around professional detachment.
A grim, intimate portrait of a man trapped by his own image and the transactional world around him.
A sharp, seductive crime thriller that understands power, sex, and manipulation as forms of commerce.
For viewers drawn to sleek design, nightlife aesthetics, and cool emotional distance in a crime setting.
male sex work, loneliness, identity and performance, class and status anxiety, desire as transaction, neo-noir suspicion, urban alienation, self-destruction
neo-noir, erotic thriller, 1980s, Los Angeles, fashion, synth score, alienation, crime drama, stylized, melancholy