Bryan Miller
John Cassavetes could never do anything the easy way. His career was too sprawling, too thorny, too proprietary — and often too at odds with itself — to fit neatly into the kind of celebratory retrospectives rolling out now as we reach the 50th anniversary of so many classic films from 1976, one of the most bountiful years in American cinema. If 1976 wasn’t the single best year of Cassavetes’ career, it was the most indicative — the most John Cassavetes year possible.
In ‘76, Cassavetes released his own The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and also co-starred in Elaine May’s lifelong passion project, Mikey and Nicky, as well as the disaster movie and action thriller Two-Minute Warning. Alternate versions of all three films would be released in the subsequent few years. Two would eventually be reevaluated as classics. Two-Minute Warning would not. However, the least distinguished of the trio of 1976 Cassavetes projects is essential to understanding the crooked trajectory of one of cinema’s most astonishing careers.
Calling Two-Minute Warning largely forgotten may sound dismissive, but Cassavetes wouldn’t mind if you forgot it. He might prefer it. It’s the kind of mid-tier genre offering that he would reluctantly participate in throughout the decades, all in the name of financing his own passion projects. The tedium of these programmers helped point him toward the more radical, transgressive approach that would define him as a writer and director. John Cassavetes, the iconoclast, was born from the frustrations of John Cassavetes the actor for hire, like an oyster producing pearls out of pure, sandy irritation.
Cassavetes’ disinterest in Two-Minute Warning is palpable. His primary function is to spout some exposition and look cool as hell in sunglasses. He certainly does both. The passage of time has transformed Two-Minute Warning into a fascinating artifact with tragically persistent relevance. It’s structured like a classic disaster movie, à la The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno, developing microdramas of several disparate characters before they all converge in a unifying calamity. It just so happens that Two-Minute Warning’s disaster of choice is a mass shooting at a professional football game.
John Cassavetes plays the S.W.A.T. team leader working alongside Charlton Heston’s hero cop, who is trying to root out an anonymous gunman posted on a tower overlooking a football stadium where the President of the United States is soon to be in attendance. It’s a strong setup, though the movie is somewhat hobbled by spending the vast majority of its running time getting all the major players into place and establishing the backstories of several people attending the game, including a a gambler (Jack Klugman) betting his whole life on the game, a pickpocket (Walter Pidgeon) working the crowd, a hot-headed family man (Beau Bridges), and a bickering married couple, one of whom is played by none other than Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes’ wife and constant collaborator.
Two-Minute Warning becomes shockingly modern when the crisis comes to a head in the waning moments of the game. America had experienced mass shootings before, most famously at the University of Texas in 1966 when Charles Whitman turned a clock tower into a sniper’s roost, but Two-Minute Warning’s stark depiction of random violence and subsequent panic at a crowded public event feels downright predictive of the modern American plague of gun murders, in particular the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. It caused plenty of unease in its own time; Two-Minute Warning was deemed so incendiary that not only was it heavily edited for television, but an entirely new heist plot was filmed and added into the movie to give the sniper a clear motive and mute the horrific senselessness of the killings. In American movies — and maybe just America at large — profit motive really puts a murder into context. That significantly longer TV edit is available as a special feature on Two-Minute Warning’s DVD release.
John Cassavetes is almost defiantly flat as Janet Maslin described in Newsweek as “a S.W.A.T. chief so hard-boiled he makes Charlton Heston’s police captain look like a gutless peacenik.” Rowlands, on the other hand, performs her handful of scenes with the gravitas of an actor starring in a new Arthur Miller play — or a John Cassavetes movie, for that matter. But, as Marshall Fine points out in his excellent biography Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented American Independent Film, they both only took the gig to earn the money to reinvest in their upcoming collaboration, Opening Night.
This became the theme of Cassavetes’ career, see-sawing between commercial films to earn the cash to finance his own offbeat, volatile character studies. That’s not to say he wasn’t often terrific in the projects he sometimes deemed perfunctory. There are far worse ways to kill an evening than with a triple feature of The Killers, Machine Gun McCain, and The Fury. And sometimes Cassavetes was great in great films, like Edge of the City or The Dirty Dozen. Just which acting projects he held in high esteem might surprise you, though. He had little regard for Rosemary’s Baby, where he played the scheming actor husband who sells Rosemary out to the literal devil. John Cassavetes hated Roman Polanski’s shooting style and thought the whole production was nothing but a stiff pantomime of a dime-store novel. In his book, Fine quotes Cassavetes as saying, “You can’t dispute the fact that [Polanski is] an artist, but yet you have to say that Rosemary’s Baby is not art. I think Dirty Dozen is way more artistic, you know, because it’s compulsively going forward, trying to make something out of the invent without preordaining the way the outcome is going to be.”
