The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Original Theatrical Cut)

Opens Friday, January 23, 2026

Please note we will also screen the 1978 version, which can be found here.

John Cassavetes’ love letter to the art of theater, inside a neo-noir take on the sleazy ‘70s Southland!

In what other film would a waitress from famed post-hippie L.A. restaurant The Source take her morning break next door to audition for Ben Gazzara’s bizarro performance-art strip club? When his high-flying lifestyle owes debts to a sinister syndicate (led by Seymour Cassel and a wonderfully mushy Timothy Carey), he’s given a tough choice: knocking off a Chinese “bookie” or losing his beloved theatre.

Cassavetes renders all of this with a hallucinatory eye, subverting genre conventions with his unsettled rhythms and a sweetly absurdist tone. Likewise, Gazzara perfectly embodies the fractured, contradictory persona of a character as much filled with frailty and vice as he is with ambition and integrity.

“A movie about a testy, outsider artist and his gang of misfit collaborators, the John Cassavetes biopic once-removed.” -WBUR

• Country USA
• Year 1976
• Running Time 135 minutes
• Format DCP
• Distributor AGFA
• Director John Cassavetes
• Cast Ben Gazzara, Timothy Carey, Seymour Cassel, Morgan Woodward, Azizi Johari
• Accessibility Assistive Listening, T-Coil

IFC Center does not generally provide advisories about subject matter or potentially triggering content in films, as sensitivities vary from person to person. In addition to the synopses, trailers and other links on our website, further information about content and age-appropriateness for specific films can be found on Common Sense Media, IMDb and DoesTheDogDie.com as well as through general internet searches.