Prizzi's Honor

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.

So many films glorify the mafia, even those like 'Goodfellas' which pull no punches still allow a residue of glamour to stick to their portrayal of the wise-guy life. So 'Prizzi's Honor', which ridicules its protagonists and shows them to be anything but wise, is a welcome sort of mafia film. Unfortunately, although it's reasonably entertaining, the film ultimately doesn't wholly succeed in any respect; too daft to work as black comedy, too slow to work as riotous farce, to humorously conceived to work as tragic drama. Jack Nicholson is good as the dumb hit man Charley, but the plot leaves us unsure whether we should laugh at him or cry with him, and in the end I felt inclined to do neither. Personally, I prefer Jim Jarmusch's 'Ghost Dog', another offbeat look at organised crime.

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.

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.