The independent features of John Cassavetes have always been a refreshing antidote to predigested commercial films. Cassavetes could give two hoots about narrative progression, straddling a border between a purely non-narrative cinema and Hollywood formula. Never much concerned with story, Cassavetes relied on genre conventions as a jumping off point to a cinema of pure emotion. And never more so than in his seedy, uncomfortable The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a noir character study about the proud but lunk-headed Cosmo Vitale (Ben Gazzara), a strip club owner in sleazy '70s L.A.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, coming after the commercial and critical successes of Faces and A Woman Under the Influence, marks a shift for Cassavetes. From The Killing of a Chinese Bookie onward, Cassavetes became increasingly interested and critical of the artist and the artistic struggle. As a result, he began to indulge in more and more directorial embellishments. With his soul closer to the surface of the celluloid, his films then became more difficult and unbearable, quickly tanking during their very short theatrical runs. And in the case of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, the film tanked twice -- once during its initial 1976 run in a 135-minute cut, where the noir story is quickly buried in a sea of Cassavetes digressions (a ploy that not only alienated adventuresome filmgoers but also many of Cassavetes' diehard fans), and again in 1978, cut down to a svelte 108 minutes, eliminating most of the minor characters' elucidations and focusing more completely on Cosmo's downfall.

But no matter how you cut it, after seeing The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, you will never be able to get Ben Gazzara's Cheshire cat grin out of your head. Gazzara's Cosmo likes to pretend he is a smug mover and shaker in his fleabag strip joint, but he really isn't. "I'm a club owner, I deal in girls," he proudly states. He gets in deep to the mob when he takes his strippers out in a limo to an undercover gambling den and loses big time. The only way out after that for Cosmo is to either lose his club or to work freelance for the mob as the assassin to an elderly Chinese bookie. Since the club is his whole life, Cosmo chooses the murder. But Cosmo ultimately has no choice. No matter which way it goes, Cosmo is doomed.

It takes no stretch to see that Cassavetes identifies fully and completely with Cosmo, who treats his De-Lovelies and his manic-depressive host Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts) as his beloved family. Cassavetes' camera locks onto Gazzara as if the camera were a heat-seeking missile, and because of this obsessive focus on Cosmo, it doesn't take too long to realize that this neo-noir is actually a metaphor for Cassavetes' struggle for artistic integrity and control. Cosmo could just as easily be a maverick independent filmmaker trying to raise money for his next production, forced to use dirty Hollywood money to keep his film going. If such a thing were possible in the world of Cassavetes, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie could well be Cassavetes' most personal film.

Besides, who else could turn the thoroughly reprehensible gangster Flo (played by the thoroughly reprehensible Timothy Carey) into an ultimately sympathetic figure?

Read more on this film, with other Cassavetes classics.