John Cassavetes’ masterpiece The Killing of a Chinese Bookie opened in February 1976. It screened for just a handful of days, and then it was gone, having failed, to put it mildly, to catch on with either audiences or critics (“resolutely refuses to come to a point” sniffed one major review). Decades later, most serious critics now laud this movie, as well they should. It may be our favorite Cassavetes – we go back and forth between this one and Opening Night – which is pretty high praise considering that our top five for this auteur are rounded out by A Woman Under the Influence, Love Streams, and Husbands. That’s a T5 that can stand with the greats, and is all the more impressive because they were all self-financed.
Chinese Bookie currently circulates in two versions, and I strongly prefer the shorter one, which I find much tighter, and, you know, sometimes Cassavetes can linger on scenes for a little while longer than might seem necessary. The effect of the Cassavetes “too long” scene can be brilliant (and at times excruciating), but, the long cut of this one spends more time on stage at the club with a (purposefully) mediocre revue than I needed to. But I could be wrong, of course. A writer I enormously admire champions the longer version, and in private correspondence took me to task for “failing to appreciate the entropy” of the long-form version—which I sensed suggested that I was simply not cool enough for this school. I won’t drop his name, because that would be vulgar.
In any event, both versions of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie start with Cosmo, owner of the nightclub Crazy Horse West, making his final payment to a loan shark—he is now free to “work for himself.” That work remains the same. Nobody would call the Crazy Horse West a high class joint; it is a dimly lit bar that features a topless cabaret. But don’t tell Cosmo that. As played by Cassavetes regular Ben Gazzara (“outstanding” understates the quality of his performance), he believes in the show, and, proudly, writes, directs and stages the acts, which put at least as much emphasis on the song and dance numbers as they do on the flesh, at times testing the patience of the crowd.
Cosmo celebrates his new debt-free status by grabbing a few of the girls and heading out to an underground gambling joint, where, over the course a long evening, he loses his shirt. The proprietors of that outfit look like businessmen (in the morning after, as the debt is clarified, reading glasses are donned, standard forms are introduced, filled out, and signed, and proper understandings are reached. These “businessmen” are, however, actually mobsters. And after a few discomforting Cassavetes-style scenes in which Cosmo has a few drinks and ponders his plight, they show up at the club, looking to collect, one way or the other.
After a few false starts as Cosmo (and Cassavetes?) seem to play for time, the price becomes clear: killing that titular “Chinese Bookie”—who may be Chinese, but one suspects he is much more than a bookie, and that Cosmo is being set up. Will he pull off the job? (Sidebar: a legendary Cassavetes story holds that, during the production, the writer-director, who didn’t like to traffic in that sort of violence in his films, got cold feet. “What if we don’t kill him?” he asked his regular band of collaborators. Their response: “John, it’s the title of the movie.”)
What follows are twenty impossibly gripping, gloriously shot night-for-night movie minutes, as Cosmo makes his way to Chinatown, changing cars and cabs, infiltrates an elaborate residence, confronts his target, and flees the scene. In the middle of this sequence, Cosmo, on his way to commit a capital crime, stops at a phone booth to call the club and check on the show. In this two minute conversation (all on Gazzara), he tries to explain to a less than attentive staffer what number should be on stage, eventually singing out “I can’t give you anything but love, baby.” And with apologies to Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane, who was speaking of a young lady he glimpsed on the Staten Island Ferry in 1898, I don’t think a month has gone by when I have not thought of that moment.
As Cosmo makes his way back to the Crazy Horse, word filters back to the mob that events in Chinatown have gone down, and in a way that has complicated their business. In a magnificent scene in a restaurant – sorry for all the gushing, but I just re-watched the movie and had forgotten this marvelous interlude – a series of oblique, serial conversations between our two main heavies, the legendary Timothy Carey and (Cassavetes stalwart) Seymour Cassel, as well as Al Rubin (another affiliate who produced the film and who was also was one of Cassavetes’ go-to cinematographers) and Val Avery, make clear that Cosmo remains in considerable jeopardy.
From there we are treated to more bravura sequences: back at the club; a well-executed garage confrontation; and a return to the girlfriend’s house, among others—all, again, over the course of that long, dark night. What happens at the end of the movie? It is not clear, nor is the ending the point, but we do leave Cosmo pacing the sidewalk in front of the Crazy Horse West, somewhat surprised by the amount of blood that is (literally) on his hand.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a movie of mood and moments, and if that’s not your thing (or if you like your good guys unambiguously good, emotional violence comfortably contained, sensitivities unruffled, and resolutions tidy) then I’d steer clear. But it has our highest recommendation. In addition to being a great movie, it is among Cassavetes most accessible—and it is his most personal, and allegorically autobiographical. As Gazzara observed, it is actually “not a gangster picture at all” but a movie “about John” and his struggle to make the art that he wanted to make. (When one of the businessmen-gangsters asks Cosmo about his mortgage, it serves as a subtle reminder that Cassavetes re-mortgaged his home for almost every film he made.) Al Rubin also sees the film as “a tale that mirrors John’s life.” It is about “the creation of a world . . . doing anything and everything to protect it [and] always having to deal with interference from people who only want to talk about money.”
