The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
Neo-noir ā¢ 135 minutes ā¢ United States ā¢ 15 February 1976
Director: John Cassavetes ā¢ Written by: John Cassavetes ā¢ Produced by: Al Ruban ā¢ Starring: Ben Gazzara, Timothy Carey, Seymour Cassel, Morgan Woodward, Robert Phillips, Al Ruban, Azizi Johari, Virginia Carrington, Alice Friedland, Donna Marie Gordon, Meade Roberts, Soto Joe Hugh ā¢ Cinematography: Mitch Breit, Al Ruban ā¢ Edited by: Tom Cornwall, John Cassavetes ā¢ Music by: Bo Harwowod
In the films of John Cassavetes violence is rarely elaborated at length. Often it isn’t enacted at all but the threat of violence can get right up into the nostrils of the viewer, loitering there menacingly in the near ground its rank breath and seedy grin dangling just a few inches from one’s face.
That sense of ever-present danger or life skidding off the rails is there in Husbands his first film with Ben Gazzara, where three men embark on a days-long binge including an impromptu trip to London following the death of a friend, a movie which suggests that family life is at best a loose tether – a court of last resort or the last refuge of a scoundrel – barely capable of suppressing the ribaldry and lecherousness and unbridled anger which can be spurred in certain kinds of men. It is there in Mikey and Nicky, another film which pairs Cassavetes with Peter Falk and draws from the former’s directorial style in its brusqueness and spontaneity while being distinctly the work of Elaine May, who owned the concept and adds a woman’s perspective to the sordid and convoluted struggle between two longtime friends.
And it is there in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, which was shot after Mikey and Nicky though released almost a year earlier as May battled with the studio over the release of her film. In fact The Killing of a Chinese Bookie contains not only an ever-present threat of violence which would be doled out by brutish and avaricious men or a kind of needling and cajoling violence, like a swift blow to the gut or a constant elbow in the ribs, but real dramatised bloodshed which seeps out over the borders of the picture with its night-time glimmer and stylised glyphs.
Cosmo Vittelli (Ben Gazzara) owns the Crazy Horse West, a strip joint on the Sunset Strip of Los Angeles which he operates with a twist. As he reiterates over the speaker system to his waiting customers, he is not just a club owner but a director and choreographer, telling them ‘I choose the numbers, I direct them, I arrange them. You have any complaints, you just come to me and I’ll throw you right out on your ass’. These stage numbers are a curious fare, a kind of burlesque which revolve around an ageing and somewhat haggard entertainer called Mr. Sophistication (the screenwriter Meade Roberts) who admits that he is ‘some kind of unique personality I suppose, a bit far-out, a bit freakish maybe . . . freakish . . . but unique in my own way’.
The headline number at the the Crazy Horse West is the ‘Paris number’ where in front of a glitzy background the girls shimmy and flash their breasts, occasionally co-opting the microphone to offer the briefest of character sketches while Mr. Sophistication slowly recites the Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields standard ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby’. It’s a catchy tune that has been sung on film by such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich, Lena Horne and Judy Holliday but is at least to my mind inseparable from the Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn romp Bringing Up Baby where they harmonise to cure the anxieties of a tame leopard. The ponderous and off-kilter version by Mr. Sophistication in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie shows that it’s hard to go too far wrong in the arms of such a classic piece.
Having just paid off a substantial seven-year gambling debt, Cosmo Vittelli decides to celebrate by accruing a new one to the steep sum of $23,000. He vows to pay the money back but the gangsters whom he owes have scant regard for compromise or patience, instead coercing him – with a few punches to the gut for good measure – to assassinate who they describe as a troublesome rival bookie named Harold Ling, but who is in fact the local triad boss Benny Wu.
Out of options and with his club at stake, Vittelli endures a series of mishaps or pratfalls as the vehicle he has been provided blows a tire and he quarrels with a waitress at a burger bar where he stops to procure twelve hamburgers in a bid to distract Wu’s pack of guard dogs. The waitress presumes that he wants each of the twelve burgers individually wrapped and this wrangling over the burgers – he tells her that his wife hates waste, she tells him that you can’t put twelve loose hamburgers into a brown paper bag and expect a happy outcome – proves almost more challenging than the murder itself, at which he proves stunningly adept.
