Francis Ford Coppola: On Stories and Technology

Francis Coppola’s breakthrough came with The Godfather (1972), an enormously successful adaptation of Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name. A big box-office hit, The Godfather was also praised by critics and was ranked third on the American Film Institute’s 1998 list of the top 100 American films of all time. 

A violent, dramatic, mythic exploration of a Mafia family, The Godfather revolutionised the gangster film, but it is also the story of a family, notably of a father and his three sons. Marlon Brando won the Academy Award for best actor for his portrayal of Vito Corleone. John Cazale, James Caan, and Al Pacino played his sons and Robert Duvall his trusted confidante. Coppola was nominated for best director, and he and Puzo won the award for best adapted screenplay.

Financially secure to make a more personal film, Coppola wrote, directed, and produced The Conversation (1974), a meditation on the power of technology. starring Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert. The concept of having power, desiring control, and eventually succumbing to the illusion of control is skillfully handled by Coppola in The Conversation. We, the audience, are invited to follow and eavesdrop on Harry Caul, a surveillance specialist hired to film a discussion between two young individuals in Union Square. Caul succeeds in his attempt, but given the complexity of the undertaking, he is left with three partial recordings that he must merge into a single useable cassette, a process that involves a great deal of technical sound play if he is to collect critical information parts and pieces. One specific line he unearths convinces him that the two are in danger, and he rapidly understands that turning in the recordings is precisely what would put them in danger. What follows is a long and methodical unravelling of both the problem Caul is attempting to solve and Caul's psychological predicament.

Coppola followed up with his acclaimed sequel The Godfather: Part II (1974) and won that year’s Academy Award for best picture. Moving both forward in time through the 1950s and back to the early years of the 20th century, Godfather II framed the events in The Godfather with overlapping stories that focus on the immigrant struggle for survival in America that was at the root of the first film. Coppola won the award for best director and shared the best screenplay award with Puzo.

At the height of his success Coppola undertook the onerous mission of filming Apocalypse Now (1979), which transposed Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War with a script by Coppola, John Milius, and Michael Herr. The novel's Kurtz evolves into an American colonel who has fled his command and is waging the war on his own terms with an army of renegades. Another officer is sent into the jungle to put a stop to this apparent defection by killing Kurtz. The picture won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and went on to win an Academy Award. Reviewers and the general audience were mesmerised by the film's drug-infused surrealism and dark humour.

Francis Coppola is an ardent advocate of new audiovisual forms and technology. While he went on to direct such mainstream films as Peggy Sue Got Married [1986] and Gardens of Stone [1987], Coppola nevertheless proceeded to invest time and money in promoting video and, ultimately, in an entirely new, largely electronic means of production for storytelling. And he makes no bones about it—if he could revolutionize the film industry and all current means of popular entertainment and mass communication, he would do it. 

Not only that, he sees such an opportunity as one that would thoroughly revamp society and the prevailing political structures, both of which he is eager to do. Yet, as grandiose as these aspirations are, Coppola is clearly not interested in power and influence for its own sake. As this interview with Ric Gentry shows, Coppola is nothing if not a humanitarian and an idealist.

RIC GENTRY: In your work, are you more interested in the form and the technology than in the content?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: I am. In particular, I’m interested in what kind of content the technology can produce. I’ve been trying to find a way to create new narrative patterns based on the times and the technology for a long time. It’s also very difficult for me to maintain an interest in the traditional stories of old that get recycled into things we see today.

The climate of our times is very tired. It’s not that we have fewer ideas so much as something in the culture that doesn’t allow itself new approaches. Technology is delivering new values that have yet to be tapped. We’ve got all this new stuff and people aren’t looking at the obvious, which is that something totally new in terms of stories can come about. Instead, we use the advances in technology to reproduce and reiterate what we’ve already seen, what’s been done in terms of form for cen- turies. I think it’s time we catch up with the tools that have been invented.

The truth is I am interested in a content that I cannot get at. I yearn to be able to move into a world where my ideas connect into a pattern that could be identified as a story. But I truly cannot get there. It’s equally difficult for me to recycle the old stories of the past as most movies do today.

RG: So in a way you’re saying that advances in technology are synonymous with new ways of seeing and thinking, and therefore our traditional stories, structurally at least, are sort of culturally redundant and, in every way—sociologically, psychologically, artistically—unvitalizing.

