Critics reviews

[The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is an] accurate summation of one man's American dream in all its absurdity... Cassavetes orchestrates the whole thing almost as if it is a dream from which we are about to wake up.

Cassavetes captures the gambler's fatalistic joy in playing out a tragedy of his own making to the bitter end, and, revelling in the romantic solitude of the hunter and the hunted, presents a gun battle as a metal-and-concrete ballet. At the club, Cosmo's afflictions are mirrored by the routines of his painted, dandyish m.c., Mr. Sophistication, an artiste of degraded, obsolete charm, whose a-cappella renditions of Hollywood chestnuts evoke the ruinous pursuit of an impossible dream.

For all its superficial generic trappings, the picture is a free-flowing movement of irrational behaviour and digressions in dialogue and narrative advancement, something that gives Killing a rhythm and pacing stilted by prolonging – or avoiding – resolution.

Few narrative films so indelibly give the impression of being on the verge of collapse as The Killing of a Chinese Bookie does. Conversations between its characters ramble around the subjects at hand, peppered with tangential anecdotes, limericks, puns, and other verbal curlicues. Al Ruban's camera dances woozily, 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 uncharacteristic car chases and scenes of physical violence are fascinating here; Cassavetes juxtaposes Vitelli's self-loathing with his undying urge to be gallant, all while he is committing petty crimes in order to save whatever peace of mind he has left. The narrative structure, looming on the actor's spontaneity amid handheld shots and angled close-ups, provides a blueprint for all independent cinema.

One of [Cassavetes's] most fascinating achievements... The film’s enduring power comes across most in subtle details of setting and character that play against, or in inertial counterpoint to, [its] obligatory propulsive scenes.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is undoubtedly hard work, but it lingers in the memory and is a good introduction to Cassavetes’ eclectic canon. If you’re looking for entertainment then look elsewhere but if you’re in the mood for something cruel and unusual, you might want to give it a shot.

[Gazzara's] is a gorgeous and heartfelt fall, accompanied by multiple, rollicking versions of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," a song best known previously in film for the time Cary Grant, in drag, sang it to a leopard. Grant was Gazzara's only competitor for suave, prickly sensitivity—and perhaps also for the title of the best male actor in cinema.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie organises a coming-and-going between the locus of figurative inventiveness, Cosmo's Crazy Horse West (he seems to have no other home), and other places of Los Angeles, where everything leads to disastrous encounters, ruled by absurd laws, torn apart both spatially and temporally.

Cassavetes's first crime thriller, a postnoir masterpiece, failed miserably at the box office when first released in 1976, and a recut, shorter version released two years later didn't fare much better. This is the first, longer, and in some ways better of the two versions; it's easier to follow, despite reports that—or maybe because—Cassavetes had less to do with the editing (though he certainly approved it). [It's] a personal, deeply felt character study rather than a routine action picture...

[The Killing of a Chinese Bookie] resolutely refuses to come to a point strong or interesting enough to support the loving care that's gone into its production, particularly on the part of the actors.Watching the film is like listening to someone use a lot of impressive words, the meanings of which are just wrong enough to keep you in a state of total confusion, but occasionally right enough to hold your attention.