But there were noir<\/em> dramas, noir <\/em>Westerns, even noir<\/em> comedies, and those boundaries get even looser once we get into the period, of the 1970s and beyond, of neo-noirs<\/em>. These films \u2013 the focus of a current program on the Criterion Channel<\/a> \u2013 include such clear homages as Chinatown, Farewell My Lovely, <\/em>and The Last Seduction<\/em>, but also urban reimaginings (Cotton Comes to Harlem, Across 110th Street<\/em>), semi-satirical subversions (The Long <\/em>Goodbye) and intersections with New Queer Cinema (Swoon<\/em>), British gangster movies (Mona Lisa<\/em>), and high school drama (Brick<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n And thus the inclusion of John Cassavetes\u2019s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie<\/em> in Criterion\u2019s selection is striking, because it\u2019s similarly difficult to pin down what, exactly, a Cassavetes movie is \u2013 though, like noir<\/em>, people are always insisting some movie or another is done in his style. You can usually narrow it down to a handful of stylistic devices or buzzwords (handheld camerawork, improvised dialogue, unconventional narratives, toxic masculinity, raw and unguarded emotion), just like film noir<\/em> (urban settings, night photography, heavy shadows, film fatales, hardboiled dialogue). Those descriptors don\u2019t apply to every Cassavetes movie, nor every film noir<\/em>. But there are enough intersections to make The Killing of a Chinese Bookie<\/em> a fascinating experiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ben Gazzara stars as Cosmo Vittelli \u2013 everybody knows Cosmo, and everybody likes Cosmo. When we first meet him, he\u2019s wearing a natty white suit, and when he tells the \u201clowlife\u201d he\u2019s meeting that he has \u201cno style\u201d (\u201cI do business with you, but you have no style\u201d), we get the sense that it\u2019s the gravest insult he can deliver. He\u2019s the owner, director, and emcee of the Crazy Horse West, a quote-unquote classy burlesque joint on the Sunset Strip; he\u2019s also a bit of a gambler, and he\u2019s meeting that un-stylish lowlife to pay off a long-standing gambling debt. But Cosmo is a guy who can only win for so long, and immediately \u2013 like, within days \u2013 he\u2019s run up a new marker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, the Mob guys he\u2019s newly in debt to make him a deal: they\u2019ll wipe it clean if he\u2019ll commit the titular crime. This summary makes the picture sound far more direct than it is, and one of the film\u2019s small pleasures is the way Cassavetes slides the plot in sideways, almost under his breath \u2013 the title character is introduced by an edit mid-sentence, and rather than giving us a bunch of backstory about this underworld conflict, the filmmaker lingers on the logistics (like the comically convoluted driving instructions to his hideaway) and complications (Cosmo\u2019s barely made it onto the highway before he gets flat tire.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the time comes to pull the trigger, it\u2019s a gnarly, ugly scene; this is not a professional assassin, for God\u2019s sake, but a strip club owner, so the execution is messy, and he doesn\u2019t notice potential witnesses at first so he has to take them<\/em> out too, and the gunshots all have an unappealing, high-pitched pop, rather than the bass-heavy boom<\/em> we\u2019ve come to expect from our criminal antiheroes. Of course, it turns out he wasn\u2019t told the whole truth about his target: \u201cIt was the heaviest cat on the West Coast,\u201d confesses his handler Mort, who apologizes \u201cabout the whole thing, Cosmo, but uh\u2026 it couldn\u2019t be helped, y\u2019know? I mean that\u2019s why we\u2019re here to talk about it. It just happened to be you. I like you, I personally<\/em> like you, I felt it when I met you, it was just instinct.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mort is played by Seymour Cassel, part of Cassavetes\u2019s recurring stock company; Gazzara was also one of the writer\/director\u2019s regulars, appearing in two other films, though this is their finest collaboration. It\u2019s a livewire performance, veering from melancholy to brutality to pleasure, often within the same scene. That tonal fluidity \u2013 sometimes incongruity \u2013 complemented his commitment to an emotional truth that attempted to replicate the messy ugliness of real life, which may be why current film culture tends to treat his work more with a guarded respect (or acknowledgement of influence) rather than the unapologetic affection of the films of his contemporaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But that simple fact \u2013 that no one made movies quite like these, and few these days even try \u2013 is why they maintain their freshness. Indie crime dramas of the \u201890s and beyond might attempt to replicate the kind of atmospheric touches and character beats of a film like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie<\/em>, but they\u2019d tie it all together with a Woo-lite shoot-out and wrap-up; instead, the closest thing this gangster-infused crime movie has to an \u201caction sequence\u201d is an awkward scene of a mob hood trying to find our guy in a warehouse, just shooting at everything, clumsily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, far less time is spent in criminal circles than the charmingly low-rent numbers at the nudie bar, where Cosmo is trying to make art for an audience that only wants smut (\u201cTake it off!\u201d they shout impatiently). There\u2019s a sense of autobiography here \u2013 that Cassavetes is making a crime movie, because that\u2019s what a filmmaker like him could get financed in the 1970s, but he\u2019s far more interested in his protagonist\u2019s artistic frustration. (Similarly, his later Gloria<\/em> ingeniously uses the tropes of the early-\u201880s action movie to provide the structure for a dazzling Gena Rowlands character study.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n To that end, Chinese Bookie<\/em> is a backstage movie \u2013 smaller in scale (and quite a bit sleazier) than his next feature, Opening Night<\/em>, but in the same spirit. Cassavetes came from the stage himself, from small actors\u2019 groups and off-Broadway shows, so it\u2019s no surprise that he concludes his film not with a shoot-out or action sequence, but a backstage pep talk. \u201cLet\u2019s go down there and we\u2019ll do a great show,\u201d Cosmo tells his girls. \u201cWe\u2019ll smile, we\u2019ll cry big glistening tears that pour onto the stage, and we\u2019ll make their lives a little happier, ok? So they won\u2019t have to face themselves.\u201d There\u2019s an awful lot packed into that little speech. Especially that last line. \u201cThe Killing of a Chinese Bookie\u201d is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a><\/em> and HBO Max<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/killing2-1024x741.jpg\")
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