If there is ever a quote to sum up the artistic outlook of John Cassavetes, it is this: “I’ve never seen an exploding helicopter. I’ve never seen anybody go and blow somebody’s head off. So why should I make films about them? But I have seen people destroy themselves in the smallest way…I’ve seen people hide behind political ideas, behind dope, behind the sexual revolution, behind fascism, behind hypocrisy, and I’ve myself done all these things. So I can understand them… We have problems, terrible problems, but our problems are human problems.”
So when I read the synopsis for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), I found it hard to imagine it playing as a straight up film noir. The story revolves around Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara) the owner of strip-cum-burlesque club Crazy Horse West, to which he is intensely devoted. After losing $23,000 that he does not have, in a private casino run by gangsters including Mort Weil (Seymour Cassell) and the Lurch-like Flo (Timothy Carey), he is told that in order to pay the debt he must murder a Chinese bookie the gang want dead. Despite refusing and hoping to pay it back bit by bit, he is forced by persistence and violence to take up the task.
All the tropes of noir are present. An anti-hero caught between a rock and a hard place; the double-cross; corrupt, cynical characters; violence; wisecracks; and of course the beautiful women – though the strippers in his club could hardly be called femme fatales. Unlike the hugely successful Godfather films of the era, the gangsters in The Killing… have no code of honour, they are just a bunch of lowlifes with no morals at all.
That said, this being Cassavetes, the focus is less on gangsters and plot devices, and more on Vitelli’s descent into an abyss of self-loathing as he loses his grip on his own life and the tightly run ship of his club. When he undertakes the hit, the action is utterly ludicrous and it becomes clear that we are not just watching the fall of Vitelli, but a deconstruction of Hollywood.
Vitelli is Cassavetes – a man devoted to his art, but forced by commercial interests to do unrealistic things he would never normally do. The gangsters are studio executives – men who want the most ridiculous things from artists, are never happy with the results and in the process end up destroying anything of worth.
Coming as it did straight after A Woman Under the Influence, it is perhaps the case that Cassavetes felt that he had to move away from the intense dramas he had made his name with. Certainly, with his previous film he had reached a kind of emotional nadir, which would have been impossible to follow right away.
Interestingly, this was developed by Cassavetes with his protégé Martin Scorsese, and it was originally intended to be directed by the latter, though he ended up working on Taxi Driver instead. Whether it would have made a better film is hard to say, it would have been different, at least. Yet it is hard to imagine Scorsese bringing the same level of pathos to the destruction of Vitelli’s dream.
