Cassavetes' night on the town after his "marriage trilogy" (Faces, Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence) was this film noir set in sleazy L. A. nightclubs, among small- and big-time mobsters and the sad gaiety of their showgirl companions. Its male-fantasy dystopia makes 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 such floorshows as "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" and "Evening in Paris." Nightly he gazes upon the stage and "his girls" like a dad at his sleeping kids; they are family. (Even more appropriate that they should be introduced by a decidedly unfatherly Dopplegänger, the emcee Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts).) When a gambling debt threatens to pull the rug from this happy if sordid home, Vitelli agrees to pay it off with a snuff job on a bothersome Chinatown bookie-who turns out to be a kingpin. Gazzara's Cosmo Vitelli is a little like Cosmo Topper, operating in a fog of denial and conversant with the messengers of death; or more appropriately like The Blue Angel's Professor Unrath, propelled by bemused curiosity (and un-rath) toward his own demise. Gazzara's performance is calculatedly unreactive, perhaps so as not to mock his character's excesses of gullibility and misappropriated desire. By contrast, the very human gangsters here are a passel to pre-figure those in Gloria, adding to film noir's cannon of character-types Tim Carey's neo-Marxist ("opium is the religion of the people") and his cronies played by longtime Cassavetes associates Al Ruban and Seymour Cassel.