There are two versions of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and they contain some marked differences. The original version as released in February of 1976 runs to 2 hours and 15 minutes and was the biggest flop of the director’s career, yanked from distribution after just one week. Pressed for time, Cassavetes had been aided by the editor Tom Cornwell but partly at the behest of Gazzara, who says that he ‘hated’ the original cut of the film, the director soon returned to the material and substantially re-edited The Killing of a Chinese Bookie for a 1978 version which lands at 1 hour and 48 minutes and subsequently served as the standard release.
The plot and characters remain the same as does the greasy ambiance provided by the gangsters, whether at other hangout spots or on the street in front of the Crazy Horse West. Cassavetes retained for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie his usual practice of blending amateur and professional actors, providing everyone with an extended rehearsal period which allowed them to gain a certain familiarity, a process which imbues the film with a kind of gritty or muttering realism and also allowed the occasional spark to fly, as in a late scene between Cosmo and Betty (Virginia Carrington), the mother of Rachel (Azizi Johari), a girl from the club who Cosmo is dating and appears to use as a kind of crutch.
Cassavetes also wound up using two cinematographers after a disagreement between him and Al Ruban over the lighting inside of the Crazy Horse West. Ruban had been the director of photography on Faces and a producer on both Husbands and Minnie and Moskowitz and Cassavetes turned to him again for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie but with explicit intentions for the onstage and bar room scenes, which feel especially grimy and low fidelity as if to replicate the live audience’s perspective and are sometimes bathed or smothered in red. In the end Ruban handled all of the exterior footage while Mitch Breit, who had originally been in charge of the lighting, helmed those Crazy Horse West interior scenes as Fred Elmes – later a regular David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch collaborator – and Mike Ferris operated the cameras.
The original version of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie owes much of its additional length to scenes shot inside of the Crazy Horse West. Onstage the burlesque show breathes a life of its own as we get to see in all of its disheveled glory more of the ‘Paris number’ with its lewdness and humanity, its frustrations and hesitations, its frolics and intermittent sense of fun. Backstage there are scenes of Cosmo cajoling the De-Lovelies as they scramble through their wardrobe changes, and those where he sits in amid the chatter of their dressing room. In one extended sequence, a kind of non sequitur which is cut entirely from the shorter version of the film, Cosmo waits patiently to tell everyone about a story that he read in the newspaper of two girls from Memphis, Tennessee who caught a gopher and ate its tail before promptly dying of botulism, saying of the anecdote ‘well I tell you, I never laughed so hard in my life’.
For some viewers these scenes may be ambling and unnecessary or even insulting by way of their apparent tedium and amateur hijinks. Yet they serve a crucial purpose and substantially vary our understanding of the original and recut versions of the film. In the shorter 1978 version of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie the Crazy Horse West is a spectre only, a remnant of something which is already in the process of being lost. On the other hand in the longer original cut of the movie the club remains Cosmo’s lifeblood, the avenue or receptacle for all of his artistic ambitions and the thing which separates him, in class and temperament, from the crude mobsters who understand nothing but coercion and intimidation or the value of a buck.
It is the original version of the movie which begets the notion of Cosmo as a surrogate for Cassavetes, who spent so much of his life struggling with financiers and sinking his own funds into his pictures on the outer margins of the studio system. Gazzara has described his own ambivalence with the character of Cosmo Vittelli until one day, early in the production, he caught Cassavetes crying as the director proceeded to explain how gangsters like other hucksters and power brokers and money makers seem fiendishly intent on killing other people’s dreams. This version also offers a kind of doubling between Cosmo and Mr. Sophistication, who is the somewhat lurid onstage manifestation of what it means to commit to an act whether to extol a life lived on the margins or as a means of self-expression which cannot be chased away.
