The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)

Director:

John Cassavetes

Writer:

John Cassavetes (writer)

Release Date:

8 October 1977 (Sweden)

Genre:

Crime | Drama

Plot:

A proud strip club owner is forced to come to terms with himself as a man, when his gambling addiction gets him in hot water with the mob, who offer him only one alternative.

Plot Keywords:

Strip Club | Gambling Debt | Murder For Hire | Reluctant Hitman | Neo Noir

Cast

Ben Gazzara	...	Cosmo Vitelli
Timothy Carey	...	Flo (Gangster) (as Timothy Agoglia Carey)
Seymour Cassel	...	Mort Weil (Gangster)
Robert Phillips	...	Phil (Gangster)
Morgan Woodward	...	John (Head gangster)
John Kullers	...	Eddie-Red (as John Red Kullers)
Al Ruban	...	Marty Reitz (Gangster)
Azizi Johari	...	Rachel
Virginia Carrington	...	Betty, the mother
Meade Roberts	...	Mr. Sophistication
Alice Fredlund	...	Sherry
Donna Gordon	...	Margo Donnar (as Donna Marie Gordon)
Haji	...	Haji
Carol Warren	...	Carol
Derna Wong Davis	...	Derna

Runtime:

135 min | 109 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

UK:15 (re-rating) | Finland:K-16 | Portugal:M/16 | Sweden:15 | UK:AA (original rating) | USA:R

Company:

Faces Distribution

Trivia:

This was actually a story idea developed by John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese years previously.

Quotes:

Cosmo Vitelli: My mother was very funny. Had a great sense of humor. Yeah, that's right. She was so funny, she ran off with this big, fat butcher.

Movie Connections:

Spoofed in "South Park: Imaginationland (#11.10)" (2007)

Soundtrack:

Rainy Fields of Frost and Magic

"The most important thing in life is to be comfortable."

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.