Movies - The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

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	Movies - The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a 1976 gangster film directed and written by John Cassavetes and starring Ben Gazzara.

A rough and gritty film, it is often thought of as an original non-glossy predecessor to the more polished Scorsese gangster films. Arguably one of Ben Gazzara's most formidable characters which he impersonated for his friend John Cassavetes in the 1970s. The actor and director collaborated for the first time on Cassavetes' film Husbands (1970) where Gazzara appeared alongside Peter Falk and Cassavetes himself. The collaboration of the two men achieved its peak in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie where in Ben Gazzara took the leading role of the hapless strip joint owner Cosmo Vitelli.

The film's original release, at 135 minutes in length, was a commercial disappointment and the movie was pulled from distribution after only seven days. Eventually, Cassavetes decided to re-edit the film, and it was re-released in 1978 in a new 108-minute cut. The 1978 version is the one that has been in general release since that time, though Criterion issued both versions of the film in their John Cassavetes: Five Films box set, marking the first appearance of the 1976 version since its original release.

True to Cassavetes' form, the 108-minute version is not just a simple edit of the 135-minute version. The order of several scenes have been changed, there are different edits of a few scenes, and there are a few segments that are unique to the 108-minute version. The bulk of the cutting in the 1978 version removed many of the nightclub routines that were in the 1976 version.

In order to pay off a gambling debt to the mob, Vitelli agrees to kill a chinese unknown to him. Against all odds he succeeds in killing the man, but he gets severely wounded during his flight. But the gangsters turn against him as they had not expected him to survive the assassination and Vitelli is forced to kill these men too.

Ben Gazzara delivered a lifelike impersonation of a simple man who found his happiness in running a third rate strip bar and who gets caught in something that is much too big for him, sometimes he does not even seem to understand the whole meaning of it.

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