Through the same sort of visage, both alluring and ghastly, the shorter 1978 recut ultimately plays out like more of a straight-ahead, neo-noir, underground crime film. If the original nods towards the burgeoning Hong Kong film industry of the seventies with its scrolling Chinese title and red directorial seal, and if The Killing of a Chinese Bookie broadly dabbles with a kind of orientalism in the climactic sequence at Wu’s complex, where he is found bathing languidly in an indoor pool, the recut 1978 version carries more of a sense of ritual, evoking a bit of the Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Delon classic Le SamouraĆÆ while helping to pave the way for such films as Thief and Scarface or Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and Sicario where Benicio del Toro plays an enigmatic everyman turned killer.
In the original when Cosmo rounds up his three girls for an ill-fated night on the tiles, we ramble through a somewhat awkward sequence of events where, for instance, his notion of suavity is disabused by Sherry’s sister who asks him to wait for Sherry outside. Back in the limousine, he hectors Sherry (Alice Friedland) to try some champagne while nodding to the price tag, enunciating the brand ‘Dom PĆ©rignon’ and telling her repeatedly that it’s ‘the best’. The recut eschews much of this for a more stately procession by limousine, focusing instead on Cosmo’s gift to the three girls (plus Rachel’s mother Betty) of a small white box containing a corsage. The receipt of the gift and its affixion to their dresses becomes a ritual in itself.
Yet in terms of plotting or narrative the two versions cut both ways. In an expanded diner scene surrounded by solicitous gangsters, the 1978 version for instance contains the apparently vital piece of information that Cosmo was an infantryman and killed some people with an M1 rifle in the Korean War. The fact goes some way towards explaining his later prowess with a gun, but is absent from the 1976 version.
On the other hand that original version shows us Cosmo’s introduction to Mort Weil (the Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel), who visits the Crazy Horse West and calls it ‘the greatest joint in town’ and ‘the best joint this side of Vegas’ before inviting Cosmo to attend his own gambling operation, a poker joint where all of the food and drinks will be served for free. This explains the intersection between Cosmo and the gangsters while also telling us a little bit more about his character, which desires the bells and whistles of status though he lacks the resources to really back that up or be at home in that world.
There are other differences. The 1978 version opens with a scene which occurs about 14 minutes into the original cut of the film, where Cosmo stands outside of the Crazy Horse West beside the club’s bouncer and commiserates over their slow business, telling him ‘It’s alright, Vince, it will pick up’. A group of kids holler towards Cosmo as they blow past in their pickup truck, with the pounding rockabilly beat adding to what is one of the film’s most driving and rhythmic scenes. Then the settling of his initial seven-year debt occurs in two parts, with the loan shark Marty (played by Al Ruban) telling Cosmo that he has one payment left, which he completes presumably a few days or weeks later after a brief club scene.
The 1976 version instead finds Cosmo immediately and seamlessly paying off that debt, as he bridles at Marty’s suggestion ‘Now you can go out and work for yourself’, seemingly taking it as a knock or slur and belittling him in response, telling him ‘Marty, you’re a lowlife, no offence. You have no style. I don’t ever want to see you again’. The scene with the bouncer Vince occurs later and segues into Cosmo’s first meeting in the club’s car park with Mort Weil. In this sense the earlier version of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie has not only longer sequences but more continuity within several of its scenes while the later version features a few more stylised cuts and juxtapositions.
The original version plays that sequence where Cosmo, backstage over the speaker system, tells his waiting customers that he chooses the numbers, directs them and arranges them as a kind of declaration on the part of the club owner, solidifying his standing to all those in attendance and perhaps even shoring up his own sense of self. The 1978 recut adds more voices to the mix, as Cosmo is heckled during that very same sequence, with outbursts from the bar crying ‘Let’s get on with it!’ and ‘Bring on the girls!’. Shorn from some of the camaraderie which characterises the 1976 version, the later recut is altogether a darker and more rancorous film.
