Paul Schrader's Bressonian portrait of a high-priced Beverly Hills gigolo: adolescently admiring and envying, but never very informative or inventive. Less than halfway through the thing, the gigolo's professional life gives way to the more automatically plottable business of a murder frameup, with the gigolo's every step shadowed by unknown enemies and an affable, cigar-smoking, dowdy but cagy police detective named Sunday (probably less as a nod to Jack Webb's Friday than to the night of the TV week when Peter Falk's Columbo used to appear). Simultaneous with the murder investigation, the gigolo becomes entangled with a figure so familiar in stories about female prostitutes: the man in a million, or in this case woman in a million, who brings true, heart-softening love to the hardened sexual psychopath. The spiritually uplifting ending, which lifts you completely up in the air with regard to the murder investigation, is a shameless steal from Bresson's Pickpocket. Richard Gere, Lauren Hutton, Hector Elizondo. (1980) — Duncan Shepherd
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