MovieChat Forums > American Gigolo (1980) Discussion > Question about the Rheiman Murder

Question about the Rheiman Murder

posted 10 years ago by shiftydave77
19 replies | jump to latest

According to Detective Sunday, Mrs Rheiman was murdered brutally. In other words, this was not an "accidental" death. It wasn't as if the blonde boy went too far....she was handcuffed and beaten with an object. To me, that sounds like the murder was premeditated, as in the blonde boy was hired to kill her, not just play rough sex games.

If that is the case, then what that means is Leon had to have known that this was not just a typical trick, he was accessory to murder the moment he agreed to send his protege out to Palm Springs to do it.

Does anyone else agree? Or do you think it started out as a simple rough sex trick with the husband watching and went too far?

[–] manram24 10 years ago

I agree, Leon planned on having the wife killed and the fact that she was into rough sex, the husband could say that Julian went too far and killed her as part of the frame.

Y'know, I could eat a peach for hours

[–] Kompressor_Fan 10 years ago

That, or it was the husband that committed the crime, and used Julian as a frame.

 The bad news is you have houseguests. There is no good news. 

[–] LenaAFoster 10 years ago

I think the husband was a sadist. That character trait was set up in the movie. Also set up in the movie was how people are objects and easily "discarded." I think the husband was a greedy freak and wanted to snuff out his wife. Leon was the bottom of the barrel pimp to accommodate that. He said at the end, something like "no matter what you pay, the other side will always pay more." And Julian was frameable. Because he had stepped on toes...

A little bit of greed, sadism, homosexual revenge (Julian rebuffing past advances). A theme which was consistent was that everyone wanted to possess Julian entirely yet they didn't care about him. They wanted to enslave him yet hated him. I think the husband watched as someone else snuffed her out. For his pleasure. They just set up Julian to take the fall. But the fact that they planted jewels suggested the husband killed her for kicks and giggles not to get rid of her before she divorced him and took his money or something.

Galena

*Free speech opinion w/ pseudonym internet moniker w/o malice for debate and discussion🌈

[–] 10 years ago

[deleted]

[–] MIJACology 9 years ago

Doubtful that it was a murder for hire.

She was handcuffed by Julian 2 days before. Then at the time of the blonde boy trick, she was handcuffed again. It was probably Mr. Rheiman who ordered the blonde boy to hit her and rape her with a foreign object, the same way he ordered Julian 2 days before to "slap the cnut". That same foreign object is presumably what accidentally killed her.

[–] renata77 9 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks SPOILER

that Julian actually did it? Michelle asked quietly, "Why did you do it?" First he looks angry,then gets a grin on his face and says, "Why did I take so long to come to you?" I took that to mean that since she asked so nonjudgmentally,he felt he'd found the soul mate who accepted him for who he was - a murderer, despite all his protestations of not being into S&M, etc.

[–] McQueen1980 9 years ago

i have said that here before

if you believe this theory which is entirely plausible then the whole movie is turned entirely on its head and that julian was lucky to have michelle as a "fake" alibi

[–] renata77 9 years ago

Thank you! I was beginning to wonder why I seemed to be the only person who thought this. I think possibly it was supposed to be a set up, but then Julian just went ahead and did it.

[–] McQueen1980 9 years ago

no problem renata!

also don't forget the walk on the beach with the nina van pallandt character

she says to him something like, you did do it Julian didn't you??

Julian doesn't even defend himself and says nothing

I took that as guilt considering it was a private conversation

[–] meguroutsubo 9 years ago

she says to him something like, you did do it Julian didn't you??

Julian doesn't even defend himself and says nothing

I took that as guilt considering it was a private conversation

It may have been a private conversation, but it was not a privileged conversation. There is a difference.

Imagine I have been charged with a crime. My conversations with my lawyer are privileged; they cannot be used against me in court. They cannot be "admitted into evidence."

The same is true of husbands and wives. The court cannot force her to talk about anything on the stand that might incriminate me...unless she suddenly hates me and changes her mind.

But if I accidentally told my bartender, "I just ran over a crossing guard. I think he's DEAD!" in an empty bar at 1 a.m. in the morning, that conversation was private, but it is not privileged. The bartender could be subpoenaed to talk about it later.

[–] McQueen1980 8 years ago

you are factually correct by the letter of the law megoroutsobo but this is a fictional movie and we as the viewer have a third eye on all fictional events in the movie
the assumption was always that julian was not guilty and all he needed was an alibi for technical reasons
i am challenging that assumption and raising the possibility that he was guilty of the crime due to this conversation on the beach , the fact he opts bizarrely to wear prison clothes in the second part of the movie( VERY SYMBOLIC) and other things like when the cop tells him I THINK YOU'RE GUILTY AS SIN

[–] MIJACology 9 years ago

You must have gotten up and left before the end of the movie. Or maybe you went to the bathroom at the moment Bill Duke [Leon] says to Julian..."because you were framable Julie".

[–] renata77 9 years ago

Actually, no, I saw the whole movie and replayed the end about three times. I saw the "framable" part and figured they wanted to frame him, but for some reason he actually did it.

My problem was, there was some sort of skip in my DVR, so that, at the moment that "Why did you do it?" was said, there was a small blip and black screen, and then Lauren was shown speaking, and the voice even sounded female, so I thought she was asking him that. Someone else pointed out that he had been the one to ask the question, so I taped the movie on a different date, and that's when I saw that he had asked her the question - about why she said she was with him and gave up everything for him.

Frankly, I liked the ending I thought I saw better, LOL.

[–] McQueen1980 9 years ago

just becoz he was framable doesnt mean he didnt do the murder

leon was not there when it happened, think about it

[–] metaspheres 9 years ago

Schrader, who wrote the movie, would vehemently disagree with you. Julian is not a murderer. Are you suggesting you know more than the person who actually wrote the film?

[–] MIJACology 9 years ago

It's one thing to take a movie the way you choose to take it. That's up to you. Enjoy. But it's another to insist that the screenplay writer agrees with you. If a person chooses to continue to insist, good luck with that. The unfortunate part is that you never really understood the movie and missed the emotions is was trying to convey. An example of this is if you take the ending scene when Julian and Michelle are separated by security glass, as a scene of a smirking killer who just scored his "blonde alibi"....you completely miss out on the emotions and depth of the last scene which was more about Michelle's love Julian's salvation/enlightenment.

[–] McQueen1980 9 years ago

every movie ever made is fully open to complete interpretation by whoever no matter what the writer or director says

julian could still have done it, albeit "ordered" to do so by rheiman and of course in mine or your imagination could have happened off camera and...

of course we never see the actual murder of mrs rheiman do we??

[–] MIJACology 9 years ago

We don't agree. But since you love interpreting films with a sort of "poetic license", you ought to look into the other work of the writer of this movie, Paul Schrader. He coined a term called "double bookends". Not sure what it means. But what that sounds like is a second story about roughly the same characters but with a different ending. Look it up on Wikipedia. American Gigolo is double bookended by another film/story called "The Walker". There's your second interpretation. But in the Walker, the "Julian Kaye" is also an innocent rent boy caught up in controversy. Notice he is still innocent of murder.

[–] McQueen1980 8 years ago

the walker does not feature a character called julian kaye so it is not a sequel and whether or not willem defoe is guilty/innocent does not relate to the plot in american gigolo