In the end both versions of the film are equally strong in their own ways. What makes the differences worth dwelling upon is that they subtly recast the tone and character of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie while also offering a few of their own standout scenes. Ostensibly a director’s cut, in the 1978 version Cassavetes foregoes the usual bloat for a more streamlined and hard-edged version of his film. At the same time the original 1976 release is arguably more distinctly ‘Cassavetes’ in so far as it is more loose and rambling, more curious and free from the confines of genre, more personal, showcasing and lingering more longingly with its ensemble cast and feeling perhaps therefore more humane.
Gazzara as Cosmo is utterly captivating, with an easy grin but an air of palpable frustration, seldom to anger but with a fiery temper that bubbles just beneath the surface. In the midst of his brokered task, the titular killing of a Chinese something-or-other, when his car breaks down he calls back to the club and wonders who is on stage, scolding a member of his bar staff for not knowing the Paris routine. Cassel as Mort embodies the superficial warmth and slimy underbelly of the gangsters and their gambling schtick, while Timothy Carey as Flo is their gurning face, with an apparent penchant for violence though it turns out that the muscle still has traces of a heart. And the great Meade Roberts in his turn as Mr. Sophistication proves one of the more memorable characters ever up there on screen.
The film plays with light and dark in practice as well as theme. In the back of a car when the gangsters have browbeaten Cosmo into going along with their dubious scheme, they deliver their instructions in near darkness with Cosmo’s face barely registering as he turns his head and is jostled in the middle seat. The steeped and bleary red light inside of the Crazy Horse West and the street scenes which usually take place under the cover of night give the hallways and entryways to the club an especially pronounced liminality as Cosmo moves between the two spheres, briefly illuminated as he heads from the bar down the stairway to fend off the inquisitive conmen.
Vince is a stoic watchman who in the event of a rumble would probably have Cosmo’s back no doubt to little avail. In the original cut as Cosmo follows Marty into the depths of a restaurant, where the loan shark is counting his cash and muttering derogatory sentiments amount his debtor before the pair head back outside, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie plays with the phrase ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’.
By coercing Cosmo into an attempt on the life of Wu, the gangsters are engaging in a no-lose bet. They will either see off a rival or Cosmo will die in the effort and they in turn will take over control of his club. When they first arrive en masse to the Crazy Horse West – Mort, Flo, the slickster Phil, their accountant and a boss figure (Morgan Woodward) who is referred to as ‘the Santa Monica gentleman’ – they look the place up and down, noting that it is a ‘valuable spot’.
Chinatown and the stacked complex of dens and spas which ultimately house Wu feels like a whole other world. On a mission with his three girls to scope out the area and potentially lure Wu uptown, Cosmo can’t handle the heat and orders a Coca-Cola before ducking inside of an air-conditioned cinema. Rare daytime sequences make it seem like Cosmo is on vacation though one ends badly for an aspiring model at the Crazy Horse West, a waitress who follows him from a nearby cafe and begins dancing only to be assaulted by a jealous Rachel (to the mournful tune of ‘Rainy Fields of Frost and Magic’ by Bo Harwood, another regular Cassavetes collaborator). As Rachel lies almost comatose on the floor, Cosmo fetches her a drink and flops down beside her, reminding her ‘I’m a club owner. I deal in girls’.
One more difference: in one of the film’s opening sequences, Cosmo who has just settled his seven-year debt with the loan shark Marty, calling him an ‘asshole’ under his breath as he leaves the outdoor seating area of the restaurant, grabs a cab and tells the driver to stop at the next bar on the right. Cooling off he orders a Scotch with water, downs it and has a quick shimmy before settling down in a quiet corner of the bar with another drink. In the 1978 recut of the film he locks eyes with a young woman who asks him ‘What are you looking at?’ to which he responds ‘Got a golden life, got the world by the balls’. ‘Oh you think so’ she says and with bravado and defiance he adds ‘That’s right, I’m great’.
In the original 1976 version, which winds up being a much longer scene, Cosmo never locks eyes with the girl but is instead joined by the cab driver, whose name is Eddie and who clearly believes that Cosmo has had his fill. They get to talking and stumble upon a shared background, with both men growing up Jewish in New York City, comparing their neighbourhoods and the rivers they swam in as kids. Eddie seems to presume that Cosmo has a wife and a family waiting back home for him, but when he is pressed to return home Cosmo says ‘There’s no river there Eddie’ with a twist and a grin.