FFC: What I’m saying is that technology, if used in new ways, might break up the monopoly certain imagery, certain icons, have on our attention. I think we could see a less homogenized view of things, and we’ll have to if there’s going to be a shake-up in our current political thinking. There’s something in our politics as old, as dated, as those stories from ancient times that get endlessly recycled.

With a new technology comes a tidal wave of new givens, new ideas, new beliefs, and most important, a new group of rulers. I hate to use such an archaic word for it but that’s what they are—rulers. Whether they are the high priests of the powerful and entrenched world religion, or the lords who control the land and the agriculture, the merchant seamen, conquistadors, the captains of the Industrial Revolution, they are our rulers. They and their ideas move out when progress moves them out by changing the nature of where power comes from.

I am beginning to have the thought that my primal interest in technology is a temporary phase—a vehicle—not unlike the ships of ancient explorers taking us from the Old World to a new continent of content and story. At that time I fantasize of leaving the old ship and moving into still another area of art and thinking.

RG: I get the impression, and Faerie Tale Theatre seems to confirm this, that artificial situations, theatrical ones, are better suited to creative video than location work, which is better for a movie. So ultimately, video is less spontaneous.

FFC: In the case of movies, like Rumblefish [1983], you can do wonderful neat stuff. Those of us who were first attracted to movies always had those few shots that, when they came back from the lab, you were more anxious to see how they came out. It’s just that I reached a point, not long ago, where I was no longer interested in that. I was very much interested in the new medium that was going to be approaching as the years went by, a kind of electronic cinema. Not quite television, but some modern version of that—advanced video, or high resolution, whatever you want to call it. I got involved with “Rip Van Winkle” just so I could continue to learn, try out a few ideas, and do my best.

Also, the process is very enjoyable. It didn’t take very long—like a week of rehearsal and then you were shooting—and that meant the focus was more on acting and ideas than on this kind of slow molasses method of making some movies. Personally, I really enjoyed myself a lot. It was like doing a play in college. But I would love to do a fable that was very realistic and then one that was realistic and maybe live, without any cinema editing at all.

RG: Do you have any ideas of how to implement that?

FFC: No. I mean, if someone said to me, “Francis, how would you like to do The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial on TV and do it live?,” I would do it. Of course, I’d rather do something original from a book or some story. But I would take any opportunity. I would love to direct for even a few months. I can’t, but I’d like to do a soap opera. That’s my dream.

RG: Just because you could work quickly?

FFC: Just to learn about it, basically. They say that a person really has one idea or two in his lifetime. I am working up to mine, and I feel it has very much to do with television and live-style television and twenty-four-track recording style. It has to do with a type of television evolved because of advances not only in video, but in computer science and all sorts of systems and electronics.

RG: Maybe you could have a group, maybe Faerie Tale Theatre is a prototype of such an organization.

FFC: They just did the fairy tales, but they were able to turn out a full-blown dramatic production every six weeks using the resources of video, cinema, matting, and all the aids to production and then, of course, found a way to sell it, to get sponsorship. That’s a really exciting thing to be connected with.

RG: But what about this idea that you’re working toward? Do you think there’s an idea that is synonymous with the new technology that isn’t evident yet?

FFC: I don’t talk about the types of work I would do because it’s easier to talk about the technology. The idea is very hard to explain. I could probably explain it to you very well if we spent hours and hours and said, “OK, let’s start from the beginning.” But the truth, it’s still coming into focus for me.

Basically, what I’m really interested in is becoming a writer of original, full-length dramatic material for an audiovisual medium, whatever it is. I’d be very interested in being a writer who could sit down, as I’m doing here, to explore to the best of my ability whatever my ideas and fantasies are, and then to know that I have a way to do it and to actually produce it for a cost that is not prohibitive, that is not so much that they won’t let me do it. It’s like a writer who wanted to have the theatre company of his dreams...

It’s interesting. When I was fifteen, I wanted to be a playwright. I didn’t know if I could be a good playwright, but that just suited me to a tee. And I tried writing plays, and they were never any good. But finally, just being good at science, I was the guy who ran the light board for the shows at school, and that’s how I got to be in that crowd. And then, putting up the lights on the ladder, I would look down and watch them rehearsing and see the director and say, I could do as well as that. So I started directing, but I started directing sort of on the same level as starting on the light board.

