paying
for romance
by Douglas Messerli
Ennio De Concini and Joshua Sinclair
(screenplay), David Hemmings (director) Just a Gigolo / 1978
A young German officer
arrives at the front trenches of World War I just hours too late. Standing uselessly by the edge of
the German excavation with bombs exploding all around him, the man, immaculately
uniformed, having been trained in the best of German military schools, wonders
if it is truly necessary to climb down into the trench. It is, says his captain.
But that very moment the soldiers around
him begin to shout out, rising from their smoking hells to dance in joy. The
War is over. The captain assures the newly arrived lieutenant that it is simply
a piece of propaganda passed to his soldiers through Allied pamphlets.
In the very next scene the officer wakes
up confused about his whereabouts in a French hospital room, whose nurses,
doctor, and governmental representatives, about to celebrate his recovery, are
shocked to hear him, having come out of his long coma, speak German, his helmet
evidently having signified that he had been one of them.
Now in full color, the film reveals post-World
War I Berlin, our naive officer having returned home with a pig, half-covered
by his long wool coat, in arms. So begins the comic-war drama Just a Gigolo,
directed by British actor and child soprano, David Hemmings—yes, the photographer
of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup and, later, in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella
as Dildano, the leader of the Sogo underground, who long before those roles had
sung as a boy soprano, Miles, in Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation of
Henry James’ Turn of the Screw.
Before I go any further I should reveal
the fact that the movie, one of the most expensive films of its day, in part
because a portion of the original was destroyed by fire, was an utter flop
which, as one of its stars put it, when the actors met one another today they
covered their faces in embarrassment.
As I argue in this essay, the film is
actually quite fascinating, if not a fully successful work of art. I think
simply by mentioning the cast anyone might perceive the problem. Let us start
with David Bowie who performed as the German officer, Paul Ambrosius von
Przygodski, described above. His mother, Frau von Przygodski, was played by the
Austrian-born actor Maria Schnell (who in her day played opposite great actors
such as Yul Brynner, Gary Cooper, Marcello Mastroianni, and Marlon Brando). Kim
Novak, in her last film role, plays one of Paul’s elderly lovers. The great
German actor Curt Jürgens acts the role of the Prince. And, also in her last
screen appearance, Marlene Dietrich is Baroness von Semering, head of a
bordello for beautiful young boys servicing elderly women, who sings the 1929
German song originally composed by Leonello Casucci and Julius Brammer, with
English by Irving Caesar, “Just a
Gigolo.”
Even the less noted figures, singer Sydne
Rome, Rudolf Schündler, and Werner Pochath (who died of AIDS in the arms of his
longtime lover, the chief choreographer and general manager of the Hamburg
State Opera, John Neumeier)
had notable careers. With such remarkable talent on board only something
spectacular was to be expected. As Vincent Canby of The New York Times bluntly
put it: “It's a very bad movie of more than routine interest because of the
talent of many of the people involved and because of its literary antecedents.”
Canby continues, suggesting those
“antecedents”:
“The screenplay,
credited to Ennio de Concini and Joshua Sinclair, seems to have been inspired,
at least in part, by Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories as well as
by various works of Günter Grass, including The Tin Drum. The
production, directed by Mr. Hemmings, deals in all of the cliches one now
associates with movies set in Berlin in the decadent 20s, everything from the
first film version based on I Am a Camera and its spinoff, Cabaret, to Ingmar Bergman's The
Serpent's Egg, which may well have been made after the Hemmings film. Just
a Gigolo has been knocking around, unreleased, for several years.”
Finally, the last sentence of Canby’s
review is very telling: “Maybe only Rainer Werner Fassbinder could do justice
to the film's source material.” For indeed, just two years after Hemmings’ film
was released, Fassbinder did indeed film a work remarkably similar, in some
respects, to Just a Gigolo, his remarkable masterwork Berlin
Alexanderplatz.
