John Cassavetes’ The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie is a film that is one of those overlooked gems that is not only a great film, but a great record of its time, even if it might have more properly been titled The Murder Of A Chinese Bookie. As much as I love the early raw films of Martin Scorsese—who reputedly thought up this tale with Cassavetes a few years earlier—no film I’ve ever seen so perfectly captures the mid-1970s underworld as I knew it as a child. There is a sense that one can even smell the cheap liquor and cigarette smoke that pervades its images.
While Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas are also great films, they are so highly stylized, scored, and choreographed that they attain mythic qualities, and are shorn of much of the realism Cassavetes’ filmic world inhabits. What set Cassavetes apart from his contemporary American peers was that his films did not mythologize—they simply depicted. In this sense, he did for modern urbanity what German filmmaker Werner Herzog does for historical films, i.e. brings them down to ‘eye level realism’. He also depicted his society with the same level of universal realism as Yasujiro Ozu did post-war Japan.
In watching the two versions of this film, made available as part of The Criterion Collection’s five disk John Cassavetes Five Films collection - the original 135 minute 1976 release, and the 109 minute 1978 re-release - one also gets a good representation of how greatness can be achieved. The longer version has only a few scenes more than the shorter version, and some of the same scenes go on a bit longer, but the tale is basically the same, for the extra scenes, while interesting, are not essential; such as Cosmo’s banter with a cabby about their New York pasts, a tale on a gopher tail’s causing botulism, and scenes outside a club. Even though the order of several scenes change, or are altered a bit, and there are a few segments unique to the 1978 version, the editing on the later version is generally superior. Rarely has a film (either version) cored so deeply into masculinity and the idea of territoriality. The longer version features a deeper portrait of the film’s main character, Los Angeles strip club owner Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara), a low man in the underworld, and greater details about his connections to the mobsters of the old guard who resent the rising criminal power of different ethnic groups.
Despite his bad 1970s era white suit - predating John Travolta’s turn in Saturday Night Fever by a year - Gazzara’s Cosmo is as pompous as many of the 1970s dick-waving icons, such as Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now, or Robert De Niro’s Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. When he tries to play the gleeful club host of The Crazy Horse West, and says, seemingly jokingly, "If you have any complaints, any complaints at all, I’ll throw you right out on your ass," you know that he’s really a bulldog pissing in his own corner.
Yet despite its dead-on portrayals of gangsters, not as the mythic icons of The Godfather films nor the semi-buffoonish goombahs of Scorsese’s filmic world, but as real human beings with a tunnel vision where it concerns money, this is no mere gangster film. Late in the film, one of the gangsters, Flo (Timothy Carey, best known from Stanley Kubrick’s Paths Of Glory) even says that Karl Marx was wrong, that religion is not the opium of the masses—money is, and that "money is Jesus." Only in the world of Cassavetes do murderous goons wax poetic.
Article comments
1 - Rodney Welch
I learned a lot from your review, which is thoughtful and specific and generous, and will most certainly lead me to add this to my queue. After I see it, I will likely read this piece again.
Unfortunately, I had a problem with your smug tone. Because Cassavetes set himself up against the studios, his acolytes have (and have always had) this annoying tendency to assume that a) everything he did was pure, unblemished art and b) if you don't agree then you're part of the problem, a "bourgeois" imbecile who doesn't get it because you spend too much time feeding at the Hollywood trough -- and if you do get it you'll probably still need the help of an expert cineaste, as great films need "someone to explain to the masses why they work." (Bourgeois? Masses? Did you eat a whole box of Das Kapital for breakfast?)
Cassavetes has been a personal hero of mine ever since A Woman Under the Influence -- the first film I ever reviewed, which was for a high school paper. Since then, I've tried seeing his work when available, and it's been hit or miss. Gloria and Love Streams were great; on the other hand, I've yet to make it to the end of Faces, which I thought was a terrible argument for improvisational acting. (On the other hand, I think Cassavetes himself was a great film actors, and his role in Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky one of the greatest ever. And I still love seeing him get blown to shreds in the Fury.)
Have you looked up any Vincent Canby lately? As a daily working critic goes, his body of work looks better and better. I don't always agree with him, but he's very often smart, very often sees details others miss. He was way ahead of the pack, for example, regarding the work of Fassbinder. Read his review of Katzelmacher, in which he is very open to a film many people find hard to watch; not only enthusiastic about the innovations (while nonetheless acknowledging the Godardian derivation) but capable of seeing the humor, the depth, and the humanity. Hardly the work of a middle-class guy from the burbs patronizing his own class.
2 - Dan Schneider
Rod:
I think you are reading a political argument into the piece where none exists. My main point of contrast is vs.Scorsese's work, and artistically, not politically.
That you see smugness in a defense of art is unfortunately too typical these days.
When reviewing older films I always check what the old timers wrote- Canby, Kael, Crowther, Ebert, etc. The very reason I started reviewing films is because, with the exception of Ebert, the reviews are all poorly written, and all are fairly stolid, and inflect their biases into the review, as you did in your post.
I am no acolyte of Cassavetes. He's very hit and miss. Minnie and Moscowitz is not good, and Influence is overrated. Faces, however, is very good.
Canby, however, is stolid. In many reviews he misses the most manifest things. As a writer, I try to navigate the middle between Lowest Common Denom reviews by his likes, and the masturbatory film theory sort of crap that is proliferating online.
Again, while I think this is a great film, I recognize that not all he touched was gold. Shakespeares wrote a dozen great plays, but he also wrote a dozen that are amongst the worst plays ever published. That makes him far more interesting than unadorned deific greatness.
Finally, I loathe armchair artsy intellectual Leftists (MFA scum), but that does not mean that some crits they bring of society - i.e.- that the masses are drooling idiots, are not correct. In pointing out flaws, one must not broadbrush in the inverse way your opponent does.
Thanks for the reply.
3 - Rodney Welch
No problem. I always like encouraging young people.
4 - Dan Schneider
Well, I'm middle-aged, but the thought remains. Last point, one needs to get beyond the 'talking points' style of dialectic, where key words like 'Bourgeois', or the like, dredge up connotations that are not there.