Someone's Watching Me! (John Carpenter, 1978)

Adrienne Barbeau and Lauren Hutton in Someone's Watching Me!

Cast: Lauren Hutton, David Birney, Adrienne Barbeau, Charles Cyphers, Grainger Hines, Len Lesser, John Mahon, James Murtaugh, George Skaff. Screenplay: John Carpenter. Cinematography: Robert B. Hauser. Art direction: Philip Barber. Film editing: Jerry Taylor. Music: Harry Sukman. 

The hysterically titled Someone's Watching Me! (the working title was High Rise) was made for TV, and it's not up to John Carpenter's usual standards. But it's still a watchable thriller with a good performance by Lauren Hutton and some moments of genuine suspense. Hutton plays Leigh Michaels, a director of live television who comes to LA for a new job and takes an apartment in a newly built high rise that the leasing agent assures her has state-of-the-art computer-controlled amenities. She quickly makes a new friend in coworker Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau), who lets her know that she's a lesbian but that Leigh "isn't her type." She also lands a new boyfriend, Paul Winkless (David Birney), by hitting on him in a bar -- a spur-of-the-moment thing after she gets tired of being hit on herself. He's a philosophy professor at USC, of all things. But then creepy things start to happen to Leigh, and she realizes she's in some kind of danger. Sophie and Paul urge her to call the police, but when she does they say they can't help her until she's got better evidence that something truly criminal is going on. So everything is set up for a solid woman-in-jeopardy tale. The only thing that struck me as novel about the movie was that the introduction of a queer character in a strong second role was unusual for a major network like NBC as early as 1978. And then when we had a second scene in which Leigh shows her comfort with Sophie's sexual identity I realized what was going on: Sophie was being set up as the sacrificial character, the one who would fall victim to the harasser, thereby heightening Leigh's peril. The Kill-the-Queers trope loomed its tired old head again. Too bad, because otherwise Someone's Watching Me! smartly displays its debt to Rear Window (1954) and to Hitchcock in general, and Hutton is an attractive heroine (though she smokes too much). 

American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980)

American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980)

Cast: Richard Gere, Lauren Hutton, Hector Elizondo, Nina van Pallandt, Bill Duke, Brian Davies, K Callan, Tom Stewart, Patricia Carr, David Cryer, Carole Cook, Carol Bruce, Frances Bergen. Screenplay: Paul Schrader. Cinematography: John Bailey. Art direction: Edward Richardson. Film editing: Richard Halsey. Music: Giorgio Moroder.

"So quick bright things come to confusion." One moment Armani-clad Julian Kay is weaving smoothly through L.A. traffic in his Mercedes or striding confidently into the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the next he's standing in a lineup of suspects in the brutal murder of one of his clients. American Gigolo has always divided critics between those who think it's shallow and humorless soft-core porn and those who find it "stylish and surprisingly poignant." I tend somewhat toward the latter view: It seems to me an American version of something like Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels (1963), with Richard Gere's Julian as a kind of equivalent of Jeanne Moreau's platinum blond Jackie Demaistre -- a lost and lonely soul adrift in a glamorous setting. It's America on the cusp of the Reagan '80s, before AIDS. The stories of male prostitutes have never been given the attention by the movies that they deserve. Perhaps it's because in a male-dominated society the question of who's exploiting whom is a little more complicated when the prostitute is a man, typically seen as the one to be pleasured rather than the pleasurer. Paul Schrader suggestively makes Julian's procurers a woman and a black man -- figures that a good-looking white male like Julian would typically not find himself subordinated to. I don't think American Gigolo fully explores all of its potential, but it rewards a second look to examine its multiple subtexts.