Prizzi's Honor

One of the more peculiar Mafia movies has to be Prizzi’s Honour. Mind you, I’m not really a big Mafia film expert, but when I think of such a movie, I think of The Godfather, which is an epic story of a Mafia family and the loyalty and respect they expect from each other and from outsiders, and also a catalogue of all the things -- contract killings and the like -- that constitute the business. Prizzi’s Honour also includes all of these things, but the story is a little more eccentric than The Godfather. Most people classify it as a comedy, although I think that’s pushing it a bit; nevertheless, it is pretty nutty.

The story is about the Prizzi family, the biggest mob family in the country. Mostly it’s focused on the don’s grandson, Charlie, played by Jack Nicholson. Charlie is a faithful employee, certainly very dependable when it comes to fulfilling any contracts, which in this business are perhaps a little more personal and permanent than in other businesses.

As the movie begins, he is attending a wedding and sees a glorious thing; a woman (Kathleen Turner) who seems to stir up all sorts of lustful feelings inside of him. He is able to track her down at the wedding reception, and manages to have one brief dance with her before she is whisked away by a phone call. He is forlorn -- he never even got her name, and for the rest of the night he is distressed, until, amazingly, Irene calls him up in the middle of the night.

He asks her out for a dinner date, preferably sometime within the next hour -- but she says that she’s out in L.A. Well, then maybe tomorrow we can have a drink -- apparently, it’s not much of a problem for him to just jump on a flight to L.A. from New York just to meet what he hopes is the woman of his dreams.

The two enter a whirlwind relationship. In only a few hours, they manage to find a favourite song for the two of them, have sex in a hotel room, and seriously propose marriage -- all the while behaving to us like giddy lovers picking up all the clichés of Hollywood romances. I laughed a bit at this, thinking this was all rather silly. I found it hard to believe that these two people would click just like that! There had to be something wrong with this picture. I could believe that Charlie would be that crazy to fall for a woman that fast, but to actually find someone who would fall for him equally as fast? That’s kind of crazy!

Well, maybe there is something up. Turns out Irene is not the tax consultant she claims to be -- really??? After a while, he learns of two facts which by themselves are surprising enough, but together would ought to breed suspicion in one’s mind. First, she turns out to have been responsible for a hit given by the Prizzi family (which is why she was called away during the reception). Secondly, it appears as if she is partially responsible for a scam put on by people who try to rip off the Prizzis in one of their casino; Charlie finds this out when he goes to L.A. to perform the hit. Turns out Irene is the guy’s wife. Any other hit man would probably knock her off almost as fast, but Charlie’s still in love, and so, even when Irene gives him a sob story that we know is false (part of which involves her claim that she only has half of the money that was scammed), he has no choice but to believe her.

The two get married after all, and things seem to be on the up and up. But there is one person who, unbeknownst to most everybody, is about to do a bit of scheming of her own. It is the don’s granddaughter, played by Angelica Huston. She was disgraced years ago by the family because of what happened between her and Charlie; they were supposed to get married, but she dumped him in some petty jealous rage, then ran off with an “unworthy” man, thereby bringing shame to the family. Publicly, the family supports Charlie while ignoring the woman, but privately, it’s apparent that her father, Dominick, has little love for Charlie. Huston’s character doesn’t exactly cause much of what occurs in the second half of the movie, but she does get the ball rolling in hopes of returning to the families good graces.

John Huston directed this movie, one of his last, and this fact is almost astonishing when you realize who this man was. Huston’s first movie was The Maltese Falcon, back in 1941. Besides being Huston’s first film, it was also the film that made Humphrey Bogart a true star, and the two would team up many times for films like The African Queen, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, and Beat the Devil. Most directors of this era would have faded away by 1985, but Huston was practically making a comeback! Under the Volcano, from the year before, was nominated for some Oscars, and this one was nominated for at least 8 of them. Not bad for some guy who was successful before almost all of the actors in this movie even saw their first screen test.

Jack Nicholson gives a very odd performance. With his rough, unrefined accent, and his tough-guy/gangster exterior masking some romantic yearnings, he could almost be doing a Bogart impression. Maybe old Huston was wanting to relive the good old days one last time. At first, Nicholson’s attempt at a somewhat narrow-minded lug was a bit distracting, but then I started to think he was kind of funny that way. I said it was a possible Bogart impression, but actually I don’t think Bogart’s characters would be quite as hopeless in their romanticism, or reveal as much. A Humphrey Bogart tough-guy character (such as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon) would probably do what Charlie does at the film’s end, but he would not show as much (if any) pain to the viewer.

Kathleen Turner, at first, seems like the last person you’d picture as a contract killer; she seems too much like a classy dame for that. But then again, many classy dames had some pretty hard and nasty secrets in the old pictures, so it’s really not much of a stretch from someone like Mary Astor from Falcon to Turner. Again, however, Turner’s character is certainly a lot more resourceful and independent, I think, than some of the women in the older films, who were only shrewd and/or evil and/or provocative up to a certain point. None of them would be cold, accurate killers quite like Irene. Actually, none of them would probably have as much warmth as the Turner character; she manages both to be shrewd and delightful at the same time. I guess you could say that Prizzi’s Honour is sort of an updated version of all those movies that Huston and his contemporaries made back in the old days. In the 1980’s, men could be more sensitive and women could be more capable, and that fits these two main characters.

The movie is classified as a comedy, but I think it’s really an eccentric mob drama, filled with witty lines and some subtle humour, but still complicated enough to qualify as a serious movie. The plot is not a simple farce; it is in fact just as well put-together as The Godfather, and deals with the same sorts of ideas, except that Prizzi’s Honour is less elegant and more down-to-earth about them. It’s the type of movie that has to be viewed more than once, because of all the little things that happen in it. As well, the ending of this film is probably one of the more distressing in many a film I’ve seen lately; it’s no laughing matter, and the payoff is one of the most bitter, yet appropriate, elements in this very unusual film.