Damn, what a masterpiece we have here!Probably my favorite Cassavetes movie.It's a combo of feelings. We have a deep loneliness here. Gazzara's character (Cosmo Vitelli) is the classic anti-hero, you can't hate him even if he kills a dog. The loneliness around him the whole movie is impressive, he is a true men, ready to do what is necessary for his life. The whole ambient are really dark too, with a lot heavy talk and killer scenes. The scene where Cosmo kills the Chinese bookie, for example, damn, it's a true classic. There's a lot of that kind of fear and loneliness that you can find just under the big city lights. And the way the movie captives you is impressive. You can see here a lot of things that influenced guys like Scorsese. Cassavetes is definitely unique and this movie is all you need to know about him. It's a masterpiece.

This is to everyone who gave this film a poor review, saying that it is masquerading as a gangster picture or that the dialogue was improvised. If Cassavetes heard you saying the film belonged in the gangster genre he would have cried. And he said that himself. He admitted that the plot was that of a crime film, but as a whole the film is not about the crime. It is about the people surrounding Cosmo and the way they interact. It is about love and the lack of love as that was all Cassavetes was interested in. When he is going out to the bookie's house we do not focus on why he is going there, we focus on the people that are around him or that he talks to on the phone. The crime theme is only to set up the downfall of Cosmo's character, which is how he ultimately loses some of the love he had in his life. As for the dialogue being improvised, there was only one scene in which the dialogue was improvised (when Cosmo goes to his girlfriend's house after being shot and talks to her mother). There was only one film that Cassavetes made that was almost completely improvised which was Shadows (another great film). And anyone who calls Cassavets an amateur or says his visual style is amateur is completely false. The scenes I'm guessing you are referring to are the ones filmed on the hand-held camera (by Cassavetes himself). Here he is going for the raw style and loves to get as close in to his actors as possible so we can see their expressions clearly and become uncomfortable and more involved in their emotions. That is probably my favorite thing about Cassavetes filmmaking, especially here, is that he does not move the camera if someone steps in front of it, and he allows his actors and camera to move freely with one another. "Chinese Bookie" is his best.

It may sound unusual to suggest that a quite fleshy movie about a wiseacre strip club owner is about family values, but I think that in this portrait-movie, the self-worth of Cosmo Vittelli is largely founded on his status as a provider for his girls. He's somewhat of a softie for his family of performers, as a young lady of 5"2 highlights when she mentions that no-one else would have taken her in being that short. His foisting of Dom Perignon champagne on one of the girls, who has no idea of the appreciation that she is required to display, demonstrates this sense of needy machismo. Cosmo can't exist outside of this role. He has a perverse attachment to the shows that he scripts and choreographs, which are in their own way quite poignant and strangely well made their smuttiness notwithstanding. The star of the show, Mr Sophistication, is an odd cod who acts as an ironic honey for all the lady bees and manages to somehow dignify what is being seen, as well as lend the Crazy Horse club a pathetic sheen.One of the strengths of cinema, the theatre of the face, has been manifestly apparent since the Maria Falconetti close-up-athon that is The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). There's ample use of it in this movie as well. In the first scene where Cosmo appears, the camera follows only his face as he converses with a gentleman who is just out of shot. The hardest part of acting can be in the response to the lines of another rather than in the deliverance of your own, here Gazzara (Cosmo) responds brilliantly, and his character's persona is established almost immediately.The ostensible plot of the movie, which concerns the titular assassination is almost superfluous, although it adds an extra lemon twist of the bizarre to what is often a lurid Warholian vodka martini of a movie.Definitely one for frequent rewatches.

763.And the question is: How many times do we get to see a close-up of Ben Gazzara rubbing his hand over his face while failing to convey ANY emotion in John Cassavetes' "The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie"? I suppose film fans have to be admired for their open-minded attitudes... no matter how terrible a film is some group of moviegoers somewhere will declare it "brilliant," maybe even "genius." In fact, some movies get MORE critical acclaim the more awful they are: if I filmed a brick wall for two solid hours and added a soundtrack of birds chirping I just might earn an Oscar nomination. At least I'd have a better film than this one."The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" is- for lack of a better description- a character-driven crime film. It is also an endurance test: scenes are stretched to mind-numbing length while messy, improvised dialogue flies by and crashes to the floor, and the bulk of the film is devoted to watching the extremely unrealistic floor show at a strip-club/cabaret owned by Gazzara's "Cosmo" character.First of all, are we really supposed to believe that anyone would pay to see such a morbid and depressing show? Men go to strip clubs to see pink parts, to throw singles and get drunk and bust a nut in the champagne room. Here Cassavetes wants us to believe that the girls dance in poorly-choreographed theme numbers while a fat, flamboyant MC sings torch songs in front of kindergarten-quality cardboard props. And every now and again one of the girls pops a nipple. The idea of this passing for adult entertainment is as absurd today as it was in 1976; this is a director indulging in pointlessly-maudlin dramatics. Sadly these sequences are ten times better than the rest of the film.Gazzara incurs gambling debts with some local mobsters, and unfortunately for us the director included every frame of this action-free sequence. The movie is padded out with silences, lingering takes, fatal closeups and characters groaning for no particular reason. I know what Cassavetes was going for here, I truly do, but he does it to such a cloying extreme that I ended up going numb within the first fifteen minutes. A slowly-paced film that gives actors time to emote and breathe on screen can be wonderful... but there's so little going on in terms of character and story that the style becomes a stunt, and a grating one at that.The mob strong-arms Cosmo into killing a Chinese bookie in order to pay off his gambling debt, and the sequence is so anti-climactic that it's almost laughable. He walks in to the Chinaman's house- supposedly a heavily-guarded fortress- with about as much difficulty as walking into a local Taco Bell. His escape involves a light jog and a bus ride (exact change, please) and then he's back at his club to watch his girls do their show, blissfully unaware that the mob now intends to kill him to cover up their tracks.And so we move into the best sequence of the film: the scenes with Timothy Carey. Carey was a character actor- truly insane- with roles in "Paths of Glory," "The Killing," and "The World's Greatest Sinner." Its only when he's on screen that the film is alive and gains some sense of purpose... even with an underdeveloped character and questionable directing Carey manages to create a lasting impression. It's too bad he vanishes on a whim that plays like a bad plot device, leaving us to another hour of nothingness.Oh, by the way, Cosmo was evidently shot in the belly while whacking the Coolie, a scene the director just didn't feel like filming! Now he's walking around with what is in reality one of the most bloody, painful wounds to the human body- but somehow Cosmo holds in all the blood and feels none of the pain! (Kinda clashes with Mr. Cassavetes' quest for Absolute Reality). The magic bullet wound simply disappears while Cosmo visits his girlfriends, evades two mafia gunmen, gives a motivational speech to his employees and performs a one-man monologue on the cabaret stage... HOORAY! Being shot in the gut was never this much fun!Or boring. Even this implausible sequence is filmed in COMA-VISION, and you'll be praying for a bullet to your own abdomen just to make the hurting stop. Look, I could go on like this. The movie is a pretentious waste of time... Cassavetes drowns a potentially dynamic crime script with endlessly hollow filler and indulges his actors to paralysis. If you think you can make it, I wish you luck, but as a guy genuinely trying to save you time I urge you to avoid this one.GRADE: D