On the Edge

By JAY COCKS

THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE

Directed and Written by JOHN CASSAVETES

When John Cassavetes makes a gangster movie, you can be sure only that it will be like no other. A film maker of vaunting, demanding individuality, Cassavetes is like a jazz soloist, an improviser who tears off on wild riffs from a basic, familiar melody. When Cassavetes is really cooking, even the moments that are awkward and forced can become electric.

Working like this within such a painstaking, cumbersome medium as film has its penalties. The movies can get ragged and confused, their pacing languid. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie shows much of what is exasperating about Cassavetes. The film is unfocused, loony, indulgent. It is also very much worth indulging--a brash, tense, mysterious night piece unlike anything Cassavetes has attempted before.

Side Notes. Again like many jazz musicians--Thelonius Monk, for one --Cassavetes is most interested in the pauses and side notes everyone else passes over. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is another of the director's blitzed meditations on life at the edge. Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara) owns a strip joint on Sunset Boulevard and a debt of dishonor. No sooner has he finished paying off the mortgage on the Crazy Horse West than he runs up an unmanageable IOU at a Santa Monica gambling joint. To pay the debt, the gamblers put this proposition to Cosmo: snuff a Chinatown bookie. Cosmo likes the risk of the proposition. Even more, though, he enjoys the almost certain prospect of disaster. He has been looking for a way over the brink for a long time.

When Cosmo sets off for the hit, he has a blowout on the Hollywood Freeway. He phones a Yellow Cab to take him the rest of the way. Then, while waiting for transportation to arrive, he calls up the Crazy Horse to see how the show is going. He asks the bartender what number is on. The bartender does not know. "Is it the 'April in Paris' number?" Cosmo demands. The bartender still professes ignorance. Cosmo starts barking out hints: "Is Mr. Sophistication singing I Can't Give You Anything But Love? Look on the back wall--is there a sign that says 'Paris'? You worked seven years at the Crazy Horse and you still can't figure this out?" The moment is mad and funny and just as important as the murder that follows it.

Tangling Limbs. Like all Cassavetes' work, Chinese Bookie has a hard surface naturalism, but he has altered his style somewhat. The scenes are clipped, terse, and derive much of their impact from indirection. When two women have a fight in the Crazy Horse, the scene is not carefully choreographed. Cassavetes shows close flashes of tangling limbs, the violent confusion of a true brawl in which it is hard to tell what is going on until one combatant finally tears away from the other. On film, the brawl is like a kinetic abstract.

What keeps The Killing of a Chinese Bookie from ranking with the best of Cassavetes' previous films (like Husbands) is that it remains simultaneously too obvious and indistinct. We know from the first that Cosmo is one of the walking wounded, so it is hardly necessary to make him into that--quite literally--at the movie's end. Further, the time Cassavetes spends in the Crazy Horse is amusing but aimless.

As always, the acting is superlative. Gazzara's Cosmo catches all the paradoxes and puzzles of the character, the wired ambition and the rapture over doom. Cassavetes' hoodlums, notably Seymour Cassel, are all unfailingly polite. The one exception is Timothy Carey as a fang-toothed, philosophical hood who eats dinner wearing white gloves and likes to quote the great thinkers. Cassel is curious about why Carey declines to fulfill his assignment and kill Gazzara. Carey curls his lips over his gums, lets a little foam drip, and says, "Like Karl Marx said: opium is the religion of the people." From him, that is sufficient explanation. No one would dare ask further questions.

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