Richard Gere

Two treasured movie memorabilia items from my own home: the gushingly written Judith Davis "unauthorized biography" of Richard Gere, published 1983...and a picture sleeve single of a Jerry Lee Lewis cover by the LA band X that served as the theme from the 1983 film Breathless.


Richard Gere. Ah, Richard Gere.

The man holds a peculiar place in American popular consciousness as a candy box sex symbol who honestly has not made a lot of, let's say, positive career choices. Gere consistently fills movie seats with now-fortyish women who loved him in a long, smuckery line of romantic comedy near-misses and ill-advised deviations from that path into thrillers (political and otherwise) and drama. His name still conjures up an image of "People's Sexiest Men Alive" circa 1993, and he is still making movies with Diane Lane. YET. I hate just about 85% of his movies. Which is problematic, as he is also one of my favorite movie stars.

Allow me to explain.

Richard Gere is one of many actors from the last thirty years that I think could have benefited from the strong hand and guidance of the now-dead classical Hollywood system of publicity. There would be fewer false homosexuality allegations (gerbils or no), less involvement in bandstanding on the behalf of the Dalai Lama (bored, bored, bored), and a bigger deal made out of the fact that he married Cindy Crawford (so hush hush when it should have been the media event equivalent of a 50's or 60's Liz Taylor marriage). We very probably wouldn't know that his middle name is Tiffany until after his death if he simply had the kind of cloutish PR that say, Tyrone Power, had in his heyday.



Examine: this guy (right) versus this guy (left). What happened to the career of the guy on the right when the guy on the left went over like gangbusters?

Richard Gere, movie star, is the Richard Gere of Pretty Woman. Richard Gere, for the rest of his life, as long as people are seeing his name in print, will be the Richard Gere of Pretty Woman. It's an almost perfect chick flick--an end all be all of a wish fulfillment fairy tale. However. Richard Gere, for all his rumpled hair charm, believable as a millionaire charm, seeing Julia Roberts for who she really is charm, is just not acting.

"Just not acting" is something many Hollywood icons have made a career out of. Some people just can't act-- they are, which should be enough for their fans. I wouldn't mind that, with reference to the easy-on-the-eyes screen presense of this man, if I didn't remember an era in his career in which he DID act, and which he WAS good. Better than good, very good. These three movies are the best examples of an alternative Richard Gere, who, in an alternate world, could have been a different kind of leading man than the Sta-Puft version we have now. And that's something I think people should know when they mention my man's good name. So:

AMERICAN GIGOLO (1980, Paul Schrader)

The soundtrack that gave the world "Call Me" by Blondie (additionally, the greatest theme song choice outside of the Rocky movies for the whole of the 80's), came from a film that was a BIG smash hit-breakthrough-star making role for the man in question, in a role that John Travolta turned down. Something about either the full frontal nudity (which Gere seems to go after with the same feral nonchalance as Ewan McGregor) or control of final cut of the film, which Paul Schrader was, rightly, not going to give him. In any case, can you see John Travolta, even 1980 John Travolta, in this role? Sometimes things work out for the best, and where I can't forgive a world that denied me Cary Grant in the Lucien role in Sabrina, I appreciate the same just world keeping John Travolta's screen career in check for the sake of Richard Gere's. This happened again in the casting for An Officer and a Gentleman and Days of Heaven. John Travolta's agent probably came from the same school of deciding on client's movie roles as Colonel Tom Parker.

But I digress.

Richard Gere is Julian, an executive-level male escort draped in Armani and often less, trying to stay above an increasingly complicated web of crosses and double crosses in Los Angeles, 1980, that eventually involve a murder, a possible set up, and a politician's wife with whom he's slowly falling in love. Lauren Hutton plays the love interest, and for the first time, with that gap tooth smile below flashing eyes, I understood the appeal of Lauren Hutton (her print ads just don't do it for me...ps I love you Jerry Hall). What's so great about Schrader's direction and script is the creeping uneasiness that pervades the onscreen mood...something about the blue twilight and grey-Venetian-blinds-shadows of the photography is offputting in the correct way. The scene can be very pretty, but just a little wrong...feeling, I guess. When things start to go downhill for Julian, who, at the opening of the film, is at the pinnacle of his professional life-- gorgeous, sought after, closets full of expensive clothes, an apartment out of an 80's music video-- they don't just barrel out of control as in a 50's noir. It's very slowly, and with a great sense of finality, that Julian's beautiful life falls apart.

