John Cassavetes - The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)

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Plot synopsis:
Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara), an amiable strip-club owner, pays off his debt to a group of sleazy loan sharks. To celebrate, he spends the night partying with a few of his favorite girls, indulges his unfortunate weakness for drinking and gambling, and ends up owing $23,000 to gangsters, putting him right back where he started. The gangsters demand that he pay off the debt by executing a competitor of theirs. What sounds like a simple enough plot is at it's heart an allegory, though, about the everyman vs. the powers-that-be.

The story obeys the step-by-step fatalism of an unfolding nightmare, whereby small mistakes and temptations lead to deeper consequences, such as can be found in classic films noirs with Edward G. Robinson, Glenn Ford, and Jean Gabin. Looked at purely as narrative, there is surprisingly little waste in the script: each scene advances and intensifies the central dramatic situation. Cassavetes even fulfills the genre contract with action sequences (rare for him) that involve shootings, chases, and sinister underlit garages, perhaps drawing on his own past experience as an actor in crime movies. On the other hand, the film’s enduring power comes across most in subtle details of setting and character that play against, or in inertial counterpoint to, these obligatory propulsive scenes.

Cosmo’s strip club, the Crazy Horse West, functions as a viscous flypaper to which the film keeps attaching itself, where time dawdles and dilates in a constant night. (Cassavetes insisted these nightclub scenes be shot through gels, the effect of which created stylized pools of isolating red or blue light for the owner-impresario to walk through.) Cosmo has gilded his tawdry peep show with a series of fantasy backdrops, all introduced by the dumpy, epicene master of ceremonies, Teddy, professionally known as Mr. Sophistication, who “takes” the audience to exotic locales. Unforgettably portrayed by Meade Roberts, Mr. Sophistication belongs to that tribe Dostoyevsky called “the insulted and the injured.” He oozes affronted, buffoonish humiliation. But he also epitomizes the needy, oversensitive artist, a self-parody of Cassavetes himself, who is hungry for the spotlight but believes himself fundamentally homely and unloved.

Ben Gazzara turns in a brilliant performance as the unhappy Cosmo. (That Gazzara was unhappy himself through much of the shooting, finding it hard to sympathize with or admire his character, only reinforces our sense of Cosmo as discomfited with his chump role in life.) Cosmo seems always to be sniffing himself for something rancid or fraudulent. Trying to live up to an elegant standard of sophistication, he mutes his Sicilian street temper with a false veneer of politeness and seductive blather. In many ways, this character is another alter-ego for Cassavetes.

Cassavetes clearly believed the self to be a constant bluff, a desperate improvisation launched in heavy fog. He told an interviewer: “People don’t know what they are doing, myself included. They don’t know what they want or feel. It’s only in the movies that they know what their problems are and have game plans for dealing with them.” The closest thing Cosmo has to a game plan is: The show must go on. At bottom he is a man of the theater, at its most Fellini-esque and flea-bitten. You do your job the best you can, even if it’s just shaking your tits onstage in the no-win situation life hands you. It is this sort of philosophical stoicism that informs much of the nobility in Cassavetes’ grubby universe.

Thirty years ago, when The Killing of a Chinese Bookie was first released, it bombed at the box office. Critics found it disorganized, self-indulgent, and unfathomable; audiences took their word for it and stayed away. Today, the film seems a model of narrative clarity and lucidity: either our eyes have caught up to Cassavetes, or the reigning aesthetic has evolved steadily in the direction of his personal cinematic style. Now we are more accustomed to hanging out and listening in on the comic banality of small talk (no small thanks to Seinfeld, one might argue); to a semidocumentary, handheld camera, ambient-sound approach; to morally divided or not entirely sympathetic characters, dollops of “dead time,” and subversions of traditional genre expectations.

The film, seen today, generates considerable suspense, part of which comes from classic man-against-the-mob conventions: seeing how the noose of fate is tightened. Part of it, however, comes from Cassavetes’ perverse reluctance to play the game of simple entertainment, offering more complex rewards instead.

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Tuesday, May 11, 2010

John Cassavetes - The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)

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