Cassavetes' night on the town after his "marriage trilogy" (Faces, Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence) was this filmnoir set in sleazy L. A. nightclubs, among small- and big-time mobsters and the sad gaiety of their showgirlcompanions. It's a male-fantasy dystopia to make Husbands look like childplay. Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara)is the tenuous but proud owner of a Sunset Strip-joint, The Crazy Horse West, and impresario of suchfloorshows as "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" and "Evening in Paris." Nightly he gazes upon the stage and "hisgirls" like a dad at his sleeping kids; they are family. (Even more appropriate that they should be introducedby Cosmo's decidedly unfatherly Doppleganger, the emcee Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts).) When agambling debt threatens to pull the rug from this happy if sordid home, Vitelli agrees to pay it off with asnuff job on a bothersome Chinatown bookie-who turns out to be a kingpin. Gazzara's Cosmo Vitelli is a littlelike Cosmo Topper, operating in a fog of denial and conversant with the messengers of death; or moreappropriately like The Blue Angel's Professor Unrath, propelled by bemused curiosity (and un-rath) towardhis own demise. Gazzara's performance is calculatedly unreactive, perhaps so as not to mock hischaracter's excesses of gullibility and misappropriated desire. By contrast the very human gangsters hereare a passel to pre-figure those in Gloria, adding to film noir's cannon of character-types Tim Carey'sneo-Marxist ("opium is the religion of the people"), as well as two played by longtime Cassavetesassociates Al Ruban and Seymour Cassel. Note: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie isrepeated Saturday, November 4 at 7:00.