Gere is obviously painfully attractive and slickly done up in this movie, but his characterization of the lead role, of the empty, mirrored surface of Julian's life, is more acting than he's done in the last twenty years, at least. While people remember the moon boots scene and the tiny grey boxer shorts, this movie was not just about eye candy-- it's really a very dark, engrossing picture from the man who wrote Taxi Driver, for God's sake. If you've only caught it in snippets on TNT, it's time to give it a serious look.



BREATHLESS (1983, Jim McBride)


This movie was slightly doomed from the outset. A bout de souffle (1960) is one of the most important, if not THE most important, movies to come out of the French New Wave. A movie that put one Jean-Luc Godard on the proverbial map (for better or for worse... I prefer Truffaut or Chabrol for my top French film directors honors, but there's no denying his influence or the number of times a film hipster will casually drop his name in the course of a conversation). This movie is, to the very hilt, "cool". Expat American waif Jean Seberg plays the at times attainable, at times unattainable object of americanophile Jean Paul Belmondo's affection. Belmondo has only a short amount of time to get out of France with Seberg before the consequences of a hasty cop killing that opens the movie catch up with him, but the plot is mostly secondary to a long game of "let's see what we can do with cinema". "Groundbreaking landmark in French cinema" and "remake" are not two words you usually like to see together. And yet!

Gere made this movie after wrapping his second massive blockbuster success in An Officer and a Gentleman (a movie that I really like, but have issues with-- see below). The plot is similar to the original, but the tone, boy the tone. Jim McBride went on to make one of my favorite "fun" movies, the bubblegum biopic of Jerry Lee Lewis Great Balls of Fire, and that comic book style is unmistakable. The swagger Gere gives to Jesse, our protagonist, in this film is similar to the swagger Dennis Quaid gives JLL in that film. Jesse drives a big 50's finned behemoth. He listens to JLL on a cassette deck at top volume. He identifies with the Silver Surfer. He wears unbelieveably gauche 50's outfits-- pink ruffled tuxedo shirts with blue jeans, black and white plaid slacks with big white buckskin loafers. He interrupts his girlfriend's thesis defense by jumping up in the window and miming Elvis, before literally breaking up the meeting by barging in unannounced and removing the thesis committee's table. Like Belmondo, he's a big puppy, but distinctly UNLIKE Belmondo, he's kitsch Americana to the gills. While the French protagonist of Godard's film aped Bogart, again, Jesse is more Elvis-in-his-film-roles, a goofy, swaggery piece of pop culture that the Nouvelle Vague director probably would've cringed at. Quentin Tarantino, so big a fan of Godard he named his production company Band Apart after the film Bande a part, names this as one of his favorites:"When I saw this in '83, it was everything I wanted to do in movies." I wonder if Butch's girlfriend in Pulp Fiction owes something to Kaprisky's Monica.

NB: The big difference between Great Balls of Fire and Breathless, and the reason that I don't 100% whole heartedly recommend the latter, is the rampant amount of onscreen sex in the earlier film. Probably my only real disappointment with the movie was how much early 80's, put-movie-goers-in-seats-with-topless-girls sex you're going to get for your movie going dollar. Richard Gere in a gratuitous hopping around and out of the shower scene (full frontal RG incident #2...like it's nothing to him). Valerie Kaprinsky, slightly irritating as it is with a distractingly heavy French accent, just can't keep her clothes on. If I looked like Kaprinsky, I might never wear clothes either, but it was not in the movie's already-critically-conscious favor to spend a good 35% of the screen time in bed. If the eroticism of your movie undermines the plot, pacing, and characterization of your players, you're not doing your audience any favors, either.

DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978, Terence Malick)


The rare pleasure of a Terence Malick movie! Teamed up with Brooke Adams as a pair of transient hired hands, the two hatch a plan to have Adams married off to the wealthy, though chronically ill, man-of-the-manor Sam Shepard. The film has the gentle, epic quality of the setting-- watching it reminds you of the mental image you would get reading My Antonia or O. Henry short stories. Needless to say as it's Malick, the pacing and cinematrogaphy both are GORGEOUS. This is the kind of role that in later years would be inaccessible to RG as being "too arty". He would be Zack Mayo or Edward Lewis, and not blank enough to create a character like this. So much the worse for him. As his earliest role on this list, it's actually one of his stronger films. There are not many other Gere movies that are going to get a glossy Criterion release, I'll tell you that at least.


HONORABLE MENTIONS:

AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN (1982, Taylor Hackford)


Things you need to know:
1) Zach Mayo sounds like an early 90's cartoon character. Why did they choose this name for this man. Why.
2)Debra Winger was on FIRE for a couple years in the 1980's. Terms of Endearment, Urban Cowboy, AND this? She's like guranteed woman-traffic at the box office.
3) One scene that knocks me flat everytime I see it even though it's probably not even that good: When the drill sargeant tries to break him and you get this exchange:
Foley: You can forget it! You're out!
Mayo: Don't you do it! Don't! You... I got nowhere else to go! I got nowhere else to g... I got nothin' else.
Gere's SPITTING at this point. Again, you will not see him act like this again after 1983. I am serious.
4)Everybody loves that last scene. Even me, I love that last scene. And yet:
5) I'm not entirely sure, however romantic it is, of Debra Winger and Richard Gere's characters getting together in the end being a good idea. Some people you can't fix with enough love...I don't see anywhere in the movie where Mayo makes huge leaps in character growth. I'm sure some girls see this and go, "Look at his looks! Look at his problems! He's a big mess I'd like to fix!" but that kind of weird abandonment stuff just doesn't wash in real life I'd like there to be An Officer and a Gentleman II where Debra Winger's lost her looks and Richard Gere's turned into his dad. Add some kids. It's not the right kind of fairy tale ending for me, as the rest of the movie plays it mostly straight for the viewer. But again, who am I to stand in the way of runaway box office success?


LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977, Richard Brooks)
I don't remember much about this movie other than it's shocking final sequence (if you'd scene it, you'd know what I meant), but I vaguely remember a very, very young RG bedding Diane Keaton and then hopping around on her bed in his shorts. Always, this man was in his shorts. I think he threatened her with a glow in the dark switchblade at some point. Again, these aren't roles you're going to see him tackling anytime soon. WHY WON'T THEY RELEASE IT ON DVD? A really strong movie.


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I was going to make a list of movies you should definitely avoid with RG in it, but the list was too complicated. Let's just say No Mercy (1986) and leave it at that. Otherwise, fire up those VCRs and get reacquainted with what was good, once, about this actor.

Buster Brown and Tige

I just got a big collection of American comic book illustrations from 1776 to...I guess around 1976...and I always get such a kick out of Buster Brown and Tige. BB was created in 1903 to help promote the Brown Shoe Company (one model of which was named after BB's sister-- Mary Jane!) and ran on and on and on until I believe the early 60s. Buster is unstoppably mischievous, and Tige tags along slash aides and abets. Buster buys a dozen eggs and tries to sit on them to hatch them, in his mother's best chair. Buster organizes all the dogs and boys with dogs in town to chase the dogcatcher away. Buster trades clothes with a little girl and they both try to pass as each other. Buster has a surreal dream the likes of which would scare David Lynch. The hits keep coming.


The illustration style is really mostly disturbing. Like Little Orphan Annie, the non-realistic eyes have a look to them that just read as creepy in a contemporary viewing. I can't imagine seeing this as a parent and going, "Cute! I want something with that cute little boy and his dog on it for my kids!" because Buster and Tige both have the eyes of an escaped mental patient. Look at the valentine on the right! In what way is this whimsical? It looks like he's painted a message in blood on the wall. Very sweet. Despite what I consider their unsuitability for children, I just love these little guys-- their antics, their borderline ghoulish faces. Look at these individual panels and try to understand the nightmare world they come from:







Just as I get over looking into the cue balls of their eyes, however, I came across this in my Google Image search wanderings:



Take it away, Wikipedia. What's with this photo?

