El honor de la familia Prizzi

I am not a huge fan of gangster movies even tho there are some masterpieces of the genre. And this was the main reason why I wanted to try this movie. However I didn't loved it but I found it just ok.

Charlie Partanna (Jack Nicholson) is a professional hitman that works for a Mafia clan led by Don Corrado Prizzi. One day he goes at a wedding and becomes infatuated with a gorgeous woman named Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner). They arrange a meeting and fall in love. After a while he finds out that she, too, is an hitwoman. And of course there is also the mob that orders them to kill each other when they have separate meetings. How it will unfold? Well, see the movie.

PRIZZI'S HONOR looks very good and it has a very good cast (Nicholson, Turner, Anjelica Huston in an Academy Award winning performance, Robert Loggia and William Hickey) and it also was a box-office hit back in 1985. However despite this I didn't found it that interesting and probably for two major reasons: 1) It could have been funnier (2) It's just not that full of action scenes as a gangster movie should be. Now I am not saying I hated the movie, but I found the plot very complicated and for me it was hard caring at all about these murderers. Not a must see despite being directed by John Huston, but just a time passer.

When a whole lot of his contemporaries were dead or in retirement, John Huston was still making some very good movies and even winning Oscars for family members. Prizzi's Honor was kind of a coda to his career having directing his father Walter for Best Supporting Actor for The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre in 1948, in 1945 daughter Anjelica Huston wins for Best Supporting Actress in Prizzi's Honor. That's a feat that will really be hard for any director to duplicate.

The Prizzis are your Eighties version of the Corleones, a Mafia family headquartered in Brooklyn with far reaching interests including Las Vegas like the Corleones. Jack Nicholson is Charlie Partanna, not the most polished knife in the drawer, but one of the sharpest. Mafia families inbreed more than royalty or hillbillies and Charlie's expected to marry Maerose Prizzi who is played by Anjelica Huston, the ultimate Mafia princess. He's practically been raised to be her prince consort.

But one look at the beautiful and sophisticated Kathleen Turner and Nicholson's hormones are at light-speed overdrive. But Kathleen's got a secret or two as well. She was in on a scam that took $720.000.00 from the Prizzis in Las Vegas. And in a real bow to women's liberation, something indeed from a tradition bound organization like the Mafia, she's also a hit woman with a contract on Nicholson.

Some 20 years before those marrieds Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were trying to bed and kill each other simultaneously in Mr.&Mrs. Smith, Nicholson and Turner were going at it, tongue and gun. John Huston after 30 years finally repeated a black comedy, a much better black comedy than Beat The Devil.

Besides Anjelica's win, Prizzi's Honor was up for several more Oscars in 1985 including Best Picture, Best Actor for Jack Nicholson, Best Supporting Actor for William Hickey, Best Director for John Huston and others. Prizzi's Honor is the kind of film where the jokes sneak up on you, don't expect belly laughs, but minutes after something is said, the line will kick in.

And Prizzi's Honor was a great film to have to your credit in the twilight of your career for John Huston.

This film has fallen from my 1980's assessment of "brilliant" down to "really very good". Why the slight slope off? Mostly because I think it positions itself as a comedy, but it's not particularly funny. What it is is devilishly clever, with an amazingly black heart. I'm not surprised that it's adapted from a novel by Richard Condon because it's funny kind of in the same manner as "The Manchurian Candidate" (which might even be funnier).

It's best not to even tackle the plot because even this poster feels like a spoiler to me. All of the accolades back in the 80's seemed to go to Anjelica Huston and William Hickey, partly because I think they were kind of new discoveries and turn in great, really eccentric and mannered performances. I think Nicholson and Turner deserve more praise than they got. Nicholson's rare performance as a really dumb man is wonderful, and Turner pulls off a really sunny performance as a really bleak and duplicitous character.