But what I really wanted to be was a writer... But then one day I went to see a movie at four o’clock in the afternoon. It was Eisenstein’s Ten Days that Shook the World [1928]. I had never heard of him, but I was so overwhelmed by this film that I said, I want to be a movie director. So, I did. I became a movie director. But then, a few years ago, after Apocalypse, what I really wanted to do was a kind of super television. Television taken to its full potential to be able to interpret dramatic subjects. That’s why I want a studio and I want to make that studio an electronics studio, so that some day it would have a company of actors, and it would have a means to essentially be a glorified Faerie Tale Theatre. I tried to have that studio and maybe it got pretty much out of hand, it was so big. But even so, whether it’s big or small, now I know that I want to work in this new medium and learn about it.

RG: I get the impression most filmmakers have some kind of phobia about video, that there’s something they think they might lose in the transition. Maybe that’s because video is in some sort of incipient stage of development.

FFC: It is in a new phase of development. More importantly, people in their time are ruled much more by social conditions. It’s enough to turn people off that video is considered kind of second class and cinema is the big deal. Television has been regulated and it’s been said that we don’t have exciting original work done for television so much, that people shy away from it. But that shouldn’t give the medium itself a bad name. I almost wish we had a new name for television because it’s waiting for the new artists in the country—writers and actors and directors. It’s going to be their instrument....

RG: How does this lead up to your use of video for Apocalypse Now?

FFC: With Apocalypse Now, since we were in those very difficult jungle locations, we found that we were never able to view any of the work. Dealing with projection was very tough. So we started to transfer the rushes to video. The video was actually transferred in L.A., but we bought a couple of those very first Beta 1 machines. I had one in a little hut and I used to get these cassettes and plug them in and see it. After a while, I was lugging this Beta around. I even put it on a houseboat float- ing down the river so we were able to see material and make decisions for reshoot- ing and that kind of thing. Then a very interesting use developed when we got this job of making Godfather I [1972] and Godfather II [1974] into a special television feature for NBC. They were willing to pay a lot for it. I was in the Philippines, so the editor arrived with all the Godfather I and Godfather II on tape. It was funny because there were big typhoons and we were running around with this Beta machine in helicopters. Whenever we stopped we would use the Betamax to make decisions since we didn’t have editing capabilities. At one point, we landed in some bombed-out place in the helicopter. We couldn’t get any 110 [electrical current] because we didn’t have a transformer. So, a helicopter pilot went into the kitchen where there was a washer/dryer and literally ripped the transformer off the wall. We plugged it in and that’s how we made that NBC special.

RG: Do you think there will be the money and the channels, literally and figuratively, for the number of aspiring writers and video makers to get into and make an impact?

FFC: To predict how it’s going to be for artists in the future. . . . It’s not so much, “What could it be for the artists?” Because you have to go back and wonder about the history of the industry itself. It depends on who’s running it, but it seems that the new video is something like television after World War II. It’s something that really would connect with the writing talent, the design talent, the acting tal- ent of the country if only there was a way for the three to come together. Right now, television is controlled, if not by the networks then the big cable companies, and if not by them, then by the big video cassette companies. It’s a business like fast food. It’s not like a national cultural interest. So it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen.

RG: Getting back to your story concept, the one you’re working toward. Aren’t there any contemporary issues or stories that stimulate you enough to say, “This is a new story,” even if it’s told with traditional beginning, middle and end? For instance, the nuclear threat.

FFC: No. I’m so bored with all those kinds of political films. I don’t think it’s the way to change the world and I don’t think it’s the way to deal with the issues. I feel that it’s chipping away with a spoon at a wall so big. All the well-worn political issues that people choose to think they’re being relevant and constructive with do not interest me. It’s mainly that they announce themselves as political films. I like political work that sneaks up on you. I admire, to a small extent, those people. But I feel, in a way, that it isn’t revolutionary work at all. That’s like establishment revolutionary. We all know, at any given time that there are worthy causes related to either disarmament or peace. And then there’s establishment press and movie business—but it’s all entrenched, even the political areas. I’m interested in an area that is perhaps so radical that people don’t even see it as political yet.

RG: Have you always felt this way? Or has it evolved over the years?

FFC: I’ve always been really turned off by the current political issues of the day. I find that people who gravitate toward that are, for the most part, just another version of the people who are in the establishment. I find them inordinately interested in power, fame, and money. I feel that they just see that as an area that’s available and they go in there and rabble rouse. I don’t respect them for the most part.

