Pic of the Day: “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” revisited

We’ll be closing out the week by taking another look at Flo, the enigmatic muscle behind a gang of mediocre Hollywood gangsters in John CassavetesThe Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). In a film full of great close-ups, this is one of the best.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

Ara Corbett tells us in the Filmfax article “Rebels With a Cause: The Timothy Carey-John Cassavetes Partnership,” “Plans to film Confession, a script that Cassavetes wrote with his son Nick, three years later never materialized, though the plan was to reunite the acclaimed A Woman Under the Influence team of Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands along with Cassavetes’ daughter, Zoe, and Carey as a gangster named Ibizza.” Good Lord – how epic would that have been? We can only dream.

Pic of the Day: “Francis in the Haunted House” revisited

As Halloween approaches, we take another look at Hugo, hulking castle minion, in Francis in the Haunted House (1956), directed by Charles Lamont. Here he calmly assess the situation with Helen Wallace, Virginia Welles, Charles Horvath (holding the empty suit of armor) and (I’m fairly certain) Paul Cavanagh.

Francis in the Haunted House (1956)

Horvath was one of the top stuntmen in Hollywood, brawling his way through countless films and television shows from the late 1940s until his death in 1978. He and Timothy had uncredited roles in Joseph M. Newman‘s The Gunfight at Dodge City (1959). And like Tim, he worked with John Cassavetes late in his career, in A Woman Under the Influence (1974).