"Midgets were hired by the Brown Shoe Co. to play Buster in tours around the United States. These little people, who were each accompanied by a dog, performed in department stores, theaters and shoe stores from 1904 until 1930."

HOW IS THIS IN ANY WAY NORMAL?! I mean, I know public opinion on the acceptability of midgets or little people used in entertainment has peaked and sloped over the course of the 20th century, from Tom Thumb to the Munchkins to Tattoo to Mini-Me, but when did it seem like a good idea to dress a midget in a pageboy and a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit to impersonate a comic strip character and promote shoes? Could you not get a real child? Even if I was a kid back then, I think I'd know the difference between a midget and a Great Dane, and my beloved comic strip idols. I'm just saying. I'm just saying.

I'm probably going to spend the better part of this afternoon looking at Barnacle Press's website which has a HUGE online archive of BB comics. Here's four to give you taste:



"Don't do it, Buster! Noooooo, don't do it!" How can you not like them?

Slim Aarons

What you would see if you were in Slim Aaron's shoes! Photographer of celebrities and royal blood alike. I like the ones of celebrities best.

Notes:



If Katharine Hepburn pulled up in a roadster on a dirt road in some tropical locale I happened to inhabit, asking for directions, I sure hope I would have the luck of the man in the yellow shirt (center) and be able to snap a photo on my camera. Odds are, I would not have my camera. Odds are, I would not be in a tropical locale. The fortuitous stars that aligned in order to put both Katharine Hepburn and Yellow Shirt in the same breath of air!



I love the look of "Oh this? This is just what my life normally looks like. Really. No, I wasn't posing, seriously, but thank you, it's a great shot, isn't it?" that Lana Turner has on her face. I assume this is Lana Turner? (Hos often do you get to say that, unless you were a receptionist at MGM studios in the forties and fifties? Gosh.)



I always notice how tiny Marilyn Monroe's head and shoulders are. It's hard when you have voluptous, bombshell kind of girls to think of them as less than fifty feet tall and Amazons. The idea that if I met MM, she would have to look up to see me is just weird. Sometimes her "Give 'em 'sexy', Marilyn" look ends up making her look slightly drunk, I think this is one of those cases. Still, I love the fan mail and again, the unintentionally implied casual of the set up. "Yes, this is how I answer my fan mail. Staring seductively into space, with it all just spreeeead out around me. I just tell that silly old mailman to just fling 'em wherever. Do you like me? This couch is a pull out, you know."




Joan Collins! What did you do to that poodle! Why is that poodle pink! Is there no humanity left in you! Kudos on the Beethoven lamp, though. Also, you look great. This is the one photo other than the KH one that looks like it might take place in reality, I like that about publicity photos sometimes.



Can't decide if I like Truman Capote or Lana Turner's setting better. Note the obscene number of cat tchotchkes lying around TC's apartment. "Reading and smoking eccentrically. HOW ELSE." What is missing in this photo is Babe Paley and the nine stoli martinis he's had before lunch. Read about auctioning of his private goods (and TC in general) here. I hate that there were two movies made about his life and neither (while each decent in its own way) got to that sometimes impish, sometimes childish perceived sense of his own greatness and importance that made Gerald Clarke's bio of him such a good read back when I was in high school. I love his writing, but more than that I like his irrepressible sense of self.



I thought this was Kim Novak before I saw a larger version. I still wish it was Kim Novak. What a lovely shade of hair this girl has, nonetheless. And I like how she's posed with a tiger skin rug and somehow makes it look DEMURE. Lovely.



The man himself. He looks like a sweetie, I like his face.


HUGE number of his photos available to view online

Wiki article on his life and times

An elegant blog feature on him with more photos

Shopping for the Stars

It started out so innocently with that Robert Montgomery paper doll I was going to post...then I just went ebay/image search crazy. I couldn't help myself. I want all 1930's celebrity endorsement products. All of 'em.

These dolls are just terrifying. And somehow fantastic. I searched and searched and searched for more of them, but I only found these, on three different sites no less. What else was in that book? Robert Montgomery, Norma Shearer, and La Crawford were all MGM stars from the early 30's, I suspect there's a Gable or a Harlow out there.