– Francis Ford Coppola. Interviewed by Ric Gentry. In Gerald Duchovnay (ed): Film Voices

Federico Fellini: On Dreams, Fantasies and Solitude

Federico Fellini: I Vitelloni

Having avoided conscription during the Second World War (apparently because his medical records were destroyed by Allied bombing), Fellini began a productive association with Rossellini, the founder of Italian neo-realism, who favoured location to studio and used non-professional actors.

Together they made such classics as Rome, Open City (1945), Paisa (1946) and Amore (1948), in which Fellini played a tramp hailed as a saint. He went on to work on Lights of Variety (1950), a gentle satire on the pretensions of a theatrical troupe, before making his debut as sole director with The White Sheik (1951), a charming romantic comedy about a woman trapped in a dull marriage who becomes infatuated by the hero of a photo-strip adventure.

Fellini's next work, I Vitelloni (1953), a study of five small-town layabouts with variously frustrated dreams of escape, achieved greater critical success. It signalled the beginning of his departure from neo-realism, and of a more overtly autobiographical tone.

The contract between a coarse sexuality and a cerebral innocence provided the central conflict of La Strada (1954), which some critics have called "the first road movie". Featuring Giulietta Masina as a brutalised waif rescued from a travelling circus by Anthony Quinn (who buys her for a plate of pasta), it brought Fellini his first Oscar.

Il Bidone (1955) and Notti di Cabiria (1957) also contrasted material corruption with innocence. In the latter Masina's superb performance as a "tart with a heart" made up for a certain waywardness of construction.

Fellini's international reputation was established with La Dolce Vita (1960). An extravagant and sprawling satire on the decadence of the international beau monde, it followed a womanising journalist (Mastroianni) around a Rome abandoned to orgies, the worship of film stars and the marketing of religion. And yet Fellini's picture isn't just about the surface; it's also about what lies underneath. The sparkle and glitter are enjoyable, and the film never sleeps. Often, the morning arrives as the characters make their way home. However, Fellini was as contradictory as the youthful / old nation from which he sprung. Moving decisively away from his roots as a writer for neorealist godfather Roberto Rossellini, Fellini infatuation with the bizarre, operatic, carnival, and circus, are on full display here. The holy and profane collide in the film's opening scene, when a statue of Christ is helicoptered to the Vatican, its shadow passing over newly constructed houses and females sunbathing on rooftops.

His next film, 8 1/2 (1963), is widely reckoned his masterpiece. The conventional explanation of the cryptic title is that the director's seven completed films and assorted cinematic oddments added up to a little over eight films in all – but Fellini told one interviewer that the title referred to the age at which he lost his virginity. The film concerned the efforts of a director lionised as a genius (Mastroianni as Fellini's alter ego) to complete his latest work. Its heavy use of symbolism and confusion of fantasy and reality became hallmarks of Fellini's later style. Now recognised as one of the finest films about film ever made, it marks the moment when the director's always-personal approach to filmmaking fully embraced self-reflexivity, pioneering a stream-of-consciousness style that darts exuberantly between flashbacks, dream sequences, and carnivalesque reality, and transforming one man's artistic crisis into a grand cinematic epic. Marcello Mastroianni stars as Guido Anselmi, a filmmaker whose new project, along with his life, is crumbling around him as he battles creative block and desperately juggles the ladies in his life, including Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, and Claudia Cardinale. The Beautiful Confusion was an early working title for 812, and Fellini's masterwork is just that: a dazzling dream, a circus, and a magical performance.

Fellini increasingly favoured material with possibilities for visual extravagance, as in Satyricon (1967) – a muddled portrayal of sexual decadence in ancient Rome, loosely based on the novel by Petronius.

Sometimes he completely abandoned the exterior world for one of his own imagining, as in Fellini's Roma (1972), a formless ramble around a surreal version of his adopted city.

The following interview with Bert Cardullo took place in Milan, Italy, during the summer of 1986, not long after the release of Ginger and Fred.

BERT CARDULLO: Signor Fellini, tell me a little about your background and your first film job.