Late in the film when a wounded Cosmo stops by Rachel and Betty’s house, the mother takes Cosmo aside for a talk. Gesturing towards the events of the evening and his being double-crossed by the gangsters, he begins to digress, reminiscing over his childhood and his mother who ran off with a ‘big fat butcher’ while describing his father as a ‘moron’. In one of the film’s quietest and most intimate moments, strangely offbeat and then suddenly intense, a perturbed Betty who is naturally protective of her daughter tells Cosmo that she doesn’t care about his father and doesn’t want him in her house anymore. Cosmo takes a beat and wishes her the best of luck in her future endeavours, before adding ‘I gotta go, because there are no rivers here’.
Ousted from their home, which to him was a kind of doll’s house, where he only ever made an entrance, now Cosmo returns to the club. In the dressing room of Mr. Sophistication and the De-Lovelies before the night’s show he delivers something akin to a morale booster or mission statement, in a rambling speech which touches upon everything from free will and predestination to the kooky exterior but tough core of some of the members of his crew.
Saying that ‘the only people who are, you know, happy are the people who are comfortable’ he adds in an inchoate yet still quixotic kind of fashion:
What’s your truth is my falsehood, what’s my falsehood is your truth and vice versa. Look at me, right. I’m only happy when I’m angry, when I’m sad, when I can play the fool. When I can be what people want me to be rather than be myself, you understand. And that takes work. You gotta work overtime for that. Doesn’t matter who you are, what personality you choose.
then bills their show as an act of deference or sacrifice on behalf of a needy audience, who share the same impulse for transformation. As the troops prepare for their turn on stage, hitting the downbeat, Jack Ackerman as the club’s musical director Tony Maggio begins to perform a rendition of ‘Love Has Conquered Man’, a song which originally appeared in Faces from a soundtrack which also featured Charlie Smalls, Julie Gable and the supremely innovative Miles Davis producer Teo Macero.
Downstairs when Cosmo begins to address the audience over the speaker system, it is in a similar vein as he wonders aloud ‘How many mothers are in the house . . . mothers who love their children, sons who love their daughters’ to some laughter and a few impatient jeers. He decides to go out on stage where with a glimmer in his eye and a confiding and convivial air, embodying a kind of warmth for his club and its mission, he tells the gathered crowd ‘You know, they say everything is sex. Sex is everything. Here at the Crazy Horse West we give you a lot more than that’.
Cosmo tells everyone in the audience to have a drink on the house and puts the spotlight on their bartender Sonny Vince, before apologising for the lateness of the night’s entertainment by explaining that Rachel has left and moved on to better things. He says that he loved her. Then he begins to introduce Mr. Sophistication and his De-Lovelies who he says are about to debut a brand new number.
Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese reportedly devised the outline for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie over the course of one night, and in the character of Cosmo Vittelli there is something of Scorsese and Robert De Niro’s later take on Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Cosmo is a braggart and in some ways a brute owing to his penchant for self-destruction who still retains a trace of the artist, enough to forgive him for many of his flaws while making it seem like he veers perilously close to some forsaken truth.
Kindred spirits aren’t always on the same track. Mr. Sophistication perhaps only listened to the first part of Cosmo’s big morale-boosting and ethos-defining speech up in the dressing room, because when he takes the stage he offers a glib summary, telling the audience in his typically fussy manner that Cosmo is ‘not only a great nightclub owner, but he also practices the best thing there is in this world: to be comfortable’.
What is proffered as a restful sentiment or even a kind of moral seems like a red herring or misdirection on the part of the film. Up on stage Mr. Sophistication and his De-Lovelies introduce ‘for the very first time’ their musical director Tony Maggio and hype their new act, but when we cut back to them it is only to find Mr. Sophistication drawing out an especially macabre, even venomous rendition of ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby’ while a stray Cosmo bleeds on the sidewalk.