Bette Davis paper dolls from the 40's with SCREEN WORN COSTUMES as designs, jeez louise.




'Scary Cary" Grant cigarette trading card, and a 1941 Cary Grant paper doll, also with screen worn costumes (see the link for another set of outfits).

1973 movie star mesh purses. Good. GOD. Very rare because of a copyright scare and subsequent recall. See you at an estate sale, little buddy. PLEASE see you at an estate sale.



1930-’40s vintage Hollywood movie star sewing patterns (Barbara Stanwyck, right; Olivia de Havilland, left). Who thought of this? WHO THOUGHT OF THIS? Why didn't I know about them earlier?Also, I love that the sizing on these two in particular reflect the women that would have bought the dresses, not the stars. O d H and Ms. Stanwyck could be like size fours, but you could make your own copy of their dresses, with regulation patterns, in a size 16. I wonder what they looked like as a finished product.

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Sidenote: I also found the PBS Antiques Roadshow archives to be both informative, and sad-making.

Antiques Roadshow Rage Part 1 (in which autographed photo of Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow is displayed, also, handdrawn pictures made for a sound man by Shirley Temple age like 6. I am going to stop watching this show if people keep finding things like this at rummage sales and I don't start doing the same)

Antiques Roadshow Rage Part 2 (in which 60 years worth of movie posters are brought in. Was I switched at birth? Why wasn't I born into a family of career movie people?)

Antiques Roadshow Rage Part 3 (in which autographed F Scott Fitz book with adorable flyleaf signature and note is brought. The man-who-brought-it-in's grandmother asked for his autograph in a bar, FSF gave it to her; the next day she brought another book in, where she found F Scott at the same bar. She told him that due to his drunkenosity, the first inscription was completely illegible, so she would need him to re sign another book. The moxie on that girl. Inscription? "For Lorainne Pell. In substitution for the drunken hieroglyphics of last Thursday night or last Wednesday night or was it last Tuesday night? From yours faithfully, F. Scott Fitzgerald." Moral? That woman's grandson had better watch himself on the way to the parking lot).


End transmission.

Two by Two --Horror Double Features

Sick as a dog all this week and last...which means plenty of time to not go see Shutter Island (which you would know to be a real privation if you had any idea how much I want to see Shutter Island) and instead trundle up undercover and fabricate my own list of Horror Film two'fers. Two by two, they came, this queue of near perfect mid 70s to mid 80s scare fests. I don't know how horror movies became my comfort movies, but for some reason, being curled up under a mild dosage of Nyquil with a truly scary movie is my idea of a get well plan.

Voila....regardez bien:



1) Shock Waves/Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1977, 1978; Ken Wiederhorn, Philip Kaufman)-- Amphibious Nazi zombies rise from their watery graves to torment Brooke Adams and crew. AMPHIBIOUS. NAZI. ZOMBIES. Pulling this off as scary rather than camp was an exercise in plot control and pacing, which I think Wiederhorn did relatively well. Such great shots of the zombies rising out of the water...reminded me a little of the balletic underwater scene in Fulci's Zombie. Wiederhorn also made Eyes of a Stranger, which had a promising slasher beginning, but kind of runs itself into early 80s horror movie torpor midway through. Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers has pod people tormenting Brooke Adams and Donald Sutherland. This is actually my favorite iteration of Jack Finney's cold war classic...yes, I've seen the original. Yes, it still plays like a bad episode of One Step Beyond. What's so smooth about the 1978 remake is how close to reality it feels...like John Carpenter's The Thing, this version seems to trump the original in using the bones, the key elements of what made it so scary, and taking away all the unneccessary, stagey bits. Each remake stands on its own, and in my opinion, fares better for its director's superior vision. Carpenter might not be a better director than Hawks, but for that film, I think he was. Ditto for Invasion. Last scene....just too scary. Just...too...scary.