FEDERICO FELLINI: I reached the cinema through screenplays, and these through my collaboration on humorous publications—Marc’ Aurelio especially—for which I wrote stories and columns in addition to drawing cartoons. If, one day in 1944, Roberto Rossellini hadn’t invited me to collaborate on the screenplay of Rome, Open City, I would never even have considered the cinema as a profession. Rossellini helped me go from a foggy, apathetic period in my life to the stage of cinema. It was an im- portant encounter but more in the sense of my future destiny than in the sense of influence. As far as I’m concerned, Rossellini’s was an Adamlike paternity; he is a kind of forefather from whom many of my generation descend. Let’s just say I was open to this particular endeavor, and he ap- peared at the right time to guide me into it. But I wasn’t thinking of becoming a director at this juncture. I felt I lacked the director’s propensity to be tyrannically overpowering, coherent and fussy, hardworking, and— most important—authoritative on every subject: all endowments missing from my temperament. The conviction that I could direct a film came later, when I was directly involved on one and could no longer pull out.

After having written a number of screenplays for Rossellini, Pietro Germi, and Alberto Lattuada, I wrote a story called Variety Lights. It contained my recollections of when I toured Italy with a variety troupe. Some of those memories were true, others invented. Two of us directed the film: Lattuada and myself. He said “camera,” “action,” “cut,” “everyone out,” “silence,” etc. And I stood by his side in a rather comfortable yet irresponsible position. The same year, 1950, I wrote a story called The White Sheik together with Tullio Pinelli. Michelangelo Antonioni was supposed to direct the film, but he didn’t like the screenplay, so Luigi Rovere—the producer—told me to film it. I can therefore unequivocally state that I never decided to be a director. Rovere’s rather reckless faith induced me to become one.

The vocation itself was altogether rather mysterious to me. As I said, my temperament led me elsewhere. Even today, when a film is finished, I find myself wondering how the devil I could have been so active, gotten so many people into motion, made a thousand decisions a day, said “yes” to this and “no” to that, and at the same time not have fallen madly in love with all those beautiful women that actresses are.

BC: Apart from women, how do you find inspiration in our mediocre times? Or perhaps you don’t find that we are constantly surrounded by mediocrity.

FF: No, it’s a barbaric era all right. People say this is an era of transition, but that’s true of every period. Certainly we have no more myths left. The Christian myth doesn’t seem to be able to help humanity anymore. So, we’re waiting for a new myth to comfort us. But which one? Nonetheless, it’s very interesting to live at a time like this. We must accept the time in which we live. We have no choice. Having said that, I feel that my mission in life, my vocation if you will, is to be a witness; and if your life consists of such testimony, you have to accept what you witness. Sure, you can be nostalgic about the past and how great it was, and you can lament the erosion of values, but there’s no point in doing that. From a generational point of view, I’m aware that there’s a certain regret about things past, but I personally try to live with the confidence that the future will assimilate the past. The past will transform itself into the future, so in a sense it will be relived—not in regret, but as part and parcel of the world to come.

BC: Does this vision of yours have to do with your looking into an interior reality rather than an exterior one? Are the dreams and fantasies of which an interior reality consists the basis of your inspiration?

FF: I don’t dwell too much on what it is that inspires me. Instead I have to be in touch with my delusions, my discomforts, and my fears; they provide me the material with which I work. I make a bundle of all these, along with my disasters, my voids, and my chasms, and I try to observe them with sanity, in a conciliatory manner.

BC: What are you afraid of, if I may ask?

FF: I’m afraid of solitude, of the gap between action and observation in which solitude dwells. That’s a reflection on my existence, in which I attempt to act without being swept away by the action, so as to be able to bear witness at the same time. I fear losing my spontaneity precisely because of such testimony or witnessing, because of my habit of con- stantly analyzing and commenting. I also fear old age, madness, decline. I fear not being able to make love ten times a day...

BC: Do you make films because solitude ranks high among your fears?

FF: Making films for me is not just a creative outlet but an existential expression. I also write and paint in isolation, in an ascetic manner. Perhaps my character is too hard, too severe. The cinema itself is a miracle, though, because you can live life just as you tell it. It’s very stimulating. For my temperament and sensibility, this correlation between daily life and the life I create on screen is fantastic. Creative people live in a very vague territory, where what we call “reality” and “fantasy” are disjointed— where one interferes with the other. They both become one and the same thing. In sum, I enjoy telling stories with an inextricable mixture of sincerity and invention, as well as a desire to astound, to shamelessly confess and absolve myself, to be liked, to interest, to moralize, to be a prophet, witness, clown . . . to make people laugh and to move them. Are any other motives necessary?

BC: Not really! Let’s talk now about the description of your early films as socially realistic, while your later ones are described as more hallucinatory.

