The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

This morning I watched the original cut of John Cassavetes' 1976 gangster flick, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. It runs, for me, an excruciating 135 minutes. The film did miserable box-office and two years later was re-released in a tighter 109 minute edit. But I lack the Cassavetes gene. Not even intellectual curiosity will make me seek out another viewing of a Cassavetes-directed film. At least not a for a long while. I've seen a few of his notable films: Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, Gloria. What's frustrating is that I can't really pinpoint anything I find objectionable. It comes done to the vicissitudes of taste. Chinese Bookie was a hard slog because one of its chief settings was a club with an all female erotic revue. Snore. Where is the gay Cassavetes? At any rate, while watching this movie my mind wandered first to other Cassavetes films, in particular the unintentionally hilarious Gloria. Gena Rowlands, not a bad actress, never stops looking & sounding as if she's playing a childhood game of cops 'n' robbers. Thinking of Rowlands in Gloria got me thinking about other smart, sophisticated actresses who have taken a stab at playing dumb, unsophisticated women. Susan Sarandon in White Palace, playing an uneducated waitress at a White Castle-type burger joint, opposite James Spader as her younger lover. Sarandon is too calculating an actress to ever make one believe she's not the smartest person in the room. But my absolute favorite example of a smart actress playing dumb is Jodi Foster in her own written/directed Little Man Tate. For some bizarre reason Foster wrote all her dialogue as if she were in a 1940s gangster flick. No one else in the movie talks the way she does. It's two scripts like Rachel's (Friends) two recipes for trifle. Little Man Tate is half an English trifle and half a shepherd's pie.



I wanted to embed the YouTube video of the  Friends vid, but embedding has been disabled, but it's a classic bit and worth the bother if you want to see (or see it again): Rachel's Trifle.