John Cassavetes' The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie is a film that is one of those overlooked gems that is not only a great film, but a great record of its time, even if it might have more properly been titled The Murder Of A Chinese Bookie. As much as I love the early, raw films of Martin Scorsese- who reputedly thought up this tale with Cassavetes a few years earlier, no film I've ever seen so perfectly captures the mid-1970s Underworld as I knew it as a child. There is a sense that on can even smell the cheap liquor and cigaret smoke that pervades its images. While Scorsese's Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas are also great films, they are so highly stylized, scored, and choreographed that they attain mythic qualities, and are shorn of much of the realism Cassavetes' filmic world inhabits. What set Cassavetes apart from his contemporary American peers was that his films did not mythologize- they simply depicted. In this sense, he did for modern urbanity what German filmmaker Werner Herzog does for historical films- i.e.- brings them down to 'eye level realism'. He also depicted his society with the same level of universal realism as Yasujiro Ozu did Post-War Japan.<br /><br />In watching the two versions of this film, made available as part of The Criterion Collection's five disk John Cassavetes Five Films collection- the original 135 minute 1976 release, and the 109 minute 1978 re-release, one also gets a good representation of how greatness can be achieved. The longer version has only a few scenes more than the shorter version, and some of the same scenes go on a bit longer, but the tale is basically the same, for the extra scenes- while interesting, are not essential; such as Cosmo's banter with a cabby about their New York pasts, a tale on a gopher tail's causing botulism, and scenes outside a club. Even though the order of several scenes change, or are altered a bit, and there are a few segments unique to the 1978 version, the editing on the later version is generally superior. Rarely has a film- either version, cored so deeply into masculinity and the idea of territoriality. The longer version features a deeper portrait of the film's main character, Los Angeles strip club owner Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara)- a low man in the Underworld, and greater details his connections to the mobsters of the old guard who resent the rising criminal power of different ethnic groups.<br /><br />The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie succeeds as a great piece of cinema because its lead character is one of the most realistically drawn characters in film history- he's a thug and a killer, yet one who is explicable. He is a businessman who cannot separate work from personal lives- his girlfriend is the bar's top stripper, and twenty or more years his junior. Yet, it is not a film noir, as so often called, for Cassavetes transcends the simpleminded techniques of that genre, and delivers a film of intellectual heft and psychological breadth, where murder blossoms from the seemingly most inane, perfunctory, and inconsequential of moments, and leads to an examination of masculinity and territoriality that has no peers in film. Sometimes his scenes go on a tad too long, but, like Walt Whitman's poetry, there is beauty and strength in even his excesses- something that many other so-called artists' most focused works lack. Cassavetes consistently served up his art at 'the grown ups table,' as Woody Allen called drama vis-à-vis comedy, but so few film fans are used to real, or pure, drama, for Hollywood has so dissolved their minds with mid-level melodramas, that they simply are overwhelmed by his best films audacious pseudo-verité. That The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie may be his very best film is all the explanation needed for its lack of popularity in a deliterate age.