FF: You could call hallucination a “deeper reality.” Critics have a need to categorize and classify. I don’t see it that way. I detest the world of labels, the world that confuses the label with the thing labeled. I just do what I have to do. Realism is a bad word, in any event. In a sense, everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real; I see much reality in the imaginary.

John Cassavetes: The Art of Narrative

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Directed by John Cassavetes)

John Cassavetes was resolutely independent, and found it impossible to deal with commercial conventions and Hollywood expectations, choosing to focus on the intricacies and complications of human relationships. He created characters who were driven toward conflict with their friends, lovers, family, colleagues, and themselves, a conflict rooted in their desires and struggles for freedom and love.

Because of Cassavetes' creative brilliance, his actors became indistinct from the characters he created. By providing the necessary circumstances for his actors to "breathe life" to the characters they were portraying, Cassavetes opened up new avenues of vision for his movies. He argued that "stylistic unity drains the humanity out of a text,” while “the stories of many different and potentially inarticulate people are more interesting than a contrived narrative that exists only in one articulate man’s imagination." The distinct characters featured in the movies directed by Cassavetes are among the most memorable in all of world cinema.

Cassavetes was formidable in his investigation of the range and mystery of human emotion, the structure and performative nature of subjectivity and the ways we relate to each other. The complexity of personalities that come to the fore in Cassavetes’s films imbues them with a startling realism that confronts traditional narrative structure to portray the underlying complications of life itself.

The most psychically and aesthetically tormented of the films he wrote and directed, John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a work that is painfully at odds with its own identity as a crime film, while also portraying a central character who is a fractured mirror version of Cassavetes himself. Whether it was his contempt for the material, which started out as an attempt to produce an entertaining genre piece, the hasty pre-production, or the strength of his preoccupation with and admiration for actors and artists, at whatever level, Cassavetes' vision for Chinese Bookie started to collapse almost straight after shooting started. His instinctive drive toward cinematic expressionism—to create profoundly insular artistic realms in which time and traditional story lines cease to exist —destabilized the carefully crafted script, as did the rushed post-production, that resulted in a film that ultimately failed to live up to Cassavetes’ intention of delivering a straight, uncomplicated gangster story. Indeed, Cassavetes was painfully accurate in his assessment of his artistic proclivities when he said that "If I created a gangster picture, I would have to make it pure entertainment, since that is what we demand from that particular genre, which is a distinct American art form. I'm not sure I'm capable of pure entertainment.”

The tensions growing throughout his career of impressively strong independent films (Shadows, Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence) could no longer be sustained during the conception and production of Chinese Bookie. These opposing forces—the desire to please financiers and audiences with uncomplicated genre entertainments against the desire to make complex and performance-driven character studies, with the latter eschewing the tropes of sex and violence that the former would require—collided and could not be worked around, destroying Cassavetes' original plan for the film and transforming it into something altogether strange, mesmerising and different.

And yet, because of its very chaos, Bookie is a masterpiece. With its gaudy, improvisatory story of a performer attempting to please his audience, but caught up in the mess of his own desires, while he hurtles out of control through a story that he cannot control, the world of both Cosmo and his creator John Cassavetes, fuse into a living, breathing testament to the nobility of artistic endeavour itself.

The following essay by Philip Lopate examines the theme of narrative and personality in one of Cassavetes’s greatest and brilliant films, ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie’ from 1976.

In John Cassavetes’s personal cinema, the director was always trying to break away from the formulas of Hollywood narrative, in order to uncover some fugitive truth about the way people behave. At the same time, he took seriously his responsibilities as a form-giving artist, starting with a careful script (however improvised in appearance). Nowhere was the tension between Cassavetes’s linear and digressive, driven and entropic tendencies more sharply fought out than in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), one of his most fascinating achievements.

Following up his success with A Woman Under the Influence, the director thought it might be interesting to try a gangster picture to stretch himself, in effect by exchanging the domestic suburbia of quarreling married couples for a more raffish milieu, and meeting the audience halfway with some traditional Hollywood entertainment values associated with the genre: suspense, murder, double crosses, topless dancers. An amiable, courtly nightclub owner, Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara), already in debt to loan sharks, indulges his unfortunate weakness for drinking and gambling, and ends up owing twenty-three thousand dollars to gangsters, who demand that he pay off the debt by executing a competitor of theirs, a mob boss whom they inaccurately describe as a Chinese bookie. The story obeys the step-by-step fatalism of an unfolding nightmare, whereby small mistakes and temptations lead to deeper consequences, such as can be found in classic film noirs with Edward G. Robinson, Glenn Ford, and Jean Gabin. Looked at purely as narrative, there is surprisingly little waste in the script: each scene advances and intensifies the central dramatic situation. Cassavetes even fulfills the genre contract with action sequences (rare for him) that involve shootings, chases, and sinister, underlit garages, perhaps drawing on his own experience as an actor in crime movies. On the other hand, the film’s enduring power comes across most in subtle details of setting and character that play against, or in inertial counterpoint to, these obligatory propulsive scenes.