2) Who Could Kill a Child?/ See No Evil (1976, 1971; Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, Richard Fleisher) In the former, a man and his pregnant wife (who looks exactly like Mia Farrow, but is not) arrive on an obscure Spanish island for a rustic holiday, only to find the place bereft of adults. Strangely, the children remain... If you kicked up Village of the Damned by about six notches, you'd get Who Could Kill a Child? I was interested to see something else by this director, who was very articulate on his ideas for the film in one of the dvd extras, but Netflix drew up blank (tsk tsk tsk). In the latter, a blind girl (who looks exactly like Mia Farrow, and is) assumes the absence of moving and talking family members means they've taken off for the weekend and continues about her daily routine, oblivious to their murders, the presence of their dead bodies, and the fact that the murderer is still in the house. For the pure suspense of waiting until she figures out what exactly has happened, the first twenty minutes of this movie are edge-of-the-seat.



3) The Changeling/ The Fury (1980, 1978; Peter Medak, Brian de Palma)-- Two movies in which late middle aged, early 60s A-list stars play down to the horror genre by pretending they're making an action movie. In The Changeling, concert pianist George C. Scott (Patton) walks away from a car accident that claims his wife and child to morosely bang out a new composition in a ridiculously cheap, well appointed, but (surprise) haunted house. As if he didn't have enough to deal with, George C. rolls up his sleeves and tries to bellow out reason with the child ghost who keeps appearing in bathtubs and carrying on in the attic at all hours of the night. The plot has one of those great, story behind the story reveals, but remembering Scott just screaming at the ghost every time the phantom appears, without the mildest regard for the fact that he's dealing with the supernatural, really made this movie for me. It WORKS somehow. I guess I might be more concerned with the nuisance of poltergeist activity in my obscenely-lowly-rented house, too, if I were half the man GCS is. Great backstory on the screenwriter's inspiration here.
In The Fury, Kirk Douglas's (Sparatacus) son is presumed dead in some weird terrorist attack in the opening sequence of the film. When it turns out the CIA or FBI or some government entity has in fact whisked him away to a training compound for highly psychically gifted youth (to be used in some kind of future tactical manoeuvers, very hush hush, etc), Kirk Douglas is really, really....MAD, I think the word is. He's crashing cars, beating up punks, swinging out of apartment windows, getting his girlfriend killed-- it's kind of neat, actually, to see someone his age doing some of the stunts he undertakes and not TOTALLY stretching the limits of suspension of disbelief (see: Clint Eastwood in Blood Work). Amy Irving (here) looks eerily like Gene Tierney (here) throughout this movie.



4) Sisters/Black Christmas (1973, 1974; Brian de Palma, Bob Clark) In Sisters, Margot Kidder plays a pair of Quebecois twins (one good, one psychotically bad) in what I consider de Palma's only really successful Hitchcock homage... where Dressed to Kill and B d P's later films poorly ape Hitchcock's style to the point of ham fisted visual quotation, Sisters plays like an updated Hitch. Margot Kidder, with her cut glass cheekbones and flawless French Canadian accent, is fantastic in this. The next year, she made Black Christmas with Olivia Hussey (who, like Amy Irving, also has a 40's doppelganger, in the form of Merle Oberon...there was a great classical Hollywood biopic somebody could have made on which the boat has now sailed...).
Black Christmas surprised me in its starkness. Clark, whose later credits include Porky's (I and II), Rhinestone, and A Christmas Story somehow managed to make a seriously disturbing slasher with an old school "Omg I didn't even see that coming but at least they'll be some kind of let up? No? Unmitigatingly dark? Ok, fine..." ending. Kidder is the highlight of the movie, in spite of Olivia Hussey's starrish role, with her foul mouth and scotch and soda laugh. It's hard to believe the only time she made headlines after this was for the Superman franchise (good news) and being found, after being missing for several days, hysterically hallucinating in someone's backyard (bad news). You never can tell with these high strung Hollywood types, I guess. PS THE REMAKE WAS SO AWFUL. I know you're required to say that of any late 90s/00s remake of some 70s masterpiece, but whatever is said for other goes thricely for this one (and Texas Chainsaw. Let's not go there). Sledgehammer job. Other than the Driller Killer remake (which my beloved Tobe Hooper, of all people, committed), just the worst horror remake of an obscure-ish horror film.


I might do a part two of this later in the week....for now though, it's back to my screening bed.