The film [Killing of a Chinese Bookie] is about a conformist, about somebody who would have been a white-collar worker years ago and who does all the right things and who is going to be killed for it.... It's the story of so many people's lives. It's not hard to understand because it happens all the time.
Killing Of A Chinese Bookie- John Cassavetesfrom Cassavetes on Cassavetes by Ray Carny
Since that binge I had not seen Cassavetes since. I've got a Netflix DVD copy of Opening Night waiting for me, and I'd love to get my hands on Love Streams, though I know that's tough one to track down.
Last Monday, I made my first trip to the new Marchesa Theater which is operated by the Austin Film Society. The best way to describe the Marchesa is that its Austin's own version of the New Beverly in Los Angeles. When I briefly lived in LA, I loved going out of my way to go to the New Beverly to see older movies or arthouse fare or grindhouse flicks. The Marchesa is located at what used to be the Lincoln Village, a dumpy 8-theater building I remember occaisonally seeing movies at when I was a kid. It was a weird feeling realizing what the Marchesa used to be when I pulled into the parking lot.
The goal is to make the Marchesa not only a place to show older or hard-to-find works, but also be a venue for local filmmakers to showcase their work. I think it's one of the missing pieces to Austin's film scene, and I look forward to supporting it as AFS continues to raise renovation funds and expand its programming.
Seeing Bookie on a 35mm print was an opportunity I didn't want to pass up. I had already missed Woman Under The Influence which kicked off this much-too-short series. This print was alive. It's been so long since I've seen a movie projected on film that I had almost forgotten how lovely a real lens flare looks on living, breathing celluloid.
Bookie hit me harder this go around. On a big screen, you can pick up on the mix of emotions in Gazarra's face. The creases in his skin have emotion. You could just as easily put this movie in the documentary section of the video story under another title, Eyes of Gazarra. I was 23 when I first watched Bookie on DVD. At 30, I can more easily identify with Cosmo's struggle to balance his passions and his economics. Not that I have a gambling problem, but I am a bit of a dreamer who is passionate about his work. And maybe I'm a bit of a conformist too. I defer to other people's projects ahead of my own. (Does deferring help me be a better editor, or did editing make me a deferrer?)
Cassavetes is often remembered for his handheld camera work - "documentary style." He was certainly influenced by documentaries and doc cinematographers, but I think it's sometimes said in a way that dismisses the beauty of his framing and camera movement that's both a disservice to Cassavetes and to documentaries. On the big screen, it's easier to appreciate his close-up framings, how he uses tight spaces to isolate characters at desperate moments. A key scene that demonstrates the dynamism of his visual technique in the face of tight budget constraints is the scene in which the gangsters running the poker games (who operate with the detachment of bankers) bring in the gamblers one-by-one. Cassavetes uses someone's shoulder to split the frame horizontally in two - and it totally works.
Cassavetes tinkered with his films for a long time in the editing room. Famously, Killing of a Chinese Bookie was released before Cassavetes was truly finished with it. After it was eviscerated by critics, he decided what did he have to lose in continuing to edit. He ended up re-releasing Bookie at a running time fifteen or twenty minutes shorter. Where many director's cuts are longer than the theatrical release - and typically more self-indulgent - Cassavetes massaged his films into leaner, more focused works.
There's a scene in which Gazarra, who plays a club owner, is auditioning a showgirl. His girlfriend walks in and doesn't like what she sees. The scene cuts out on a character define line of dialogue, yet you get the sense that maybe it was the beginning of a longer speech. You get the sense there's a bigger moment coming, and I'm sure Gazarra killed it, but Cassavetes cut out of the scene at exactly when he needed to. It makes for a more focused scene thematically and it demonstrates his discipline as an editor.
On this second viewing, I also was able to appreciate the film's genre elements more than I did the first time around. The beats of a gangster movie are all here, and paced apart structurally in an almost perfect three act structure. This surprised me. I remembered Bookie taking more tangents on its journey to a dank garage "shoot-out" (and maybe I had unwittingly watched one of its longer cuts on DVD), but this movie moves. It's a much better balance than I gave it credit for between Gazarra's scenes running the club and scenes evading gangsters.
It's also important to note how dreamlike Bookie is throughout. The movie begins with solar flares and blown highlights. As the story unfolds it moves into Rembrandt territory - deep blacks in which areas of the frame are illuminated by practical light sources. There's a point in the story where one could argue the film leaves the land of the living and enters an alternate dreamscape altogether. Intentional or not, it makes for a hell of a visual and thematic ride.
Cassavetes doesn't really deviate from the gangster plot until the final twenty minutes when he focuses on Cosmos' surrogate family at his club. It's in the backstage scene in which the camera slowly pulls back as he leads a song with his show girls and Mr. Sophistication that I got choked up. The Killing of A Chinese Bookie is a character study - a dissection of manhood, of Ben Gazarra's lifestyle, while also serving as a metaphor for Cassavetes' indepedent film career - that masquerades as a gangster picture.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is the story of an ordinary man who has constructed his life as many American men do. He has defined himself in terms of his work; it is more than a way to make a living, it is his entire existence - paid for in monthly installments.
