Having now seen "American Gigolo," "Hardcore" and "Taxi Driver,"… I can't tell whether Mr. Schrader seizes on these sensational subjects because he is a canny picture-maker or because he is fascinated by moral sleaziness. I don't mean that he's just idly curious but that he is obsessed in the manner of a person who was brought up in a strict religious faith, as Mr. Schrader (Dutch Reformed Church) was, and somewhat late in life discovered what he takes to be the real nature of the world.

"American Gigolo" is a laughable movie but it's not without interest, if only because Mr. Schrader seems to be genuinely convinced of the worth of his hero, Julian Kay …, an almost physically perfect young man who makes a very good living as an expensive Los Angeles prostitute. (pp. D15, D42)

However, Mr. Schrader's interest in Julian quickly comes to look less like concern for the hustler's soul than like uncontrolled adoration. This is especially true in the way the camera focuses on [Julian's] mostly expressionless face, on his body and on those objects that the director has placed in Julian's apartment in a failed attempt to give the guy some class. Because the character met early in the movie would seem to have difficulty reading People magazine from cover to cover, it's a sight-laugh when Mr. Schrader's camera, in panning across Julian's belongings, just happens to spy works by Vladimir Nabokov and Colin Wilson.

Does he have a bookish cleaning lady?

The major difficulty with "American Gigolo" is that Mr. Schrader has too effectively established Julian as high-priced sex-machine to make the character work as the consciousness-raised hero he's supposed to be in the murder-mystery that takes over the second half of the movie.

Not terribly significant, perhaps, but much more believable are Julian's narcissism that takes pride in having been able to lead to sexual climax an older (very rich) woman who'd been abandoned by her husband and thought herself frigid. The scene in which Julian tells us about this triumph is hilarious, not because it is exploitative but because the movie maker is being so dumbfoundingly sincere. I don't doubt at all that a prostitute like Julian would talk this way, but Mr. Schrader, incurable naif that he seems to be, takes everything Julian says at face value when a little irony might have been in order.

Julian is a trivial character. Mr. Schrader might have transformed him into something other had he (Mr. Schrader) maintained a tiny bit of skepticism or seen Julian as another aspect of our junk-food generation. That, I suspect, is beyond Mr. Schrader. He gives every indication of being as dazzled by Julian as everyone else is. He's also dazzled by the life Julian leads, by all of the terrible, disgusting, kinky, sleazy, immoral things one has to do to put a little money in the bank….

When, at the end of "American Gigolo," Julian's soul is salvaged, it's salvaged not by God or by some breakthrough in understanding but by a plot device learned from all of those Hollywood movies that Mr. Schrader, as a little boy in Michigan, was not allowed to see….

I believe there are characters like Julian Kay living the fast life in Hollywood at this moment. Mr. Schrader knows how real people of all kinds talk and behave, and he has deep sympathy for them, as was beautifully manifest in the small-town sequences in "Hardcore." Sometimes, though, his real people, like Julian Kay, resolutely refuse to be canonized by melodramatic violence. They remain stubbornly trivial. (p. D42)