L'assassinio di un allibratore cinese

No need to recap the plot. By now I've got Gazzara's profile stamped on my brain like it or not. That might be okay if his character had more than two expressions, a sneaky smile and a stony deadpan. I guess those are meant to indicate Cosmo's tough resolve that eventually emerges. Okay, the movie reflects director-writer Cassavetes' experiment at using close-ups rather than dialog to drive narrative. Sometimes it works impressively, Faces (1968), for example. Here, however, the many extended shots sap story line, and not even the many bare breast drop-ins compensate. Okay, maybe I'm stuck in 40's tight crime flicks, but I'd love to see what RKO and Anthony Mann would do with the same premise. For sure, the results would be less self-indulgent. No doubt, both Cassavetes and buddy Gazzara are extremely talented moviemakers. But that doesn't mean every shot hits its mark. And here, I'm afraid we've got a meandering misfire.

John Cassavetes is widely regarded as being the father of American independent film. Using his fees as an actor in films such as "The Killers" (1964) and "Rosemary's Baby" (1968, he funded his own films away from the interference of Hollywood. In this film, Ben Gazzara plays Cosmo Vitelli, a nightclub owner who lives way beyond his means and manages to get into a massive gambling debt with the mob. This leads to the gangsters putting heavy pressure on Cosmo to perform a hit for them in order that he pays back the debt. The film deals with Cosmo's attempts to extricate himself from these proceedings whilst still keeping his integrity, not to mention his life intact.

The film can be seen as having parables with Cassavetes own dealings with Hollywood studios and his attempts, not unlike those of the films protagonist to keep his integrity and his artistic vision intact. The film is a classic example of 70's American cinema when the old studio system had collapsed and filmmakers had the freedom to make whatever films they liked no matter how personal or non commercial they might seem. This is a truly great film.

'The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie' is one of the most interesting and original movies I've ever seen. I would include it with movies such as 'Blow Up', 'Performance' and 'Eraserhead', which may not have much to do with each other on the surface, but are what I would call puzzlers. On first viewing you go "well, it was different... I'm not sure if I LIKED it, but it sure was original..." Then later you find yourself haunted by it. You go back and watch it again and again, and each time you discover some nuance or emotion or idea, or a certain scene or line that resonates. These movies are ones that STAY with you.

The plot of 'Bookie' is pretty straightforward. A strip club owner gets into debt with the Mob and is pressured into murdering a bookie. Other directors such as Scorsese or Frankenheimer or Friedkin or Mann could have made an tight, exciting thriller out of such a plot. But John Cassavetes goes for a completely different approach, and doesn't play by "the rules". He ignores the obvious way of proceeding, slows things down, focuses on characters and relationships and moments, and ends up with a cinematic poem.

That may sound pretentious to some, so be it, but that's what it is. The beauty of the photography combined with the improvised dialogue by some of the best character actors of American post-War movies (Gazzara, Cassel, Carey), makes this movie unique. There's nothing quite like this movie, and it's one that if you sit back and just let it do its thing, will remain absolutely unforgettable.

One of the 1970s greatest achievements.

I've shown this movie to baffled girlfriends and eye-rolling friends who've left the room after twenty minutes. The picture was essentially unreleased upon its completion in 1976, and is now available on video only because of the retrospectives of Cassavetes' work that followed his death. The movie is considered bewildering even by many Cassavetes champions, but for me it ranks among the greatest American movies. As Cosmo Vitelli, the strip-joint owner who's a clown who thinks he's a king, the sublimely reptilian Ben Gazzara leans into an offstage mike and tells the audience, "And if you have any complaints--any complaints at all--we'll throw you right out on your ass." Like Jake LaMotta, or Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, Cosmo is a walking aria of male self-destruction. He finally pays off the shylocks he's in hock to for his place--the Crazy Horse West--and celebrates with a gambling spree that puts him right back where he started. To pay his debts, Cosmo agrees to murder a Chinese kingpin the L.A. mob has marked for death--but that only gives the barest indication of the strange, ecstatic poetry of Cassavetes' greatest and farthest-out-on-a-limb movie. The movie is a strangely crumpled form of film noir; a classic Cassavetes character portrait, with more than the usual romanticism and self-disgust; a super-subliminal essay on Vietnam and Watergate; and an example of a one-of-a-kind lyricism that's closer to 2001 than a gangster picture. With its odd rhythms, Warholish color and substance-altered performances, it's one of the rare movies for which there exists no point of comparison.

A movie which a friend from a film class in university hated so much she broke up with her boyfriend because he liked it, "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" became my first Cassavetes film when I watched it this morning. Widely seen as a misfire on release, extremely divisive now, with many regarding it as a self-indulgent experiment of the very worst variety and others as one of the greatest examples of independent American cinema in the 1970's, my take on "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" is somewhere between the two extremes.

It's an admirable film in concept, a sort of gangster movie focused entirely on characters, with very natural dialogue (surprisingly most of it was scripted, I would've guessed it was improvised for the most part) and some interesting visuals, as interesting as Cassavetes could manage with his miniscule budget anyhow. Yet much of the time it doesn't just seem like wanking, it IS wanking. Moreover, for all the hoopla over how formally interesting the movie is it's barely even all that cinematic, seeming more like experimental theater at times. Ben Gazzara is terrific, the saving grace of the film and the only thing which I really cared about while watching it. With a mildly interesting but still amateurish director helming the movie this couldn't be the sort of thing it wants to be. If it is not visually sophisticated, if the visual storytelling is not strong enough, it needs narrative pull from the script. It doesn't have any. Moreover, it's a character piece in which none of the characters are even remotely interesting, unless you're the sort who pats films on the back for daring to portray a character who has a certain occupation as something other than an archetype.

Now of course I will get people telling me I'm an absolute moron and can't handle anything slow or lacking in explosions and cleavage, but many times during "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" I couldn't help but think back to "The Conversation". That's a 'slow' movie not dissimilar to this in some respects. That's also a great movie. This isn't. I think it's pretty easy to explain that as the difference between sophisticated craft and amateurish, occasionally interesting craft. The 1976 cut is a chore to sit through, and I don't think I'll ever bother with the 1978 cut.