Paul might easily be seen as a better
educated and far more cultured version of Fassbinder’s Franz Bieberkopf (his
last name, in German meaning “beaver head,” the name Fassbinder also gives to
himself in Fox and His Friends) is a fool, a kind of Simpliclus
Simplicissimus who in Franz’s case has just been released from prison. So too
has Paul been released back into the Weimar Republic from the prison of war,
and like Franz does not quite recognize the changed world into which he has
been thrust. His childhood friend Cilly (the name also of one of Franz’s woman
friends), the daughter of his family’s servant, has become a revolutionary of
the streets, (who in this instance sings Bowie’s “Revolutionary Song,” written
most definitely in the Kurt Weill tradition) in whom Paul, now “shell-shocked”
as she describes him, has no sexual interest.
Everyone, including his mother, responds
upon reencountering him, “I thought you were dead,” as well might be given his
complete aloofness to the suffering they have had to endure and his utter
passivity to a world which now has no place for him. Just as Franz takes up
selling shoelaces, the Nazi newspaper, and finally gay-oriented magazines in
Fassbinder’s film, so does Paul take on a job of a human beer can that
advertises the product. If Fassbinder’s “hero” falls accidentally with the
future would-be Nazi Reinhold
Hoffmann, so does Paul almost accidentally come into the clutches of the Nazi Brownshirt
leader, Otto (Pochath), willingly sharing his bed for more than the cause that
Otto espouses.
After Otto demonstrates his complete
misogynism by slapping Paul simply for talking to Cilly (Rome), the handsome
boy determines to shift jobs once more, this time becoming the kept lover of Helga
von Kaiserling (Novak) whom he meets at the funeral of her military husband as
warring Communists and Nazis shoot it out in the cemetery where is about to be
buried. Ducking down beside the coffin, Paul and Helga suddenly discover
themselves atop one another and in their deep sense of fear and sensual adrenaline
simply cannot resist one another. Perhaps we must acknowledge the influence of
Evelyn Waugh upon this work as well.
When one has already become a bisexual
male whore, as has Paul, why not take a job with more money and less
responsibility than the one Baroness von Semering offers? Besides, Paul has all
the credentials necessary for the position: a beautiful face, a good education,
and a complete lack of moral scruples; moreover, Helga has just taught him how
to tango. Finally, even if you’re “just a gigolo...selling each romance,” there
are all those other pretty boys hanging around at every party.
Paul’s final party, an evening in bed
with Cilly who has just married a Prince (Jürgens), ends rather badly in another
shootout between the Communists and Nazis. Both sides claim him; after all he
has already given up his living body to both causes. But as Otto previously
declared, “we will get him in the end” (all puns intended). Accordingly, Paul
unintentionally becomes the first hero of the Nazi cause that leads to Hitler’s
rise.
Thus, Hemmings turns in a rather
sophisticated and often outrageously witty picaresque comedy very much in the
manner, if not with the profound insight and directorial accomplishment, of
Fassbinder.
The problem is simply that Just a
Gigolo has a few too many irons in its fiery expectations. The fact that
Cilly abandons the revolutionary cause to become a kind of Sally Bowles-like
cabaret singer before moving on to Hollywood stardom and her marriage to the
Prince—if at moments seems charming, particularly when she sings “Don’t Let It
Be Too Long”—may certainly elucidate the writers’ themes, yet her trajectory ultimately
takes us away from the true focus of the film.
Most importantly, as good as Bowie
always is in floating through his numerous film roles, he’s hardly a good
candidate for the passive role in which Just a Gigolo casts him. Bowie
is simply too sexy and talented not to have the opportunity to belt out a song
or two, dance up a storm instead of a tango, or, at least to let us watch him
zestfully jump into either Otto’s or Cilly’s bed. As it stands, he is in this
role after all just a kind of gigolo, a pretty face who has sold out his true
talents to the lure of Hemmings’ grandiose cinematic aspirations; Bowie didn’t
even get to meet Dietrich since she filmed in Paris while he picked up the
glass of champagne she offered on a stage set in Berlin.
Nonetheless, along with the wonderfully
goofy music of Gunther Fischer, the jazz era renderings of The Pasadena Roof
Orchestra, and even the stylings of The Manhattan Transfer, there is something
quite wonderful about Hemmings’ version of the Weimar angst. Perhaps after
these many years of dismissal, it’s a film worth more careful attention.
Los Angeles, November 1,
2020
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).
