Cracked Actor: David Bowie, Movie Star
Just a Gigolo (1978)
Yeah, so during his Berlin period, Bowie played a doomed Weimar Republic male prostitute in a disastrously received Cabaret knock-off directed by David Hemmings. Here you can watch him be pretty and self-effacing, pretending (through the magic of shot-reverse shot) to look at another era’s androgynous confrontational sex object, Marlene Dietrich (in her last film). Especially in his first decade of film work, Bowie was, surprisingly, very good at looking abashed, waveringly poised, shy.