The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

Not to be confused with The Killing of a Chinese Wookiee...

If you've never seen a John Cassavetes' film, this is a good start. Many of his pictures are brilliant, though other Cassavetes classics like A Woman Under the Influence and Husbands meander and test a viewer's patience; Killing stands out for its straightforward narrative. The long takes and seemingly-extemporaneous dialogue (Cassavetes' films are tightly-scripted, the actors only appear to be improvising), rough edits, natural lighting, and selective use of music overdubbing are all here, guerilla filmmaking at its best.

The documentary aesthetic inserts you right into the action and gives the story of Cosmo Vitale a raw immediacy. He is paying off a mob debt when the film opens, only to go out with the most beautiful dancers from his strip club and get in over his head again. Things develop and he cannot so easily pay off his debt this time: the mob wants him to pull a hit on the competition, a local Chinese wookiee... sorry, bookie.

It isn't the plot that sets this film apart; it's the presentation. Ben Gazzara plays the lead to devastating effect, all swagger when confronting his girls but once away from them cycling through levels of existential despair provoked by urban realities crashing around him. He rebounds from one threat to another with painful intimacy, the camera like a cosmic eye capturing this mortal at his worst, yet the film is not so much concerned what he does as it is with how and why.

Center of the storm is Cosmo's strip club, a macabre joint closer to a saucy circus than anything truly raunchy -which, in the gritty context, is surprising. The dancers are coy, putting on airs and costumes, as an MC right out of vaudeville sings them from Paris to Potterdam. Mr Imagination serves as a kind of moral compass, in a pivotal scene fed up with the lack of appreciation he's getting because, let's face it, he's a freak.

No, Cosmo argues, you're not a freak, but Mr Imagination isn't having it: he's a freak and by inference so is Cosmo.

Part of what makes the film so great is Cassavetes' ability to carry this scene. Even in writing it down, I can't deny it sounds weird, but in the context of the film it becomes something truly beautiful. In calling his protagonist a freak, we hear the echo of Nietszche, saying not "freak" but "human, all too human". Which is a subject so rarely tackled in film anymore, the burden of simply being a man.