The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)

Ben Gazzara in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

Cast: Ben Gazzara, Timothy Carey, Seymour Cassel, John Kullers, Al Ruban, Azizi Johari, Virginia Carrington, Meade Roberts. Screenplay: John Cassavetes. Cinematography: Mitch Breit, Al Ruban. Production design: Sam Shaw. Film editing: Tom Cornwell. Music: Bo Harwood.

I am never going to be a fan of John Cassavetes's movies, and I don't care if I ever see The Killing of a Chinese Bookie again, but I have to admit that his unconventional moviemaking had a deep influence on American movies. What could be more conventional, after all, than a film about a club owner forced by the mob into assassinating a rival mob leader? It's the stuff of 1940s film noir, and of countless movies afterward. But Cassavetes's unconventional approach to conventional material obviously exerted an influence on directors like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, to name only the best. The club owner is Cosmo Vitelli, played superbly by Ben Gazzara, who runs up gambling debts he can't start to pay. So the mobsters agree to forgive the debt if he will kill their chief rival, the Chinese bookie of the title, who turns out to be the capo di tutti capi in L.A.'s Chinatown. (The film was made two years after Roman Polanski had Jake Gittes told to forget it.) And although a full plot summary would reveal its conventional bones, it's what Cassavetes, along with the improvisatory crew of actors and his freewheling cameramen, does with the material that matters. Cosmo's club, for example, is a strip joint with a master of ceremonies called Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts), who resembles Joel Grey's M.C. of the Kit Kat Klub in Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) only in that he's heavily made up and a bit epicene. As the girls sashay about topless in shabby costumes, he sings (very badly) sentimental oldies like "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," "After the Ball," and "Imagination." The effect is gruesomely hilarious, a tone that persists throughout the film. When Cosmo sets out to accomplish his murderous mission, he's been provided with a stolen car that's been hot-wired, so he can't stop anywhere once he's started. But the car blows a tire in the middle of freeway traffic, eliminating that part of the plans. Nevertheless, he persists, calling a cab to get him closer to the target. First, however, he has to buy a dozen hamburgers to feed and quiet the guard dogs, but the waitress argues with him that he really doesn't want them all put unwrapped in a single bag. These mishaps are the stuff of black comedy, and they're nicely handled. But Cassavetes's improvisatory style and the somewhat dizzying hand-held closeups on the action seem more mannered than is really good for the film. There's brilliance here, especially in the performances of Gazzara and the mainstay of many Cassavetes films, Seymour Cassel, but the whole thing seems like a rough draft of a better movie.

Track 29 (Nicolas Roeg, 1988)

Track 29 (Nicolas Roeg, 1988)

Cast: Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd, Colleen Camp, Sandra Bernhard, Seymour Cassel, Leon Rippy. Screenplay: Dennis Potter. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: David Brockhurst, Curtis A. Schnell. Film editing: Tony Lawson. Music: Stanley Myers.

With directors like Luis Buñuel and David Lynch, whose films regularly stray along the boundaries between logic and the irrational, between the waking world and dreams, between sanity and madness, you can always sense a central consciousness, a coherent vision, holding the film together. This isn't the case with Nicolas Roeg's Track 29, which falls apart as it drifts into weirdness for weirdness's sake. It centers on Linda, a neglected housewife, whose physician husband, Henry, spends most of his free time in the attic playing with his model trains, and at work is having an affair with his nurse, who spanks him while wearing rubber gloves. The doctor and nurse are played by one of the odder couples ever to be seen in a movie, Christopher Lloyd and Sandra Bernhard. One day, when Linda (Theresa Russell) is having lunch with her friend Arlanda (Colleen Camp), they're joined by a young man named Martin (Gary Oldman), whom we see at the start of the film hitchhiking along a country road and later being picked up by a trucker (Leon Rippy). Martin creepily admires the trucker's "Mom" tattoo, which sets us up for the even creepier assertion that he will make to Linda that he's really the son she gave up for adoption at birth. That Oldman and Russell are almost the same age should clue you in to the fact that nothing is going to make conventional sense in Track 29. Martin arouses more than maternal passion in Linda, but he may not even exist: Although Arlanda sees him in the cafe where he makes his acquaintance with Linda, in a later restaurant scene in which Martin plays on Linda's erotic obsession, we cut from the table where they're sitting to behind the bar and share the point of view of a waiter and bartender who see her sitting alone. Oh, there's much more, including a scene in which Henry addresses the attendees at a model train collectors' convention and stirs them to a frenzy with his speech. But you get the point: Track 29 is mostly an elaborate psychosexual fantasy, but it lacks a central vision to hold it together or carry it to any kind of satisfactory conclusion. It's never daring enough to explore sexual frustration and obsession in the many imaginative ways Buñuel does in Belle de Jour (1967). It could pass as satire if there were any larger point to its fleeting moments of insight or surprise, the way Lynch's Blue Velvet, made two years earlier, uncovered the seamier side of Reagan-era complacency. As it is, it's just, well, weird. 

Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968)

Seymour Cassel and Lynn Carlin in Faces

Richard Forst: John Marley
Maria Forst: Lynn Carlin
Jeannie Rapp: Gena Rowlands
Chet: Seymour Cassel
Freddie Draper: Fred Draper
Louise Draper: Joanne Moore Jordan
Florence: Dorothy Gulliver
Jim McCarthy: Val Avery
Billy Mae: Darlene Conley
Joe Jackson: Gene Darfler

Director: John Cassavetes
Screenplay: John Cassavetes
Cinematography: Al Ruban
Film editing: Maurice McEndree, Al Ruban

I often feel like there are some very good short films struggling to get out of John Cassavetes's features. One finally emerges in Faces after what seems like hours of the drunken horseplay of middle-aged businessmen who laugh heartily at their antics and bad jokes, egged on by the party girls they have picked up. That stuff is essential to the point Cassavetes is making about the stalled lives of his characters, but it goes on much too long. There are those who defend it insistently and articulately: Without the wearying effect of these opening sequences, they argue, the poignancy of the film's later scenes, such as its quiet conclusion with the estranged husband and wife sitting in a stairwell, would not be so effective. I get the point, just as I can see how tonic Faces was in its late-1960s context -- the '60s were one of the weakest decades for American film. But the movie only comes to life for me when Lynn Carlin's Maria, suffering silently from her husband's announcement that he wants a divorce, goes to the Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood with some of her friends and comes back with the freewheeling young Chet. (Seymour Cassel, who was 30 when the movie was made, seems a little long in the tooth for the role, and because the film was released three years after it was made and after things had become shaggier and more psychedelic, Chet is a very clean-cut hippie.) Carlin's performance has a vulnerability to it that is quite touching, and when Chet wakes up to find Maria overdosed on sleeping pills, the scenes of his attempt to revive her are beautifully acted. And when Richard arrives to find Chet fleeing from Maria's bedroom, the intricate attempt of husband and wife to cope with their common adulteries and incompatibility is very well worked-out. I believe these scenes much more than I do the earlier ones of the raucous, blustery businessmen, which feel like actors working too hard to play dumber and more vulgar than they are.

Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)

I didn't get Rushmore the first time I saw it, so I thought that, having seen most of Wes Anderson's subsequent films, it was time to revisit. And yes, I get it now. The problem is that it still leaves me a little cold. Part of my trouble with the movie lies with its central character, Max Fischer, who as played by Jason Schwartzman and written by Anderson and Owen Wilson begins as such an obnoxious twerp that it's hard to switch allegiance when the film eventually turns him into a sympathetic figure. It's difficult, too, to see why Olivia Williams's character, Miss Cross, puts up with him so long. My suspicion is that Williams didn't quite understand what Anderson and Wilson were going at with her part -- maybe she didn't get Rushmore either. As a result, we see her torn between two inappropriate suitors, Schwartzman and Bill Murray, but playing her part as a conventional romantic comedy heroine. Fortunately, everyone else in the cast, including such splendid actors as Seymour Cassel and Brian Cox, is completely into the loopy world that Anderson has created. There are those who think that in his later movies Anderson has either gone too cutesy or atrophied into a kind of zaniness for zaniness's sake, but I'm not one of them. I think he has learned how to superimpose his eccentric stories on the real world so that they work as the kind of satiric commentary that doesn't quite come off in Rushmore.