Richard Gere

"Days of Heaven is the movie that the Village Voice famously called “the most gorgeously photographed film ever made.”
Oh My God. Beauty that leaves you without speech. And I cannot improve upon the Criterion write-up.

A movie in which clothes maketh (and unmaketh) a man!

TI watched this flick last night with the sound off and for the first time realized how precise and sharp the visual strategies of this classic really were. Without the distraction of the bad plot (talk about deus ex machina in excess) and the wooden acting, it really hits home how much this film is about CLOTHES.

It is legend now that Giorgio Armani outfitted Gere for his looks in the film and it is accepted that this movie (recontextualized as a feature length Armani ad) really sold the Italian designer's name to America via Hollywood. But when you examine the clothes Gere wears and his relationship to those clothes, you do gain a newfound respect for director Paul Schrader's ability to communicate character and plot points using purely visual code. The shoes, the belt, the ties are always right. The gigolo in question is so assured in his sense of style, so correct, so note perfect, you know he is going to get in biiiig trouble mid-film. It is like watching a symphonic take on status dressing . It is an aesthetic that is not flashy and it pretends to be casual in that California mode but boy is it a dream world when it comes to evoking LA style.