Critic Reviews

Gazzara struts like a polyester peacock, playing a doomed nightclub owner in debt to the wrong people.

Peter Bogdanovich used Gazzara in a similar part in Saint Jack (1979), but as good as that film is, it doesn't catch the exquisite warmth and delicacy of feeling of Cassavetes's doom-ridden comedy-drama.

With a heavily improvised script Cassavetes gets the most from his actors, each giving emotive performances.

A film that displays most of the faults of his kind of on-the-hoof film-making - and all the virtues.

Cassavetes captures the gambler’s fatalistic joy in playing out a tragedy of his own making to the bitter end, and, revelling in the romantic solitude of the hunter and the hunted, presents a gun battle as a metal-and-concrete ballet.

Gazzara is riveting as man who exudes cool and calm—style—while also stinking of panic.

As always, the acting is superlative. Gazzara's Cosmo catches all the paradoxes and puzzles of the character, the wired ambition and the rapture over doom.

Like a shaggy dog story operating inside a chase movie. Chinese Bookie is the more insouciant, involuted and unfathomable of the two; the curdled charm of Gazzara's lopsided grin has never been more to the point.

The jaggedness will put many people off, which is a shame, because this is a rewarding film that asks only that you stay alert and use your senses. [15 Mar 1976, p.89]

A meandering, almost impenetrable tale of sweaty strip joints and sleazy gangsters.