On this day, 52 years ago, John Cassavetes' "The Ki!!ing of a Chinese Bookie" (1974) was released in the USA. John Cassavetes explaining why he made the movie: "'A Woman Under the Influence' (1974) was the first picture I’ve had anything to do with that wasn’t made out of plain, simple feeling, but rather out of a real desire to do something in my profession. It was extremely frightening for me not to come to work out of enthusiasm and instead put myself up as something of a craftsman. Earlier films such as 'Shadows' (1958) and 'Husbands' (1970) grew out of personal experiences reaching all the way back to my childhood days. They were expressions of my innermost feelings, and now that I’ve dealt with all that, I feel obligated to view life in other terms. I want to explore other areas of human and artistic experience. I made 'The Ki!!ing of a Chinese Bookie' (1976) as an intellectual experiment– not because I am in love with it. I enjoy a more intellectual and less emotionally demanding view than in my previous work. If I can make, out of certain intellectual ideas, films that are complex in their nature, then I’m entering into new ground. And that is certainly something I look forward to. It is a film that has little to do with me and with how I feel about life. It’s interesting to me to see how other people live in our society, to look at them and ask myself, ‘Why do they do it? And how do they do it?’ Without trying to explain. The fun and challenge of the film was to imagine a self-contained world different from the one I live in: to move into it and live in it." ("Cassavetes on Cassavetes", edited by Ray Carney, 2001)