Title: PRIZZI'S HONOR

Date: 6/15/1995; Publication: Magill's Survey of Cinema;

Magill's Survey of Cinema

06-15-1995

PRIZZI'S HONOR

Abstract:
John Huston combines a formally elegant script and mise en scene with muted, idiosyncratic acting in this droll comedie noire that goes for smiles rather than laughs. Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner play star-crossed hit persons who fall madly in love as they approach their middle years. Family ritual, allegiances, and business prove stronger than love for an outsider, however, and Nicholson's character must sacrifice his love on the altar of Prizzi's honor.


Summary:
In this gentle comedy about violence, John Huston draws together many of the qualities that have made his fifty years in filmmaking so remarkable. Beginning his career as a writer, he has always valued a tight script, and in Richard Condon and Janet Roach's distillation of Condon's novel, Huston began with a beautifully articulated, formally elegant screenplay. Never a methodical or formulaic stylist, Huston elaborates an original mise en scene for each new picture to endow it with its own individual narrative integrity. Similarly, he often draws idiosyncratic performances from his actors, helping them to create unique, quietly eccentric characters that test the limits of their range.

Instead of his usual manic intensity, Jack Nicholson acts his reined-in, middle-aged mafioso with little more than a stiff upper lip to give his patient, expressionless face character. Kathleen Turner plays his lover, a classy California professional woman, thunderstruck with vibrant passion for her Brooklyn-born inamorato. Anjelica Huston, who received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, combines the demeanor of Lucrezia Borgia with the intonation of a world-weary Mae West in her marvelously nuanced portrait of a Mafia princess in dark exile. Among the lead actors, only William Hickey overplays, overtly bidding for laughs. Otherwise, all concerned turn what might have slipped into broad parody of the Mafia genre into a comedie noire built purely of smiles, a vastly amusing, quiet comedy with scarcely a laugh line in its whole course.

As he has from the beginning of his career, Huston reasserts his benign affection for the odd people who dare to struggle against the odds. He has always seen the stacked deck as the essence of the human condition, and those who elect to play against it as the noblest of souls.

The film begins with an opening triptych consisting of three single-sequence shots interspersed with the titles, showing three central ritual events in the formation of the hero, Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson). In the first, his proud pop, Angelo Partanna (John Randolph), stands outside a hospital nursery sharing his newborn pride with his oldest and dearest friend, Don Corrado Prizzi (William Hickey). As Baby Charley's godfather, Don Corrado assures Pop that Charley will have two fathers and that he will be a part of the Prizzi family in fact if not in name. The second ritual event shows Charley dressed in a Cub Scout uniform opening an adolescent gift - a shiny new set of brass knuckles. In the third event, a candlelight ceremony, Don Corrado initiates the young man into the secrets of the family, securing his blood oath that henceforth Charley will put its interests above all else.

Following the titles, the exposition proper opens at a fourth ceremony, the stately wedding of Don Corrado's granddaughter. Phalanxes of Prizzis, cops, and gangland figures have packed the cathedral to show the don their solidarity and respect. All eyes look intently forward, watching the ceremony unfold - all eyes save those of a beautiful blonde stranger seated in the balcony. Her gaze seems to hook Charley (Jack Nicholson), seated down below among the Prizzis, causing him to crane his head up over his shoulder to exchange glances with her. Their repeated point-of-view gazes stitch them together and isolate them from the rest of the crowd riveted to the ceremony.

The ensuing wedding reception continues the narrative's ritual-centered structure. Since Irene (Kathleen Turner) is the only blonde in this sea of Mediterranean faces, Charley picks her out easily enough. When he invites her to dance to the Sicilian band music, she responds with a throaty, excited yes, seemingly as smitten with him as he is with her. After they dance, he introduces himself, but before she can tell him her name, the radiant blonde stranger vanishes without a trace.

That night in his apartment, Charley unsuccessfully phones around to get help in identifying her. Yet now his (and the narrative's) Prizzi-centered underpinnings have collapsed, leaving him alone, helpless, and frustrated in the darkness of his apartment. Just when he has abandoned hope, the phone rings, and a woman's voice identifies itself as that of Irene Walker. Charley's heart leaps, and he invites his mystery woman to lunch the next day.

