Few narrative films so indelibly give the impression of being on the verge of collapse as John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie does. Conversations between its characters ramble around the subjects at hand (if there even is one), peppered with tangential anecdotes, limericks, puns, and other verbal curlicues. Al Ruban’s camera dances woozily around faces and bodies, and occasionally shakes violently to obscure the details of physical conflict when it happens, as isolated pools of red and blue nightclub light dilate and recede under oiled lenses. The titular event—ostensibly the film’s pivotal dramatic incident—is belabored, but not in the screw-tightening manner that predicted suspense beats are usually delayed, while a later gun showdown in a warehouse is similarly calibrated for minimal “excitement” in a conventional sense. For long stretches, Cassavetes abandons protagonist Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara) to observe the song-and-dance routines performed at Vitelli’s club, each of which appear to be improvised on the spot or falling apart. As a crime/gangster picture, the film is entirely un-exemplary, but only nominally does it belong to that genre. Instead, it stands out as a singular entry in Cassavetes’ already singular body of work. (Note: This piece addresses the 135-minute original cut of the film, rather than Cassavetes’ shorter, 108-minute 1978 director’s cut.)
For many, 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence represents the apex of Cassavetes’ run of very personal films starting with Shadows (1959), each of which sought, with resulting emotional intensity and claustrophobia, to demolish the established film grammar, particularly in regards to the formulae of characterization and performance, and push his drama into a realm beyond both artifice and humdrum naturalism. If The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, coming two years after Woman, marks a noticeable shift toward generic territory, it’s only in the way Cassavetes knew how: to understand archetypes as people, and then proceed with as little sentience of the genre lineage they belong to as possible.
As such, the film’s main character isn’t a high-ranking mobster, but rather a compulsively gambling club owner, whose combination of pride and fecklessness leads him into debt so deep that only pulling off an assassination for the mob can put him above water. From beginning to end, Gazzara plays Cosmo with a maniacal grin that can express smarm, discomfort, or gregariousness with the faintest modulation; in the opening scene, he signs off mid-transaction during a shady, barely specified dealing with, “I’d do business with you, but you have no style.” As it turns out, Cosmo can barely create the illusion of self-composure, let alone contemplate pulling off the kind of schemes one finds in classic film noir. His pep-talk speech at the film’s close, given to his club’s troupe of showgirls and their ringmaster Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts), only reflects back on his own vulnerability. “You’ve gotta work hard to be comfortable,” he tells them, shortly before exiting the club and inspecting the blood from a recent wound on his hand.
It would be a mistake to conflate this platitude about comfort with a message to the audience—Cassavetes was always openly hostile to the notion of cinema as escapism, not to mention the idea of cinema as a neat message-delivery system. Insofar as one can join the dots between the director’s own much-mythologized struggles to find financing and audiences for his films, and the fictional details of the films themselves, the crime underworld is a telling choice of milieu for Bookie. The specifics of Cosmo’s debts are left vague enough to assume a totemic role in the narrative, just as the violent mobsters on Cosmo’s back—shot occasionally in light so dim that they appear interchangeable—and can be easily read as stand-ins for the aggressively commercial side of Hollywood production. Even then, terms like “stand-ins” and “readings” are antithetical to Cassavetes’ project, where metaphor is only productive if it bypasses the intellect and registers on a visceral level.
Indeed, the film’s best moments contain a strange, clumsy poetry that’s difficult to define without making them sound banal. In the minutes leading up to Cosmo carrying out his assassination, Cassavetes undermines any anxiety on his part by switching focus to observe the frail, sunken-chested naked body of his target, who wades slowly across an indoor pool before responding to the gun aimed at him by scrunching up his face and shaking his head, as if emitting a pollen-induced sneeze. The gesture is completely unexpected and not “realistic,” per se, but contains the kind of emotional truth that Cassavetes was always after—that when faced with the explicable, rational finality of a fatal bullet, the only response should be an inexplicable, irrational gesture. In effect, this “other” minor character becomes another human subject for Cassavetes to empathize with, and hence plays a role as decisive in the narrative as anyone else.
“No one liked the film, other than two or three American critics, the others demolished it,” Cassavetes told Michel Ciment in an interview for Positif in 1978. It’s difficult to imagine him being surprised by the response, and in the film’s lengthy performance scenes conducted by the top-hat wearing, makeup-caked Mr. Sophistication, we see Cassavetes’ (and Cosmo’s) own anxieties of appeasement played as a grotesque vaudeville act, in which Mr. Sophistication’s corny but sincere songs are interrupted by his “de-Lovelies,” and the lascivious howls from the audience provoked by their accompanying T&A displays. The struggle of Mr. Sophistication to be seen and heard as all eyes are set on tawdrier sights both encapsulates and pre-empts (with a great sense of humor and self-deprecation) Cassavetes’ own struggles to find a space for his cinema in the media landscape of his time.
Forty years since its release, time has been kind to The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The film has been the source of at least two blatant homages—Mathieu Amalric’s burlesque-troupe road movie On Tour (2010); and Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales (2007), which gave Bob Hoskins one of his most memorable roles as a tetchy, Vitelli-like club owner. Even Ben Affleck cited it as a visual influence on his Best Picture-winning (and distinctly un-Cassavetes-ian) Argo (2012). Philip Lopate chalks up its late acceptance to two possibilities: “[E]ither our eyes have caught up to Cassavetes or the reigning aesthetic has evolved steadily in the direction of his personal cinematic style.” Whatever the explanation, Bookie succeeds at following through on the advice of Gena Rowlands’ Myrtle Gordon from Cassavetes’ subsequent Opening Night (1977), doing for its genre what she insists her fellow cast members do for their stage production: “Let’s dump it upside down and see if we can’t find something human in it.”
