Prizzi’s Honor (1985)

Directed by John Huston. Starring Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, John Randolph, William Hickey, Anjelica Huston, Robert Loggia, Lee Richardson, Michael Lombard. [R]

Mafia hitman Nicholson falls head over heels for a woman (Turner) he spots at a wedding, and goes ahead and marries her even after learning she’s a contract killer herself, but things get really complicated when different members of the Prizzi crime family approach each of them separately to bump off the other. Most enjoyable black comedy by John Huston (his penultimate film), from a crime novel by Richard Condon, is smartly cast to the heel, including Huston’s daughter, Anjelica, in a wily, wicked turn as the granddaughter of the senile Don (Hickey, also mean, and also fabulous), an ex-girlfriend of Nicholson’s enforcer determined to destroy the “happy couple”. Starts off on uncertain footing, to be sure, with a few instances of awkward camerawork in the first act and the initially off-putting decision by Nicholson to play his character as a slow, heavily-accented Brooklyn coglione, but hits its stride soon after, and lets the actors play it right down the line separating farce from tragedy. Its black comic sensibilities have lost some of their freshness and bite—the movie’s tame compared to the post-Goodfellas bloodbaths, and low-key pitted against some of the later self-aware Mafia comedies and postmodern mob operas like “The Sopranos”—but the clockwork plotting, off-beat dialogue, and vivid characterizations turn the screwy contraption into a deceptive, flawed triumph. Anjelica won the Supporting Actress Oscar, almost forty years after John Huston directed his father, Walter, to an Oscar win for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Try to spot Stanley Tucci in his film debut.

81/100