Lunch, it turns out, takes place in Los Angeles, a continent away from Charley's Brooklyn stamping grounds. Now Charley and Irene engage in their own bonding rituals, again shown in a series of three discrete, protracted single takes. In the first, Charley and Irene sit uncomfortably on a couch in the restaurant lobby. Huston shoots them essentially full face, assigning them symmetrical balance in the frame and in their courting. Turner and Nicholson play the sequence-shot with brilliant nervousness, both showing how desperately they want the other, both eager to finish the preliminaries and get down to declarations. Moments later, they sit on the restaurant terrace facing each other in profile, again playing a lengthy scene in a single, compositionally balanced take, now making ardent declarations and dying to consummate their passion. Moments later, they roll about from bed to floor in a third extended sequence-shot taken from above their heads down the length of their bodies as they tumble and roll, mixing blonde hair with brown in wild loops of egalitarian lust. Charley has found his equal in this sunny land, and he and Irene have become the perfect modern lovers.

The narrative, however, shows clearly that their stars are crossed; Charley is caught between two ritual-bound sets of allegiances that now begin to pull him in opposite directions. Upon his return home, the family immediately dispatches him back to Los Angeles, where he kills one Marxie Heller (Joseph Ruskin) for absconding with family funds. Heller's wife walks in; she is none other than Irene. She explains that Heller had recently returned home, dropping in out of nowhere. She pleads ignorance of Heller's doings but remembers that he had put a satchel in the closet the night he returned home from his years'-long absence. The satchel turns out to contain only half the stolen money. As Charley presses his questions, Huston uses his mise en scene to separate the couple. He intercuts one-shots of Irene, set against a somber wall divided into two dark shades, with one-shots of Charley, set against a clutter of books and brightly side-lit from a near by window. The mise en scene divides them as clearly as the family business. Although they will love each other and will soon even marry and live a bicoastal modern, upscale, professional marriage, they will never regain the perfect unity, symmetry, and equality they enjoyed in their whirlwind courtship.

It is not as if they could not have the perfect modern marriage. Charley eventually learns that Irene, like himself, is a professional hitter. Indeed, her professional activities had originally brought her to the wedding; she had been hired by the Prizzis as an outside specialist to kill a gang rival while all the Prizzis were engaged in alibi-clad celebration. The more he learns about her, the more his admiration increases for her levelheadedness and resourcefulness as his business peer and eventual partner. Their future could be bright - as bright as the West Coast scenes appear against the comparative darkness of the Brooklyn scenes.

The princess of this Eastern darkness is Maerose Prizzi (Anjelica Huston), another of Don Corrado's granddaughters and Charley's former girlfriend. Maerose, usually dressed in stunning black outfits, seems to wear these widow's weeds for Charley. Four years earlier, in a fit of anger over Charley's lack of passion, she committed an act of dishonor with another man for which the family has exiled her, allowing her to visit them only on ritual occasions. Once Charley marries, Maerose pleads that his wedding has expunged her maculation. Her father, Dominic (Lee Richardson), grudgingly allows her to move back into his home. In a wonderful semicaricature of a bedraggled Italian widow, Maerose dresses in black homespun and paints bags under her eyes to stoke her father's misplaced fury against Charley, on whom he has come to blame all of his woes. Dominic, turning to outsiders to administer family justice, unwittingly rehires specialist Irene to rub out Charley, while Maerose works within the family empire to single out and finger its true sore point. She finds and offers to Don Corrado evidence of Irene's complicity and profit in her former husband's theft of Prizzi money.

Up to this point, Charley has anchored the narrative in the sense that he has been present (either physically or on the other end of the phone) in every scene. When Maerose begins her machinations, the narrative moves for the first time away from Charley, his ken, and his control, cutting his anchor and setting him adrift. Having first lost his anchor in Prizzi ritual and now in the narrative itself, Charley - and everyone else - bobs wildly in the crosscurrents of interfamilial business and politics.

To make things much worse, Irene has shot a policeman's wife during a kidnaping that she and Charley have performed. The shooting brings down the wrath of the police, who close down all the rackets in New York. The other families react furiously and violently to the loss of their revenue. Under internal and external pressure from family members, police, and rival gangs, the formerly solid Prizzi hierarchy begins to splinter and then crumble. Even the narrative reaches such a state of disintegration that one can scarcely tell who is doing what to whom and why.

