The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) on Netflix
Cosmo Vittelli choreographs the act himself at the Crazy Horse West, his Los Angeles burlesque club. A $23,000 poker debt lets the gangster Mort demand he kill a bookie named Harold Ling.
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- IMDb7.2/1016,676 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes79%
Trailer
Plot summary
Cosmo Vittelli owns and operates the Crazy Horse West, a Los Angeles burlesque club on the Sunset Strip. He clears a gambling debt he has carried for seven years with a loan shark, Marty, and marks the occasion by bringing Marty and his associates to see the club's night act. A night out with three of his dancers, Margo, Rachel, and Sherry, ends when he loses $23,000 at poker, and Marty's partners force him to sign the club over as collateral. The next night the gangster Mort and his men tell Cosmo to kill a bookie called Harold Ling, which would wipe out what he owes. They give him a gun, a car and the address, and rough him up when he hesitates.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- While he and John Cassavetes were being held up at gunpoint, Seymour Cassel recalled, Cassavetes defused the robbery by offering the gunman ice cream and a job in his new film, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and the robber accepted.
- For the restaurant scene late in the film, John Cassavetes invited a number of prominent Hollywood studio executives to appear as extras, then deliberately cut every one of their faces out of the finished film.
- The 1978 version of the film was not a simple edit of the 135-minute original: the order of several scenes was changed, a few scenes were re-edited, some segments appear only in the shorter cut, and most of the nightclub routines were removed.
- John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese came up with the idea for the film together in a single night; Cassavetes then developed it on his own, drawing on Arthur Penn's Mickey One, The Family Rico and Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky.
- Ben Gazzara's strip club owner Cosmo Vittelli was partly based on an impersonation of John Cassavetes that Gazzara used to do for his friend in the 1970s, and in a mid-2000s Criterion Collection interview Gazzara called Vittelli a double of sorts for Cassavetes.
- The film's original version, running 135 minutes, was a commercial disappointment and was pulled from distribution after only seven days in release.
- David Bowie sat in on much of the shoot of the film, and he is visible in some of the club audience footage that made it into the finished film.
