There are several impressive repertory screenings in Chicago this weekend—Doc Films has The Godfather Part II and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, and the Music Box is showing Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet—but if I had to single out a must-see, it would be John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), which the Chicago Cinema Society will screen at the Patio Theater on Friday and Sunday from a 35-millimeter print. Like Touch of Evil, Chinese Bookie is a highly personal take on the crime film; in his Reader capsule, Jonathan Rosenbaum described the film’s antihero, a strip-club owner forced to commit the titular crime, as the director’s alter ego. Cosmo Vitelli (what a name!) is “the proud impresario and father figure of a tattered showbiz collective (read Cassavetes’s actors and filmmaking crew) who must compromise his ethics to keep his little family afloat (read Cassavetes’s career as a Hollywood actor).”
