Was this review helpful? Chinese Bookie is the more insouciant, involuted and unfathomable of the two; the curdled charm of Gazzara's lopsided grin has never been more to the point.

No characters other than Ben Gazzara's are even remotely developed.

By the very end he's still quiet, introspective and closed, but we get the feeling he's taken a look at his life and how he goes through it, and he's less than satisfied.

Many scenes begin in near blackness, and abruptly, LA sunlight streams into the murky darkness while actors lines ricochet and overlap. 13 out of 30 found this helpful. Emanuel Levy EmanuelLevy.Com June 28, 2005 In this film, Ben Gazzara plays Cosmo Vitelli, a nightclub owner who lives way beyond his means and manages to get into a massive gambling debt with the mob. December 27, 2004

By creating an account, you agree to the to pay off that set of debts he eventually agrees to murder a Chinese bookie for the hoodlums to whom he owes the debt. This is my favorite John Cassavetes movie, perhaps because it's the most appealingly sleazy. The painful part for the viewer is that we see the pain in their lives too.

Avoid at all costs........ MERK

It's great at dusk, whereby the sea is not some abstract volume but the specific sensation of upfloat, and the early moon is that rock over there from me. A movie which a friend from a film class in university hated so much she broke up with her boyfriend because he liked it, "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" became my first Cassavetes film when I watched it this morning. February 9, 2006 It's been said by many that "Chinese Bookie" is the toughest of any Cassavetes films to digest.

The crime theme is only to set up the downfall of Cosmo's character, which is how he ultimately loses some of the love he had in his life.

At first glance he appears to be doing nothing-but guess what folks, he's thinking. He murders the target half way through the film, who turns out to be a bigger fry than just a bookie, and then realises he's been set up by the hoodlums. One of the signatures of Cassavetes' films is that they reach the climax, and then go on about another hour before ending.

John Cassavetes is widely regarded as being the father of American independent film. Get the freshest reviews, news, and more delivered right to your inbox!

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It is perhaps the least liked film of the precious few Cassavetes wrote and directed, but it's an honest film that doesn't pull any punches. All of Cassavetes's films are noteworthy, and THE KILLING OF A Chinese BOOKIE is one of his finest. 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. As for the dialogue being improvised, there was only one scene in which the dialogue was improvised (when Cosmo goes to his girlfriend's house after being shot and talks to her mother). This was Cassavetes' attempt to make a film with more commercial elements, but the melding of a conventional narrative with his own abstract musings doesn't completely work.

63 out of 74 found this helpful. I came to this film with a strange mindset. Without knowing anything about it I had absorbed a sort of collective opinion of it as a "great film". Was this review helpful? Vitelli and the film move back and forth between the double … If Cassavetes heard you saying the film belonged in the gangster genre he would have cried.

He finally pays off the shylocks he's in hock to for his place--the Crazy Horse West--and celebrates with a gambling spree that puts him right back where he started.

5 out of 8 found this helpful. How many directors can say that? The good thing in living a short walk from the beach is that I get to do this every other day of nearly half the year.

I worship Cassavetes. Not that Cosmo is bothered, he floats along on a cloud of his own satisfaction - that is until the gangsters he owes money to for the upkeep of the club start asking him for more. Widely seen as a misfire on release, extremely divisive now, with many regarding it as a self-indulgent experiment of the very worst variety and others as one of the greatest examples of independent American cinema in the 1970's, my take on "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" is somewhere between the two extremes. This is to everyone who gave this film a poor review, saying that it is masquerading as a gangster picture or that the dialogue was improvised. Was this review helpful? Necessary viewing for Cassavetes fans – people looking for a straightforward story should look elsewhere. May 15, 2009 I'm not sure if I LIKED it, but it sure was original..." Then later you find yourself haunted by it. As challenging as his films can be, he found humanity in gangsters and villains as well as in regular guys.

the bookie dies!)

Was this review helpful? The movie stars Ben Gazzara as the lead character, Cosmo Vitelli.

This film is so much like real life that you not only watch it, you live it. I always needed at least a bit of narrative drive in a film.