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This is my second go at The Killing of a Chinese Bookie as part of my John Cassavetes marathon. In my first attempt a few years ago, I failed to make it all the way through. It baffled and confused me, and I was impatient with it. Though many acolytes of Cassavetes suggests the film requires at least a second viewing in order to find one’s footing. And thankfully, I found mine. This is one of the most original and defiantly unmainstream genre films I have ever seen. It reminds me so much of the Robert Altman films (particularly Nashville, Mash, and McCabe & Mrs. Miller) from the same gloriously wild period of 70s cinema. The film’s challenges lie in the frequent, long and meandering scenes that add little to no inertia to plot progression. This is deliberate. To wonder about the scene’s purpose is to discover its emotional meaning. I connected with the film most of the time, and the baffling and inexplicable moments are, well, like the ones in life. Thus, this is what makes Cassavetes’ style and technique so fascinating and rewarding. There are so many ideas that a three act structure simply cannot contain them all.

The invasive realism of Cassavettes’ crime drama is melencholy and hypnotic. Gazzara’s performance as Cosmo is highly vulnerable, his bouts of anger and emotion uninterrupted by editing. With lathargic camera movement amidst scenes of casual improvisation, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie dissects the characters of Cosmo’s sleazy nightclub circus with raw simplicity. The same technique is used in filming the awkwardly unfunny musical reviews (which Cosmo boasts he choreographed himself). They are played out at length from a spectator’s view, immersing the audience in the patheticness of the goings-on. The plot is only occassionally useful, as Cassevettes sometimes departs too much into his organic stylings, spending too much time with scenes that don’t further the narrative. Likewise, his lingering takes and jump cutting tend to dry out sequences of suspense. The artistry usually overtakes the action, but alas, that’s the beauty of it. It’s an otherwordly and exhausting exercise in film, completely unique and heavy on the heart.

Seeing the original 1976 cut of THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE, it is clear to me that John Cassavetes’ work has a voyeuristic quality that I enjoy greatly, and not voyeuristic in a creepy Brian DePalma way, but in a completely immersive way. Watching a Cassavetes movie is like stepping into a room with his characters and overhearing their conversations, a sensation that is heightened by his refusal to record ADR, making the dialogue hard to make out from start to finish, so you don’t really hear everything that is said, but you get an idea of what they are talking about and what has just transpired. THE KILLING OF CHINESE BOOKIE is no exception, Cassavetes’ hand-held camerawork and his use of natural light takes you right in to the world his characters inhabit and never takes you out of it. The film deals with the dark consequences of the American dream in the dark way that most films from this era do, however it is dealt with in a subtle and restrained way, as the themes never come to the forefront of the story. The film deals with the trials and tribulations of a strip club owner named Cosmo Vitelli (played by the great Ben Gazzara, whose character seems to be a younger, nicer version of his character from THE BIG LEBOWSKI, Jackie Treehorn), who owes a sizable gambling debt to some local gangsters, and in order to square away his finances, he must kill (you guessed it) a Chinese bookie for them. Very little happens in the film’s first act, it mainly sets up the world that Vitelli inhabits, giving us an idea of what it is he is reluctantly willing to kill to protect later on. Once the plot kicks in, it moves along briskly, even if it does take awhile to wrap up at the end. It’s a classic film from an American hero of cinema, one that shouldn’t be overlooked by serious movie fans.

TKOACB is a rare creature: a genre film that succeeds because of its creator’s obvious disinterest in genre. The film tells the simple story of a nightclub owner (Ben Gazzara) who has to, err, kill a chinese bookie in order to pay off another debt that will save his seedy joint from closing down. Most filmmakers would’ve played this premise for pulpy thrills, but under Cassavetes’ method approach and spontaneous verite style, it becomes a film where a lingering shot of the old chinaman wading across his pool before his death, or the moment where Gazzara breaks out in a little jig as he enters a restaurant is far more striking than any of the ‘big events’. Bizarre poeticism and messy emotions stand in for thrills and hipness, and rambling, inarticulate speech replaces snappy dialogue and quips. Iconoclastic genius for some, grating amateur hour for others. It might even be a bit of both.

Gazzara’s Cosmo is perhaps the quintessential Cassavetes antihero, a totem of male self-destruction who gambles himself back into debt after paying it off, who can barely form a coherent sentence, and whose idea of redemption is gathering his buddies at the club around in a circle and giving them an uncomfortably sincere ‘inspirational’ speech about the importance of being comfortable with life. Nonetheless, Cassavetes never puts himself above or below Cosmo; he empathises with him every step of the way. It’s no surprise that he worked on the idea for the film with Martin Scorsese, as the film shares its intention of demystifying criminal lifestyle with Scorsese’s best films. The difference is that there’s no glamour to be seen anywhere in TKOACB; Cosmo might be the ‘what happened to?’ of Scorsese’s subjects (Liotta in Goodfellas, De Niro in Casino, Jake LaMotta etc.) after they’ve burned out for good, plagued by loneliness and regret.

Even for fans of Cassavetes’s approach, it’s easy to see his film as something of a ‘fuck you’; or as Pauline Kael – one of his most committed detractors – described another of his films, "replaces the exhausted artifices of conventional movies with a new set of pseudo-realistic ones, which are mostly instantaneous clichés”. The story of it’s production and release makes for the most despairing chapter of Ray Carney’s biography Cassavetes on Cassavetes, and its critical and commercial failure seems particularly dispiriting in an era of filmmaking where rule-breaking was welcomed warmly. But for all its audience-unfriendly qualities, TKOACB isn’t empty artistic posturing; like all Cassavetes films, it’s distinguished by its forthright sincerity, and is remarkable for wringing raw, emotional truth out of material that would usually be reserved for a straightforward genre exercise – something that makes it just as personal as anything he made.

Director John Cassavetes’ raw, unfocused style has been riveting in other movies, but here it’s just pretentious and dull – it’s too meandering to work as a character study, and fails to generate the suspense it needs to be effective as a crime drama. Excellent naturalistic performance from Ben Gazzara, and there’s some nice seedy atmosphere, but it’s just too long and slow-paced to be watchable, it’s really a chore to sit through. A real disappointment.

Exactly what you would expect if you imagine John Cassavetes tackling a gangster movie. It is widely known that John modeled the Ben Gazzara character after himself so it had a great meloncholy to the story once you realize that Ben represents John and the gangsters in the movie represent those in the movie industry who have always tried to stop his dreams from being made. John’s movies have, in my opinion, the best written characters out of any other films. When you watch this film, be prepared to learn a lot about each person shown, so much that by the end you will probably feel as if you know them a little. And that’s what’s best about this film, it takes its time and sucks you in completely so that after you get done watching this film, you will feel some strange type of emotion in yourself. Any film that can do that is a good film to me.