The mafia-comedy hardly seems like a new idea in 2009, we've seen it done well ("The Sopranos"), done alright ("Married to the Mob" or "Analyze This") and done badly (any number of films, "The Godson" for example) and it practically seems quite an established film subject, even a cliché one at this point. However, to fully understand "Prizzi's Honor" if you've seen some of the latter day mafia-comedies that followed it, you have to understand that at one point it was a novel idea to make a movie where mafia dons and hit men were comedic fodder.

If you approach "Prizzi's Honor" expecting it to pick up where its successors left off, you're bound to be disappointed and will likely find it slow and its jokes stale. It's important to remember that this was the first major production to take the subject matter of "The Godfather" (high-level mafia families) and satirize it. It therefore must have seemed quite clever and groundbreaking in 1985 to lampoon the bizarre behaviors and concepts of honor that "The Godfather" and all its imitators had presented to us as reality. You really can't hold "Prizzi's Honor" accountable because so many others realized there was a satirical goldmine here and exploited it until the mafia-comedy film was as cliché as the mafia film, so when approaching this movie, I tried to remember nothing like this had really been done before.

Prizzi's Honor opens with a wedding scene, which is probably a nod to "The Godfather", but it is a very weak and plodding scene by any definition and especially in comparison to the masterpiece it emulates. From there it's mostly uphill though, as Nicholson's tremendous acting is just enough to suspend disbelief as his character, the son of a high ranking mafioso, has a wacky whirlwind romance with a dashing woman he meets at the wedding, only to discover she is mixed up in scamming his own mafia family and she's actually a hired killer just as he is, but that his love for her is so strong that her background doesn't matter. Dating the enemy becomes more and more of a tightrope walk and increasingly their genuine wedded bliss seems to be interrupted by their real world jobs, which would suggest they should see each other as a threat, and both of them typically deal with threats by homicide, leading to a quite funny problem that recurs throughout the film.

The film is very quirky, since it's basically making up a new style of film there's a lot of imagination and the plot itself doesn't fall into any clichés. However, it does exploit a basketful of mafia movie clichés, from the over-the-top Brooklyn drawl that Nicholson somehow pulls off to the corpse-like appearance of the decrepit yet ruthlessly brilliant Don Corrado Prizzi. As most of its successors have just combined mafia clichés with a basic plot, "Prizzi's Honor" seems quite fresh with its complex plot and wonderfully offbeat characters.

"Prizzi's Honor" seems to have fallen by the cinematic wayside, at least, it's not on too many short lists of great films, and its lackluster IMDb rating (6.8) rates it below or alongside many works it actually paved the way for. To some extent I think it suffers from the notion that very few good "serious" films emerged from America in the 80s aside from the stuff Woody Allen was doing. While to some extent this movie does seem to reflect some of the mid-80s film-making malaise, there is a lot of very clever work being done here, and this really is a movie worth remembering.

"Prizzi's Honor" is one of those strange charmers that thrives on dark comedy and whacked situations. Mafia hit-man Jack Nicholson (Oscar-nominated) meets the super-erotic Kathleen Turner at a wedding and of course ends up dumping girlfriend Anjelica Huston (in a well-deserved Oscar-winning turn). The fact that Huston is the daughter of one of Nicholson's associates only makes the plot thicken. What Nicholson does not know is that Turner is really an assassin herself. Will he find out that his lover by night is really a hit-woman by day? And will he learn in time that the two have actually been hired to kill each other? Also along for the ride are scene-stealers Robert Loggia and William Hickey (who received an Oscar nod as the family's don). "Prizzi's Honor" was the final venture for legendary director John Huston (who was near death when he was Oscar-nominated for this). That little tidbit does not change the fact that "Prizzi's Honor" is really a strange experience that does not completely succeed. It is a movie that serves its purpose, but the ending does not justify the means used to get there. The Oscar-nominated screenplay makes itself out to be much more intelligent than it really is and ultimately Nicholson and Turner have to carry the production. Still a good movie, but over-rated and even a bit disappointing when all is said and done. 4 stars out of 5.