***SPOILER ALERT*** It's when nightclub owner Cosmo Vitelli, Ben Gazzara, finally paid off his debt to the local loan shark Marty, Al Ruban, is when his troubles really began.<br /><br />Going out to celebrate his new found freedom with his top strippers including his girlfriend Rachel, Azizi Johari,at this mob run casino "Ship Ahoy" Cosmo lost $23,000.00 mostly in credit that the casino owner John, Moran Woodward, advanced to him. Now back behind the eight ball with his nightclub "The Crazy Horse West" in danger of being taken away from him Cosmao is forced to do a hit job for John & Co. What John wants Cosmao to do is knock off this obscure Chinese bookie, Soto Joe Hugh, or better known as the Chinaman in order to square things with him.<br /><br />What Cosmo doesn't know is that he's being set up to be killed by the Chinaman who isn't a small time L.A hoodlum but the top crime boss on the West Coast! Without knowing all the facts Cosmo even if he succeeds in knocking off the Chinaman and living to tell about will then be targeted by the man, John, who contracted him to do it! A live Cosmo Vitelli is far more dangerous to John & Co. then a dead one! In that he knows, and can expose, who's behind the Chinaman's murder! Which will have the entire Chinaman mob breathing down on John & Co. necks!<br /><br />****SPOILERS****Very off beat crime drama with Cosmo on the run for his life from both the John and Chinaman's, whom he knocked off with two of his bodyguards, mob.The movie ends on a down note in that Cosmo after getting away from both John and the Chinaman's mobsters is left, from what I can see, bleeding to death outside his nightclub that he took refuge in. This after his girlfriend Rachael left Cosmo knowing that she'll end up dead if she stays. As for Cosmo he at least had the last laugh in having those who were out to murder, as well as silence, him fail miserably. Even if he didn't live long enough to see it.<br /><br />Director John Cassavettes most personal work that had his most deepest fears realized and put on the screen. Feeling that his dreams of making movies were being stolen from right under him, by the Moguls in Hollywood, Cassavettes used the metaphor of a nightclub owner, Cosmo Vitelli, to explain on film the demons that haunted him all his adult life. Actor and good friend Ben Gazzara at first turned down Cassavettes in taking the part of the doomed Cosmo Vitelli but when he was told by Cassavettes that it in fact was really about himself he did it as a favor to him. Cassavettes never was able to overcome the fears that the movie "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" brought out about his personal life. Unable to control his destructive alcoholism Cassavettes' directing career continued to go downhill together with his health dying of a massive heart attack in 1989 at the age of 59.