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Old Don Corrado Prizzi (William Hickey) is a shrunken little man, ghouly and wormy, with tiny, shocking bright eyes.
PRIZZI'S HONOR MOVIE
The movie is about what the Prizzis do in the name of honor. (In a scene in which Charley, the romantic clod, is told that he is to be the next head of the family, Nicholson produces a small, eye-rolling flourish: for an instant-a passing shade of thought- he sees himself as Brando, the don.) The Condon book is a takeoff on The Godfather, and Huston follows it right down to putting a spin on the details (like the quick glimpse of the wedding couple, so you can see that the bridegroom is shorter than the bride), but the parody isn’t too broad- not even with Nicholson’s inflated upper lip complementing Brando’s pushed*out lower lip. There are reasons for audiences’ good will toward him: he’ll do anything for the role he’s playing, and he has a just about infallible instinct for how far he can take the audience with him.Ĭharley’s essential average-guyness is the movie’s touchstone: this is a baroque comedy about people who behave in ordinary ways in grotesque circumstances. But Nicholson doesn’t overdo his blurred expressions or his uncomprehending stare he’s a witty actor who keeps you eager for what he’ll do next. And when he falls for a West Coast girl-a Polish blonde, Irene (Kathleen Turner), whom he meets at the Prizzi wedding that opens the movie-he’s like a man conked out by a truckload of stardust. Nicholson’s Charley plugs the “Honeymooners” kind of ordinariness into this Mafia world. (Like Kramden, he wants to occupy a bigger space in the world.) Then he’ll go limp and lacklustre, like Art Carney’s Ed Norton. At times, Charley is like Jackie Gleason’s vain Ralph Kramden in “The Honeymooners”: he seems to want to waddle and shake more rolls of flesh than he’s got.
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And Nicholson’s performance is a virtuoso set of variations on your basic double take and traditional slow burns. (When he’s fully in character, he’s frog-faced and fishy-eyed, like a blown-up Elisha Cook, Jr.) Charley is a loyal and dedicated company man, but he’s not too sharp he’s like a hardhat who’s only good at his trade-he needs to be cranked up to think. As Charley Partanna, the enforcer (i.e., hit man) for the brotherhood, Jack Nicholson has added a facial effect: his upper lip puffs out and curls under, which thickens Charley’s speech. She played John Travolta’s mother in Saturday Night Fever and its sequel, and that’s who they talk like. Huston has a cast of devil’s helpers, who have been coached in the jerky rhythms and combative dialect of Sicilian Brooklynese by the actress-playwright Julie Bovasso. It’s as if his satirical spirit had become irrepressible-the devil in him made him do it. He directed this movie (his fortieth) on pure instinct-on the sum of everything he knows. The only thing about Prizzi’s Honor that suggests a veteran director, or even hints at Huston’s age (he’s seventy-eight), is the assurance of his control. Even The Man Who Would Be King didn’t have the springiness that this has. You’d think this movie the work of a young director because of the elation you feel while it’s on, and afterward, too. And the zest that goes into the Prizzis’ greediest swindles is somehow invigorating. The behavior on the screen is bizarrely immoral, but it has the juice of everyday family craziness in it. When it’s over, you may think of slight resemblances to Beat the Devil and The Maltese Falcon, but its tone is riper. His riffs about the corruption of American business and politics have a rote paranoia-they have no sting-but the characters are entertainingly skewed, and the story moves along and keeps you smiling. The 1982 novel, by Richard Condon, is a lively, painless read. It’s like The Godfather acted out by The Munsters, with passionate, lyrical arias from Italian operas pointing up their low-grade sentimentality. The picture has a daring comic tone-it revels voluptuously in the murderous finagling of the members of a Brooklyn Mafia family, and rejoices in their scams. If John Huston’s name were not on Prizzi’s Honor, I’d have thought a fresh new talent had burst on the scene, and he’d certainly be the hottest new director in Hollywood.