IN the rancid American Gigolo (Pearl, 9.30pm) Richard Gere plays the highest-paid lover in Beverly Hills. Christopher Reeve turned down US$1 million (about HK$7.73 million) to take the part and Gere, on balance, should have done the same. American Gigolo is thoroughly unattractive; a perverse film devoted to perversity.
Which for some might hold some attraction. Midnight Cowboy, after all, trod the same ground, but with more compassion and fewer contrivances. In American Gigolo writer and director Paul Schrader hits his audience with every kind of degenerate act he can manufacture, essential to the plot or not.
The plot, in fact, is all the film has going for it, a nice combination of courtroom drama and thriller which might have stood alone, without the kinkiness to hold it up.
Gere is a male prostitute who finds that a client (the California State Senator's bored but beautiful wife, played by Lauren Hutton) won't clear him when he is falsely charged with murder. Hector Elizondo is the dirty raincoat investigator who feels Gere deserves a few years in the slammer.
ALMOST all the jingoism and paranoia in evidence in Arctic Heat (World, 9.35pm) has been seen before in films of this nature. Russia - as in the former Soviet Union - is the enemy, full of dastardly commies who have no respect for the American Way.
The story revolves around three American college students (Mike Norris, Steve Durham and David Coburn) who, while on holiday in Finland, decide it would be a giggle to sneak under barbed wire into neighbouring Russia.
They are hunted, caught, interrogated by the KGB, implicated in a murder, escape, are hunted again and so on. The obligatory pretty girl who helps them is played by Laura Heimo.
