Ben Gazzara gives one of his best performances in John Cassavetess THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE
THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE (John Cassavetes, 1976)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Wednesday, July 20, 1:30 & 9:15, and Sunday, July 24, 3:30
Series runs July 15-24
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
John Cassavetes’s 1976 gangster picture, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, is no mere neonoir shoot-’em-up but a deep and involving character study of a low-level jiggle-joint owner who fancies himself a classy, big-time player. Cassavetes regular and close friend Ben Gazzara gives one of his best, most nuanced performances as Cosmo Vitelli, a Korean War veteran who runs the Crazy Horse West gentleman’s club on the outskirts of the Sunset Strip. Instead of just having his female employees take their clothes off to music, he writes, directs, and choreographs ridiculous fantasy scenarios with songs, costumes, and dialogue, hosted by the shlumpy Mr. Sophistication (screen and television writer Meade Roberts) and poorly acted by his devoted harem, Sherry (Alice Friedland), Margo (Donna Marie Gordon), Haji (Haji), Carol (Carol Warren), and his lover, Rachel (Azizi Johari). After gambling impresario Mort Weil (Seymour Cassel) enjoys a night at the Crazy Horse, he invites Cosmo to his club, Ship Ahoy. Cosmo turns the outing into a pseudo prom, taking a limo to three of his girls’ houses, giving them corsages, drinking Dom Perignon, and bringing them with him to the secret gambling club, where he proceeds to embarrass himself and lose twenty-three thousand dollars. Because Cosmo is unable to pay the debt, Mort has a proposition for him, one that weighs heavily on the club owner’s conscience, but he’ll do just about anything to keep his beloved club.
Gazzara, who previously appeared in Cassavetes’s Husbands and would later star with Cassavetes’s wife, Gena Rowlands, in Opening Night, is extraordinary as Cosmo, a schlemiel who thinks he’s a smooth operator ready for the major leagues, although he has glimpses of the truth about himself. “You learn to be happy, you learn to play the fool, you learn to be what everybody wants you to be,” he says at one point. He cares so much about his productions (which evoke a Fellini-esque Cabaret in very strange ways) that even with his life in danger, he finds a pay phone to call in and see how the performances are going at the club. Cassavetes fills out the cast of sleazy mobsters and others with such distinctive-looking character actors as Timothy Carey, Robert Phillips, Val Avery, John Finnegan, and producer Al Ruban. Cassavetes and cinematographers Ruban and Mitch Breit keep the handheld cameras on the move, weaving their way through the lurid club and the dark streets, with natural light and sound adding to the often cinéma vérité, improvisatory feel. (One of the camera operators was Frederick Elmes, who went on to become DP on such films as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Night on Earth, and Olive Kitteridge.) The original 135-minute cut is way too long; in 1978, Cassavetes released a 108-minute version with substantial changes, including deleting a lot of the performances at the club, which was a very good idea. But the main reason to see The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is to watch Gazzara strut his stuff, his shirt unbuttoned to show off his chest hair, his sly smile nearly ever-present, knowing that he is killing it. The longer version of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is screening July 20 and 24 at Metrograph in the series “Cassavetes/Rowlands,” celebrating the king and queen of independent cinema by showing all twelve of Cassavetes’s films. Cassavetes died in 1989 at the age of fifty-nine, leaving behind quite a legacy. The series continues through July 24 with such other works as Love Streams, Shadows, and Faces, with Rowlands participating in several sold-out postscreening Q&As.
BAMcinématek follows up the opening film in its “Four More Years: An Election Special” series, John Frankenheimer’s conspiracy noir, The Manchurian Candidate, with a very different kind of political thriller, Alan J. Pakula’s analog conspiracy neo-noir, All the President’s Men. Adapted by William Goldman from the book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the breathless procedural follows two young reporters who may have stumbled onto a national story with international impact. Woodward (producer Robert Redford) is sent to cover a hearing involving five men who broke into Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex and soon finds himself and fellow reporter Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) caught in a cover-up that begins with the Committee to Re-elect the President (appropriately known as CREEP) and may lead all the way to the Oval Office. The wily veteran newspapermen at the Post — editors Harry M. Rosenfeld (Jack Warden) and Howard Simons (Martin Balsam) and executive editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) — keep a close watch on the youngsters to make sure they don’t screw things up, admiring their hunger but worrying about their lack of experience. Woodward and Bernstein, whom Bradlee calls “Woodstein,” are polar opposites; Woodward is a handsome, conservative WASP, Bernstein a somewhat funny-looking liberal Jew perpetually smoking cigarettes, even in an elevator. But they make one of the greatest detective teams in the history of cinema, armed with notebooks and typewriters instead of guns, knocking on doors and making phone calls. But Redford and Hoffman — an urban take on Redford and Paul Newman from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which was also written by Goldman (Marathon Man, The Princess Bride) — turn doorways and landlines into intense objects of suspense. Redford’s hand and eye movements during several calls from his desk are utterly mesmerizing; don’t miss how he shifts dialing from one hand to the other without missing a beat. (Try it on an old rotary phone; it’s nearly impossible.) As the names keep getting bigger — from Hugh Sloan (Stephen Collins) and Maurice Stans to Charles Colson and John Mitchell (voiced by John Randolph) as the White House is implicated — the film gets better and better, building almost unbearable suspense even though we know what’s going to happen. But All the President’s Men is one of those movies you can’t stop watching, can’t switch away from when you chance upon it on television; every aspect of it is that good.
Unpredictable Japanese writer-director Sion Sono defies expectations once again with Love & Peace, a wacky tokusatsu tale that has been gestating for more than two decades but has finally hit the big screen, with all its crazy madness. One of six films Sono (