- John Cassavetesfrom Cassavetes on Cassavetes by Ray Carny
Husbands
I don't really know what Husbands is about at this point. You could say it's about three married guys who want something for themselves.... You could say it is about three men that are in search of love and don't know how to attain it. Or you could say it is about a person of sentiment.... We worked with no story... and worked for a year to try to solve it and to gain, to get something out of it.
- John Cassavetes
from Cassavetes on Cassavetes by Ray Carny
Sunday evening I went back to the Marchesa to finish the Cassavetes series with Husbands. Three friends (played by Gazarra, Peter Falk, and Cassavetes himself) - married, good careers, facing middle age - bury a member of their crew. His death inspires a weekend-long bender that will infuriate their wives, send them to London, and lead them to, inevitably, examine what they want from the rest of their lives.
Lars Nilsen, the programmer at the Marchesa, introduced the film. He mentioned that it was a strange but wonderful coincidence that Husbands was scheduled the same weekend as The Hangover Part III. Lars said he thought he would have a better time at Husbands anyway because it's more funny and consistently compelling.
When I first saw Husbands I was alone watching a rented VHS. With an audience, the comedy (though you wouldn't really describe this movie as a "comedy" - which is what makes it such a superb "drama") is much more prominent and infectious. All the humor is dictated by line readings, looks, facial tics. There's no telling what an audience will pick up on and find laugh-out-loud funny.
I took my wife to see Husbands not knowing how she'd react to it. Luckily, she was laughing from the first scene. The carousing reminded her of some folks she knows. I'm relieved she enjoyed it. I can only imagine someone who doesn't like Husbands would probably hate Husbands.
There's a scene on a subway that has a perfect internal arc to it. I think it's a great model for any screenwriters looking to improve their scene work. "What are we doing - we've got forty more stops!"
There's a scene in a bar that was improvised on the spot with the extras. When the lead cast turns on one of these extras, it feels so real you get high off the mix of discomfort and humor.
There's a scene late in the film between Cassavetes and Jenny Runacre where he doesn't cut away even though the shot has gone out of focus. Why? Because their performances are so intense, so dialed, why the hell would you ever cut away?
Gazarra has the biggest arc in the movie. He serves as the thin plot's catalyst. But each actor/character has their moment to explore complicated emotional terrain.
The final scenes unfold with a melancholy flavor about them. The final scene is open to interpretation, and while I was taken by it, I think in another ten or fifteen years it will put me on the floor sobbing.
Each moment was found as we went along - not off the cuff, not without reason - but without a preconceived notion that forbids people from behaving like people and tells a 'story' that is predictable - and untrue. I hate knowing my theme and my story before I really start. I like to discover it as a I work.
- John Cassavetesfrom Cassavetes on Cassavetes by Ray Carney
The first half of the film is edited fairly tightly. Cassavetes loves cutting scenes together based on how they contradict each other, whether it's a visual contradiction or an emotional one. He cuts from the silence of a grieving widow next to her husband's grave to the roaring motors of a procession leaving the cemetery.
The second half is looser. Takes get longer. It's arguably more indulgent, yes, but it's all part of making the viewer feel like they're on a bender with these guys. The highlight scene for me is the long close up on an older woman that Falk attempts to pick up in a London casino. Her face contorts in ways that, oddly, reminded me of Helena Bonham Carter in Burton's Planet of the Apes (I know - that's a weird fuckin' reference). An entire movie could be made about this odd woman.
Something my wife commented on was how little Husbands holds your hands. One of the men has a fight with his wife that left her wondering exactly what set him off. It was a point of discussion for us afterward. It wasn't a problem for her that she couldn't quite pinpoint it. She commented that, "You get used to so many movies spelling everything out for you that it takes some time to adjust to one that doesn't."
Astute observation. That's not to say these types of films don't exist. They're just harder to find in the marketplace.
Having seen these films again, I think any comparison between so-called mumblecore and Cassavetes is a misunderstanding of Cassavetes and a disservice to the young filmmakers being compared to him. They are playing in two different stadiums, possibly two different sports. For one thing, where mumblecore typically utilizes untrained or less-than-experienced actors, Cassavetes is working with titans of performance and improvisation. Mumblecore explores naturalism; Cassavetes explores performance and psychology.
Also - for all the fumbling these men do trying to express their emotions - Cassavetes' characters are actually more articulate than they're given credit for. More articulate than many of the twenty somethings in mumblecore films, anyway. It's just that sometimes this articulation isn't through dialogue. It's through action.
If a Cassavetes film is playing in a theater near you I encourage you to go see it. And if it isn't, get some wiling participants together, pour some drinks, and enjoy most of his work on Criterion Blu Ray.
Seeing his movies in a theater on glorious 35mm (can't believe 35 is becoming so rare I have to put it on a pedestal like that) with an audience made me realize his films are best watched with a group surrounded by bottles of liquor. If you can't catch his movies in a theater, then please, try to recreate the scenario I just pitched you. It'll be worth it.
When you make a film whose interest is to take an extremely difficult subject, deal with it in depth and see if you can find something in yourself, and if other people can find other things within themselves that they will be able to develop in their personal life, it's great.
- John Cassavetesfrom Cassavetes on Cassavetes by Ray Carney
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