Cosmo’s strip club, the Crazy Horse West, functions as a viscous flypaper to which the film keeps attaching itself, where time dawdles and dilates in a constant night. (Cassavetes insisted these nightclub scenes be shot through gels, which created stylized pools of isolating red or blue light for the owner-impresario to walk through.) Cosmo has gilded his tawdry peep show with a series of fantasy backdrops, all introduced by the dumpy, epicene master of ceremonies, Teddy, professionally known as Mr. Sophistication, who “takes” the audience to exotic locales. Unforgettably portrayed by the Hollywood screenwriter Meade Roberts, Mr. Sophistication belongs to that tribe Dostoy­evsky called “the insulted and the injured.” He oozes affronted, buffoonish humiliation. But he also epitomizes the needy, oversensitive artist – a self-parody by Cassavetes – who is hungry for the spotlight but believes himself fundamentally homely and unloved. Teddy’s theme song, “Imagination,” becomes the film’s bleak anthem.

At bottom, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a character study of its grinning, self-estranged protagonist, Cosmo, a small-time, rough-around-the-edges businessman trying to maintain an invented persona of Mr. Lucky suavity and charm. The corsages he brings each of his “lovely ladies” – rounding them up as escorts to the gambling joint Ship Ahoy, where they will be forced to witness his defeat – are the perfect expression of his self-conscious, formal punctilio and hunger for class. Gazzara turns in a brilliant performance as the unhappy Cosmo. (That Gazzara was unhappy himself through much of the shooting, finding it hard to sympathize with or admire his character, only reinforces our sense of Cosmo as discomfited with his chump role in life.) Cosmo seems always to be sniffing himself for something rancid or fraudulent. Trying to live up to an elegant standard of sophistication, he mutes his Sicilian street temper with a false veneer of politeness and seductive blather. In a long, revealing speech near the end, he admits that he is always betraying his real nature: “Look at me—I’m only happy when I’m angry, when I’m sad, when I can play the fool, when I can be what people want me to be, rather than be myself.” Ironically, he utters this false confession as a way to motivate the troupe to get back onstage and give the customers what they want – saying, “Choose a personality,” or in other words, Fake it for me. Even at his most sincere, he’s calculating, and even at his most calculating, he is lost, unable to decide what he is undergoing or who he is. One moment he says, “I’ve never felt better in my life”; the next moment it’s “I don’t feel too hot” (no surprise, since he has a bullet lodged in his gut).

Cassavetes clearly believed the self to be a constant bluff, a desperate improvisation launched in heavy fog. He told an interviewer: “People don’t know what they are doing, myself included. They don’t know what they want or feel. It’s only in the movies that they know what their problems are and have game plans for dealing with them.” The closest thing Cosmo has to a game plan is: the show must go on. In one hilarious scene, en route to his prospective hit job, he stops in a phone booth to check up on the evening’s performance: what number are the girls and Teddy doing? He berates his help for not knowing the acts better after all these years. At bottom he is a man of the theater, at its most Felliniesque and flea-bitten. He understands two things: “I own this joint” and “Everything takes work; we’ll straighten it out.” You do your job the best you can, even if it’s just shaking your tits onstage in the no-win ­situation life hands you. It is this sort of philosophical stoicism that informs much of the nobility in Cassavetes’s grubby universe.

The plot’s biggest gamble is to make Cosmo, this likable if screwed-up schnook, actually go through with the killing. Is it plausible that someone so seemingly decent would do such a thing? We don’t know, any more than we know enough about his past to say with certainty whether it’s even the first time he’s killed someone. But if we accept Cassavetes’s model of the self as constantly in flux – provisional, unknowable, yet susceptible to the immediate claims of duty – then we may be better able to make the leap and accept the possibility.