As ever, it was a profound belief in an experimental, improvisatory style of acting that fueled Cassavetes. The tedious, elaborate process of financing and distribution was the bane of his existence. And that’s the subject of his 1976 auteur effort, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
It’s a bit misleading to call any John Cassavetes film an auteur effort, given his approach to collaboration. His directorial debut, Shadows, was a group project involving the members of Cassavetes’ New York acting workshop. Cassavetes gave the performers a fairly simple dramatic scenario: A white man dating a Black woman who passes for white is thrown off-kilter when he meets her brother. Cassavetes constructed a narrative from the ensemble’s collective improvisations, then finished shaping a full story in the editing room.
Collaboration would continue to be an essential component of the later films, although they were not necessarily so fully improvised. (Fine notes that the script for Faces eventually ran between 250 and 300 pages.) Despite his openness to a shared vision, every Cassavetes movie is so distinctive, so immediately identifiable as his work, that it validates the auteur theory as much as his own process seems to disprove it.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is all about a man trying to stave off money troubles while collaborating with a group of fellow artists to put on a show. It just so happens that the showplace in question is at The Crazy Horse West, a dingy strip joint overseen by Cosmo Vitelli, an avuncular degenerate played by Cassavetes company regular Ben Gazzara. As the film begins, Cosmo is just climbing out from underneath one gambling debt, only to dig himself into another. He must find a way to pay back the money he gambled on credit, lest the mobsters (including character-actor legends Timothy Carey and Seymour Cassel) take over the Crazy Horse. Even as Cosmo descends into increasingly desperate situations—including carrying out the hit described in the title—he’s constantly calling the club to make sure the show is progressing exactly as instructed. Not even murder can fully distract him from his creative ambitions.
The ramshackle magic of Killing of a Chinese Bookie comes from Cassavetes’ depiction of these Crazy Horse stage shows, which are overloaded with theatrical tangents and shoddy artifice. Cosmo proudly explains to the audience that he writes all the dramatic scenarios, which tend to be amateurish travelogues to foreign locals — or at least the foreign locals as imagined by someone who’s never been there. The dancers act out these interminable skits alongside the master of ceremonies, Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts), a schlubby back-alley clown constantly sweating off white greasepaint and his drawn-on Snidely Whiplash eyebrows. Mr. Sophistication growls out morose a cappella numbers, and the girls recite strained dialogue intended to evoke stereotypes of Paris or Italy. Occasionally, they’ll flash a breast to a rowdy crowd impatient with the slipshod artistry interfering with their sex show.
John Cassavetes is absolutely sincere about his admiration for Cosmo’s dedication to his own artistic vision, which is either cluelessly or defiantly anti-commercial. At the same time, Cassavetes is also taking the piss out of himself. Cosmo, Mr. Sophistication, and the Crazy Horse dancers are obvious avatars of Cassavetes and his beloved troupe of actors, but it’s a deliberately unflattering comparison. It’s a parody and an ode tangled together in a tapestry that no doubt reeks of cigarette smoke.
The killing referenced in the title should logically be the movie’s climax, but it occurs halfway through—another perfect metaphor for John Cassavetes’ career. There’s real suspense in the scene, which maintains the neo-realist aesthetic but has the momentum of a traditional crime-drama setpiece. It is far and away the most conventionally exciting sequence of the film. But that’s not what Cosmo, or Cassavetes, is truly concerned with. For both of them, the killing is a grimly necessary divergence undertaken to facilitate the oddball art that fully consumes both the creator and his character. Cosmo shooting the Chinese bookie is the same as Cassavetes shooting Two-Minute Warning.
A two-hour-and-fifteen-minute cut of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie was released in 1976 to little fanfare, despite John Cassavetes coming off his career-defining A Woman Under the Influence two years prior. In 1978, he re-released a new edit that runs almost a half-hour shorter. It’s one of the rare director’s cuts that tightens the material rather than expands it. Which version you prefer largely depends on just how much Mr. Sophistication you want in your life. For my money, the Cassavetes-approved cut is superior for the quicker pace of the opening, and the inclusion of one of the film’s best scenes, in which Cosmo and three of his dancers sit in a banal, sunlit waiting room as the equally banal gangsters shake down fellow failed gamblers for their mounting debts. It’s the perfect antithesis of The Godfather‘s Vito Corleone doling out favors from his opulent home office on the day of his daughter’s wedding. The glamour—of mobsters, of Hollywood, of art—is gone. Or maybe it was never really there.
