PRIZZI'S HONOR: John Huston's Parody of THE GODFATHER.

"My dear, crime is just a left handed form of human endeavor." Thus spoke Emmerich, the crooked lawyer in John Huston's influential film noir: THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950). He might have been speaking of PRIZZI'S HONOR. Or of Art. John Huston committed Art all his life and got away with it, in a town that regards Art a crime.

PRIZZI'S HONOR describes the American Family, and by analogy, the American Nation, in much the same way THE GODFATHER did. It may also be Huston's saturnine view of his own family, which he kept together with the skills of a Mafia Chieftain. But PRIZZI'S HONOR is also a black comedy, that is to say, a left handed form of the Crime of Art. And so, Huston's film is THE GODFATHER with a comic garrote.

PRIZZI'S HONOR, therefore, like THE GODFATHER, begins with a wedding where most of the major characters are introduced and the plot is sent on its way. Like Don Corleone (and Huston), Don Corrrado Prizzi (William Hickey, WISE BLOOD, 1979) has sons: Edwardo (Robert Loggia, SCARFACE, 1983) and Dominic (Lee Richardson, SKYLARK, 1993). But the real power among the younger generation is the Princess of the Family: Maerose (Anjelica Huston), wearing a wide brimmed hat to shade her dark, intelligent, slightly bitter and wary eyes. Closely allied, and best friend to Don Corrado, is Angelo "Pop" Partanna (John Randolph, SERPICO, 1973). His son, Charlie Partanna (Jack Nicholson), is The Family Hit Man.

As Don Corrado dozes at the ceremony, and Alex North's witty operatic music sets the mood, Charlie turns his head and sees a guest, an outsider: Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner, BODY HEAT, 1982). It is love at first sight for Charlie, and lots of trouble when he impetuously marries her -- because Irene is a hit woman from out of town, whom the Family later comes to suspect has taken them for $750, 000.

PRIZZI'S HONOR, based on a novel by Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate), presents themes both Huston and Condon had taken up previously, but by 1984, these themes were so obvious that the two could not deal with them in the darkly paranoid manner they had in previous years. Huston had acted, for instance, in the Condon based film WINTER KILLS (1979), which suggested that he as the Patriarch of a successful American family, indeed the American Nation, was willing to do almost anything (assassinating the President, for instance) in order to retain money and power:

Shoot the President Kennedy? Sure, a majority of Americans believe the wealthy or powerful did it. (And the reasons and links grow more apparent with every passing year.)

Let the banks rob the people? You bet! We would soon learn that the Banking System, presided over by a drunkard put in charge by President Ronald Reagan, had allowed the Savings and Loans to rob investors of hundreds of billions. (We have spent eight years investigating Whitewater, involving a miniscule percentage of the sum stolen, originally a Savings and Loan deal gone bad. Most of the money in the really Big Cases was never recovered, and few executives went to jail for any appreciable time.)

Of course, from the start, there were the families of Big Oil involved, and now we have their involvement in a spreading energy crisis.

The Prizzi's and the Partanna's, according to Huston, are simply an alternate form of such families and organizations. Theirs, like the Corleones, like the Mitchells and the Milkens, is a story of family greed. (Hell, Huston himself would say, I fought it myself most of my life.) Whatever is good materially for the Prizzis and the Partannas is morally justifiable, in their eyes -- and evidently in the Nation's.

Charlie Partanna, as played by Jack Nicholson, is their CIA. But where Sonny and Michael Corleone -- and presumably the CIA -- were brilliant, Charlie Partanna is pretty dumb. Nicholson wears a bad toupee, adopts a Brooklyn numbers guy accent, stuffs paper in his mouth like Brando, and shuffles through the movie palms back. The performance is both funny and courageous because Nicholson gives up the canny, handsome, controlling persona he had projected in most of his earlier pictures.

The smart one of the group is Maerose, Charlie's ex-girl and still in love with him, who engineers the mechanism which eliminates her rival, returns Charlie to her, and makes him the new Michael Corleone of the Prizzis. Anjelica, who had not acted with her father since her first film, A WALK WITH LOVE AND DEATH in 1969, wanted to prove herself to him, and she did.

PRIZZI'S HONOR was Huston's next to last film. Dying from emphysema, he found this film the last in which he was in full control. It is not by accident, perhaps, that emaciated, half-dead-looking William Hickey resembles Director John Huston, at that moment, nor that this character can suddenly come alive to save the Family goods. It is certainly not by accident that Anjelica Huston wins out in the conflict, and gets Jack Nicholson, as she had him, at the time, in real life.

In other ways, PRIZZI'S HONOR was a family affair. Huston's script girl on THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), Meta Wilde, was the script supervisor here. Rudi Fehr, editor of Huston's KEY LARGO (1948), another (more idealistic) story of a family dealing with Organized Crime, came back from retirement to supervise the editing of the film.

PRIZZI'S HONOR was not, and still may not be, easy to fall in love with. We have to deal equally with Charlie, Irene and Maerose. Each competes for our affections, and it is only through giving ourselves to them all that we fully realize the comedy of the piece. It is also necessary to realize that Irene, in the end, after taking her best shot at Charlie (as it were) sacrifices herself to him, rather as an act of professional courtesy. Knowing that going in will give you an unholy glow of pleasure coming out.

The New York Film Critics awarded the film Best Picture and Huston Best Director. But in Hollywood, it was a different story. PRIZZI'S HONOR received eight nominations -- including Best Picture -- and Huston and Anjelica were the first Father-Child Nominees since John Huston won with father Walter Huston, for THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), but the only Oscar of the night went to Anjelica.

To the Future.

The Old Master had to content himself with being the oldest director ever nominated for an Academy Award. I still remember the look on Huston's face when the earnest, important OUT OF AFRICA (Sidney Pollack) took Best Picture. Not only that but a different kind of Crime won out in the end. ABC, which never believed in PRIZZI'S HONOR, sold it to Video for a flat sum of $5,000, 000, before its release in theaters, which severely reduced any royalties accruing thereafter to Huston.

Take a look at one of the great director's last films. He was as individual in satire as he was in film noir or high adventure.