Cosmo Vitelli owns the Crazy Horse West, a strip joint in Los Angeles. He's laconic, vet, and a gambler. When we meet him, he's making his last payment on a gambling debt, after which, he promptly loses $23,000 playing poker. The guys he owes this time aren't so friendly, pressuring him for immediate payment. When he's not able to do so, they suggest he kill a Chinese bookie to wipe away his debt. Vitelli and the film move back and forth between the double-crossing, murderous... (Full plot summary below)
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Cosmo Vitelli owns the Crazy Horse West, a strip joint in Los Angeles. He's laconic, vet, and a gambler. When we meet him, he's making his last payment on a gambling debt, after which, he promptly loses $23,000 playing poker. The guys he owes this time aren't so friendly, pressuring him for immediate payment. When he's not able to do so, they suggest he kill a Chinese bookie to wipe away his debt. Vitelli and the film move back and forth between the double-crossing, murderous insincerity of the gamblers and the friendships, sweetness, and even love among Vitelli, the dancers, a dancer's mother, and the club's singer, Mr. Sophistication.
Leave your thoughts about The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
| Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyGazzara struts like a polyester peacock, playing a doomed nightclub owner in debt to the wrong people. |
| AV ClubKeith PhippsGazzara plays a strip-club owner committed to staging sad, unsexy, decidedly personal semi-nude musical revues. |
| TIME MagazineJay CocksAs 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. |
| LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenGazzara is riveting as man who exudes cool and calm—style—while also stinking of panic. |
| The GuardianDerek MalcolmA film that displays most of the faults of his kind of on-the-hoof film-making - and all the virtues. |
| EmpireWilliam ThomasWith a heavily improvised script Cassavetes gets the most from his actors, each giving emotive performances. |
| Chicago ReaderJonathan RosenbaumPeter Bogdanovich used Gazzara in a similar part in Saint Jack (1979), but as good as that film is, it doesn't catch the exquisite warmth and delicacy of feeling of Cassavetes's doom-ridden comedy-drama. |
| MovieMartyr.comJeremy HeilmanEven though this feels relatively streamlined by Cassavetes' standards, I thought it was eminently watchable, if not exceptionally profound. |
| NewsweekJack KrollA meandering, almost impenetrable tale of sweaty strip joints and sleazy gangsters. |
| Creative LoafingMatt BrunsonThis was Cassavetes' attempt to make a film with more commercial elements, but the melding of a conventional narrative with his own abstract musings doesn't completely work. |