The gangsters are similarly unglamorous in the other film Cassavetes acted in that year, Mikey and Nicky, written and directed by the great Elaine May. John Cassavetes plays one of those schnook outlaws, Nicky, who has holed up in a seedy motel after stealing a load of cash from his gangland boss. Nicky, blotto and fully in extremis, calls his estranged best friend, Mikey (Peter Falk), for help. The film plays out over the course of a single night and the subsequent morning, as Mikey takes Nicky on a farewell tour through the city. What Nicky doesn’t know — and what the audience learns early on — is that Mikey isn’t helping Nicky escape, but rather setting him up to be killed by a bumbling hitman (Ned Beatty) who can never seem to be in the right place at the right time.
Aside from Rosemary’s Baby, Mikey and Nicky might well be the best movie Cassavetes was involved with that he didn’t direct himself. He had a tremendous working relationship with May. Both were widely considered to be brilliant, eccentric, and sometimes a pain in the ass. The fusion of their particular talents created something even greater than the sum of their formidable parts. Mikey and Nicky often plays like a John Cassavetes movie, in that the main characters have a reckless, volatile energy that makes the whole movie feel like a genuinely dangerous high-wire act. Yet, the script was very much performed as written, as evidenced by the sharp dialogue that is May’s calling card. When Nicky first catches Mikey’s attention by writing notes on hotel towels, wrapping them around liquor bottles, and throwing them out the window, Mikey bangs on the hotel door and quips, “I got your towel.” Later, when Nicky stands over his parents’ graves, he mutters, “It’s very hard to talk to a dead person. I have nothing in common.”
Carrie Courogen details the often fraught production process of Mikey and Nicky in her stellar biography, Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius. May insisted her actors stick to the scripted dialogue but encouraged them to block and perform those scenes as they saw fit, often many times over a series of long takes. That’s partly the reason May shot an astonishing 1.4 million feet of film on the project, or 259 hours of raw footage. As Courogen notes, that’s about three times as much as was needed for Gone With the Wind.
The result was a near-endless nightmare of editing, sure, but also a naturalistic piece of work that feels almost impossibly off the cuff despite some tight plotting and elegantly crafted dialogue. Falk and Cassavetes are allowed to bring the full breadth of their explosive talent to a movie that was at least as personal to May as Chinese Bookie was to John Cassavetes. It’s the best of both worlds.
That’s not how it was received. The studio was flummoxed. They expected another comedy from the director of A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid. What they got was a devastating tale of soured friendship and betrayal, filled with pathos and often brutal interactions between two characters who are each loathsome in their own ways. The studio was so confounded that the tagline on the poster was “Don’t expect to like ‘em.” And audiences didn’t, at least not at first. According to Marshal Fine, after an early screening of Mikey and Nicky, Elaine May’s A New Leaf co-star Walter Matthau observed, “That would be a good movie, if you were on a train from Vladivostok to Moscow.”
The production process certainly was tumultuous. John Cassavetes signed on to do the movie when he was still editing A Woman Under the Influence, which was released in 1974. In her book, Courogen breaks down in great detail the ordeal of finishing Mikey and Nicky, which included well over a year of editing, legal threats, and May’s alleged theft of several reels of footage. Elaine May, who is either a perfectionist or just plain indecisive, depending on who you ask, had to be all but coerced to finish the project, which the studio rather hastily released as soon as they had anything close to a finalized film, even if that cut included continuity errors. May would eventually re-edit a definitive version of the film, which is the one that has been widely available for decades.
Elaine May’s career as a director would spectacularly explode with the 1987 release of Ishtar, which for many years would be the totemic Hollywood flop. When the Kevin Costner-starring would-be summer blockbuster Waterworld became the box-office whipping boy of 1995, critics dubbed it Fishtar. John Cassavetes’ career petered out as his health declined around that same time. He stepped in as a for-hire director to finish the disastrous Big Trouble in 1986 before passing away in 1989. Nonetheless, Mikey and Nicky’s reputation continued to grow until it eventually transcended cult-classic status and just became a straight-up classic, with a vocal legion of fans and a Criterion release. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie had a similarly charmed afterlife, although Two-Minute Warning, far and away the most successful of the three movies, has lapsed into relative obscurity.
If you had to select only one John Cassavetes movie to represent his work, you’d almost certainly go with A Woman Under the Influence. It’s probably his best work overall, and the performance from Rowlands set a bar for naturalistic brilliance that actresses are still trying to clear today. But to narrow the focus to the best, most widely acclaimed incarnation of Cassavetes’ confrontational art elides the ugly truth about the practical realities of commercial filmmaking that shaped his career and his worldview, and often led to moments of brilliance in movies that were not themselves brilliant. The three Cassavetes projects released in 1976 collectively capture all of it. And what was Cassavetes dedicated to if not the truth, both ugly and sublime?