Cosmo’s counterpart in the gangster world is Mort, shrewdly played by that superb Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel. Morty is another character with a false self, a smiling company man hiding behind an oddly decorous manner; “Will you excuse me please? I have to freshen up,” he says to his dinner companions before ordering another rubout. Not everyone surrounding Cosmo is as empty and amoral, however. Rachel (Azizi Johari), the beautiful showgirl who is Cosmo’s lover, and her mother, Betty (Virginia Carrington), offer him an alternative of tender care. So it is all the more startling when, in a powerful scene toward the end, Betty interrupts his monologue of childhood reminiscence and sweet talk to tell him she doesn’t give a shit. “Cosmo, I think what happened was wrong,” she says, rising to full moral stature, and adds that if he won’t see a doctor to have the bullet removed, then he can’t stay in their house. Without wanting to know how he came by that bullet, she indicates to him that he represents a danger to her and her daughter, and she has an obligation to protect her family. Thus his fantasy that this black mother and daughter are his true “family” crumbles, and he retreats to the club, his only haven. So might Tony Soprano later lick his wounds in the Bada Bing! club.

In 1976, when The Killing of a Chinese Bookie was first released, it bombed at the box office, much to Cassavetes’s disappointment. Critics found it disorganized, self-indulgent, and unfathomable; audiences took their word for it and stayed away. Today, the film seems a model of narrative clarity and lucidity; either our eyes have caught up to Cassavetes or the reigning aesthetic has evolved steadily in the direction of his personal cinematic style. Now we are more accustomed to hanging out and listening in on the comic banality of low-life small talk; to a semidocumentary, handheld-camera, ambient-sound approach; to morally divided or not entirely sympathetic characters, dollops of “dead time,” and subversions of traditional genre expectations.

The film, seen today, generates considerable suspense, part of which comes from classic man-against-the-mob conventions: seeing how the noose of fate is tightened. Part of it, however, comes from Cassavetes’s perverse reluctance to play the game of simple entertainment, offering more complex rewards instead. An example is the scene where Cosmo stops off at a hamburger restaurant to pick up some meat with which to placate the guard dogs before murdering their owner. The waitress, a well-intentioned, matronly blonde, tries to convince her customer to take the burgers individually wrapped, so they won’t make a greasy mess. Cosmo obviously cannot share with her the real reason why he refuses this amenity and is reduced to repeating his request, with mounting frustration, while the bartender acts as a sympathetic bridge between the two. Classic gangster movies or film noirs often feature sharply etched cameos of garage attendants, hotel clerks, or hash slingers, but generally they perform a strict narrative function and then disappear. In this scene, however, the waitress goes beyond that point, threatening to pull you out of the hit-man narrative by insisting on her reality. Cosmo, looking tired and aggrieved, is being forced to acknowledge that every human has a distinct point of view – something he will again have to take into consideration soon enough, when he faces the old Chinese bookie, naked in the bathtub, before deciding whether to blow him away.

In Cassavetes’s cinema, these delays, these eruptions of the messy, frustrating, time-consuming, and inconvenient ways that everyone, bit player to star, asserts his or her right to be taken seriously, are not impediments to the plot but are the plot. This point is made clearer in the original, more leisurely (and, to my mind, better) version of the film, which lasted 135 minutes, as opposed to the second, tightened version of 108 minutes. In the longer version, we learn more odd details about the De Lovelies (the one who doesn’t like champagne, for instance) and get an introduction to the Seymour Cassel character at his most unctuously ingratiating. We are allowed to sink into the moment voluptuously, to see more stage routines in the nightclub, which reinforces Teddy’s/Mr. Sophistication’s role as Cosmo’s grotesque doppelgänger and makes for a better balance between crime and showbiz film. The shorter version is in some ways tougher, colder, more abstract, like a French policier; in the longer, exploratory version, Cosmo takes a while to seem completely lost, alienated. Both versions, however, end in the same ironic way, with Teddy mistaking his padrone’s philosophical spiel as proof that Cosmo “practices the best thing there is in this world – to be comfortable.” Cosmo goes off we know not where, bleeding, possibly to death, and we never see him again. The focus shifts back for the final time to the nightclub, where Teddy sings a despicably hostile rendition of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” to the audience (and, by extension, to us), and the last line heard in the film is a chorus girl reassuring Mr. Sophistication that they really do love him, even if he thinks they don’t. We could say the same to the now departed Mr. Cassavetes.

– Phillip Lopate: ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie: The Raw and the Cooked’. Courtesy of www.criterion.com