The most
(perhaps only) conventionally readable portion of John Cassavetes’ The
Killing of a Chinese Bookie is indeed the title sequence, in which
protagonist Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara), under extreme pressure from gangsters
after running up a gambling debt he can’t pay, gains entrance to a well-guarded
enclave, commits a high-profile murder, shoots several other people in the
course of the resulting mayhem, and makes it out of there alive: Vitelli’s
improbable proficiency and success suggest a form of clarity, perhaps of
self-liberation, more generally denied him, but one defined more by
conventional cinematic archetype than character. It stands in intriguing
contrast to the strangely preoccupied sense of searching that defines the rest
of the film – Vitelli is the owner-manager of a supremely idiosyncratic night spot
which bears the exterior of a strip club, but actually seems to titillate
audience only through the highly mediated form of musical numbers fronted by
the peculiar “Mr. Sophistication.” We see nothing of Vitelli’s private life,
beyond interactions with some of the employees and their families, mostly
taking an artificially courtly kind of form: Gazzara’s one-of-a-kind mixture of
off-putting smugness and compelling connectivity reaches a fascinatingly
unreadable apotheosis here. In classic film noir fashion, Cosmo’s success at
pulling off the job fails to put the gangsters out of the picture, leaving him
in a final position that appears desperate and hopeless, and yet also, as manifested
in his demenour when he gets up on stage, defiantly triumphant, a duality which
perhaps echoes the strange status of the film itself, a barely-released “flop”
far more prominent now than most of its widely-seen contemporaries. The end
credits roll over a “Mr. Sophistication” rendition of “I Can’t Give You
Anything But Love,” the tone and phrasing strangified to the point of rendering
it fittingly unclear whether or not that’s a condition to be lamented.
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