Prizzi's honor.

EUREKA! According to the New York Times's Vincent Canby, we now have in Prizzi's Honor "the only other great movie of 1985," along with Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo. That may be more greatness than this still relatively young year can bear. And let's remember that "eureka" is how a movie actor with a fake Italian accent would pronoumce "you reek."

Actually, Prizzi's Honor doesn't reek; it is, just like Purple Rose, a mediocre film with delusions of grandeur, which make it slightly less than mediocre. It seems to be intended as a mordant satire on the Mafia, and, beyond that, American capitalism, and, beyond that, human nature, but it is too simplistic, too guarded, too farcical to be more than a modest entertainment with suppurating ambitions; I would love to know what Bertolt Brecht would have made of it, if someone could have coerced him to sit through its 130 minutes. Prizzi's Honor is based on a novel by Richard Condon, with a script by Condon and Janet Roach. Several novels by Condon have been made into movies--he is that kind of hack--most notably The Manchurian Candidate. But this one is no Candidate, not even a contender.

The director is John Huston, a man of genuine but uneven talent, whose besetting sin is a nonchalance that easily turns into indifference; when the project is Beat the Devil, Huston's slapdashness works perfectly. But he has done well with other kinds of films too, even as recently as The Man Who Would Be King (1975). Now 78, though, Huston has been showing increased nonchalance and diminished talent. For his latest films he has tended scarcely to rouse himself from his director's chair, a sedentarines particularly evident in Annie and Under the Volcano. If Prizzi's Honor shows rather more spirit than its immediate predecessors, it is wasted on material that never achieves the wildness and ruthlessness it requires.

Charley Partanna is the hit man for Brooklyn's Prizzi family, for which his shrewd, cynical father is the consigliere. Don Corrado Prizzi has joined Charley's blood to his own in a solemn ceremony, and blood to hiw own in a solemn ceremony, and blood is thicker (but only just) than Charley's head, which follows the Prizzi orders to the bloody letter. The Don's sons are the irascible Dominic, in charge of the family business, and the smooth Eduardo, who heads the family law firm. Under the circumstances, it is unclear why a consigliere without consanguinity is needed, but as with the charge at Balaclava, so with much of this film, ours not to reason why. Charley was once engaged to Maerose, Dominic's daughter, who ran off with another man and was, as the family scandal, banished to Manhattan and interior decorating, for which, given her Brooklyn accent and non-U ways, she is ideally unsuited, but, again, remember Balaclava! At a Prizzi family wedding, Charley espies a beautiful blonde, and is instantaneously smitten.

Having tracked her down in California, he promptly flies out for lunch with her. Irene Walker turns out to be none of the fancy things her name, attire, and demeanor would suggest. She is, as she says, a "Polack" who changed her name; also, as she doesn't say, actively married, a participant in a major theft from a Vegas casino run by the Prizzis, and a hit man, or hit woman, whom the Prizzis hire when they need outside talent. Love blossoms between the two hit persons, and they marry, with Charley willing to overlook Irene's share in theft, even as she sweetly overlooks his killing her husband. Were the film content with chronicling the fun and games of this respectably murderous pair, it could have been a fairly amusing blackish screwball comedy. But it isn't black enough--or, indeed, red enough, as shot people don't even bleed--and it tries to be a seriocomic comment on our society as well as a sendup of The Godfather, which is too much for its meager resources.

Most of the movie is taken up with purportedly comic double- and triple-crosses; according to Canby, also quadruple-crosses, but by that time I had lost track, comprehension, and interest. What is certain, and telegraphs itself, is that the Prizzis' honor will require Charley to dispose of Irene, who, however, is more disposed to have the gander in the sauce. The way the final conjugal showdown is written is particularly unconvincing, but it is clear that this marriage of true shots must end in a modified love-death--call it a love-hate death. In fact, the way it is staged and photographed, it looks as if both spouses kicked the bucket--which i rather suspect of being the original ending, disallowed by elementary market research. As it is, Charley gets off scot-free, and even gets the murdered Dominic's job, as well as his daughter (though why Maerose, who spurned him in his prime, should pant after his protruding paunch and receding hairline remains unclear), while Irene gets it, literally, in the neck.

This ending strikes me, even in its ludicrous context, as dramatically unsatisfying, inordinately improbable, and sexist. It is a harsh, pseudo-moral judgment on the female of the species, who, in this film, is not deadlier than the male, only equally so and disproportionately punished. True, she is also a bit of a liear and cheat; but, as Maerose says to Charley, "Just because she's a thief and a hitter don't mean she ain't good in all other departments." And, once married to Charley, she is a perfect helpmeet or help hitter (even though Charley protests, "I didn't get married so my wife would go on woiking!") and doesn't commit any extramarital crimes--is, in fact, a square shooter. The difference in her destiny provides a rather rancid comedy with an indigestible close.

Whether one likes Prizzi's Honor depends largely on whether one likes lines like the ones I have quoted, or this apologia of Irene's: "I've been doing three or four hits a year. That may not be that many if you consider the population." I don't find any of that as funny as when, in the middle of a kidnapping-cum-murder, the spouses exchange this bit of stichomythia: "See you at dinner." --"Okay, dear." But where the Mafia should be treated with the blackest of gallows (Gallo?) humor, it gets sentimental-comedy treatment. This is particularly evident in William Hickey's Don Corrado, raved about by the reviewers who have not, like me, seen his appalling and never-changing stage performances, and have forgotten, or not realized, how bad he was in such screen outings as Wise Blood. Typically, Canby perceives Hickey as a "ferociously practical, wise, infinitely patient old Don"; whereas David Denby speaks of his "essential rattiness" and "enjoyment of evil [and] double-dealing [as] an end in itself." This seems to be contradictory, and a performance that is all things to all critics is not so much acting as a Rorschach blob. I am likewise unimpressed by the Irene of Kathleen Turner. Hailed by many reviewers as perhaps the funniest and surely the most goergeously, steamily sexy Hollywood actress, she is, to me, competent by our screen standards and pretty from an angle or two--in repose and with ethereal lighting--but otherwise just another petty [sic] face.

Jack Nicholson, however, gives another of his highly accomplished, controlledly funny performances as Charley, and, as Maerose, Anjelica Huston, who previously always looked like the star's girlfriend or director's daughter, comes across, at last, as an actress. The supporting cast is solid, and Andrzej Bartkowiak, though he tends to mistake his camera too often for a Dutch genre painter's palette, delivers some piquant sombernesses. Alex North's score recycles Italian opera appropriately but predictably, and Huston's direction is sparing but at least not lethargic. How happy the spirit of Will H. Hays must be! Whatever American films have gained in sexual freedom, they have more than lost through social and political restrictions: The word Mafia is not mentioned once.