L'honneur des Prizzi

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.

I loved this film when I saw it in 1985. To see it again after seeing film and series like the Godfather, The Soprans etc is a treat. It is a lovely film, elegant,well-played with a with lots of humor. Jack Nicholson pays the not very intelligent Charley Partanna with flair and a lot of humour. Kathleen Turner is beautiful as ever. The rest of cast is also very good. John Rudolph playing his charing but very dangerous father, Angelica Huston is magnificent as the deserted MaeRose who wants to revenge Cahrly but still loves him. The music is very much a part of this intelligent film. It is a joy to listen to how it comments or highlights what happens in the film.

It is a loving parody of the mafia genre. A must-see for any one who likes this genre and for film lovers everywhere.

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.

Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner both are assassins, though when Jack first notices her, he has no idea she, too, is a professional hit-man (hit-woman?). When they fall in love and get married, it seems kind of darkly sweet, but soon there are LOTS of complications--including the mob ordering them to kill each other. How will they work this out? Well, the film manages to do it in a way that I certainly didn't expect.

"Prizzi's Honor" is a well made film and it was a sleeper hit back in 1985. However, I've gotta be up front about this one....it just didn't interest me very much. I think there are two main reasons--it should have been funnier and I just don't like most gangster films. There is a HUGE fascination among the public for gangster films, I know, but apart from a few classics, I don't care for the genre at all. So, keep this in mind as you read my review--this guy just isn't into gangster films. Now this isn't to say I hated the film--the acting was quite nice. But I also found the plot needlessly complicated and it's hard caring at all about evil murderers. Worth seeing, perhaps, but to my it just wasn't up to all the hype.

Once I had a little context, I enjoyed it.

It's not your typical mob movie. And maybe not typical anything else.

Comes from an author who writes satirical books about abuse of power. Known for The Manchurian Candidate. And this.

So this is a satirical mob movie. But the satire is watered down some in the movie compared to the book, apparently.

Watching it with that lens, knowing some of it is kind of a subtle/wry/dark humor, sort of making fun of the mob with these over the top characters and plot lines... It actually becomes quite funny. And fun.

And Jack Nicholson's character is well done I think. As well as his main love interest.

So if you can handle all of that...

8/10.