The narrative's initial ritual-bound structuring has implicitly compared the Prizzi family to a primitive society. Primitive societies, anthropologists say, unconsciously fear vendetta above all else. Without the role of juridicial law to defuse the process, any violent act will call for revenge, eventually escalating into an endless chain of reciprocal violence within the clan. This retaliatory series weakens the family physically and psychologically from within, ultimately laying it open to decimation from without. According to Rene Girard in VIOLENCE AND THE SACRED (1977), the patriarchy must select a scapegoat, a sacrificial victim, to break the chain. In order to be effective, the scapegoat must be marginal to the clan, a person whose sacrifice will not entail further revenge. Irene, the Polish Californian outsider, the still mysterious and certain disruptive force in the family, beams like a blonde beacon at the storm-tossed ship of state. In their darkest hour, Don Corrado and company decide to throw her to the cops. To remove Charley as a possible avenger, they cannily persuade him to perform the sacrifice himself. Blood is thicker than love for an outsider, they tell him. He sadly acknowledges their reasoning and agrees to ice his spouse.

Charley calls her to tell her that everything has cooled down and that Don Corrado has offered to make him king of the Prizzis. Irene, knowing full well the price that the Prizzis have exacted of him, congratulates him warmly, then books a place for herself on the next day's flight to Hong Kong. Before she can leave, however, Charley wings his way back to Los Angeles one last time.

In a series of totally separated one-shots, their unity and symmetry forever abolished, Charley and Irene try to murder each other. The two attempts are shown in slow motion from the target's point of view, providing a formal resolution of the alternated point-of-view shots that originally brought them together at the wedding and simultaneously separated them from the other members of the family. Their love, their marriage, and their business partnership have ended in violent divorce, but greater violence to the family unit has been prevented.

Charley returns to his Brooklyn apartment. He showers, then steps out onto the balcony to place a phone call. Maerose sits in her dark apartment, illuminated only by a faint bit of light from the window. She answers the phone. When Charley tells her that Irene will not be around any more, she ecstatically moves into the light. As her rapture explodes on her face, the film becomes so overexposed that it even washes out her black clothing, whiting her out in a paroxysm of fulfillment. The princess of Prizzi darkness has usurped the blonde outsider's brightness. Now, with Charley's promised ascension to the Prizzi throne, she will soon be his queen.


Country of Origin: USA

Release Date: 1985

Production Line:
John Foreman for ABC Motion Pictures; released by Twentieth Century-Fox

Director: John Huston

Cinematographer: Andrzej Bartkowiak

File Editor: Rudi Fehr and Kaja Fehr

Additional Credits:
PRODUCTION DESIGN - Dennis Washington
ART DIRECTION - Michael Helmy and Tracy Bousman
SET DECORATION - Bruce Weintraub
COSTUME DESIGN - Donfeld
MUSIC - Alex North

MPAA Rating: R

Run Time: 129 minutes

Cast:
Charley Partanna - Jack Nicholson
Irene Walker - Kathleen Turner
Maerose Prizzi - Anjelica Huston
Don Corrado Prizzi - William Hickey
Dominic Prizzi - Lee Richardson
Angelo Partanna - John Randolph
Marxie Heller - Joseph Ruskin

Review Sources:
Christian Century. CII, July 17, 1985, p.685
Commonweal. CXII, July 12, 1985, p.407
Films in Review. XXXVI, August, 1985, p.428
Life. VIII, June, 1985, p.139
Los Angeles Times. June 14, 1985, VI, p.1
The New Republic. CXCIII, July 8, 1985, p.24
The New Yorker. LXI, July 1, 1985, p.84
Newsweek. CV, June 17, 1985, p.89
Time. CXXV, June 10, 1985, p.83
Variety. CCCXIX, June 5, 1985, p.14

Named persons in Production Credits:
John Foreman

Studios named in Production Credits:
ABC Motion Pictures
Twentieth Century-Fox

Screenplay (Author):
Richard Condon
Janet Roach

Color

Video Available.
Genre:
Comedy

Award Citations:
Academy Awards - Winner - Best Supporting Actress - Anjelica Huston
Academy Awards - Nomination - Best Picture - PRIZZI'S HONOR (John Foreman)
Academy Awards - Nomination - Direction - John Huston
Academy Awards - Nomination - Best Actor - Jack Nicholson
Academy Awards - Winner - Best Actress - Kathleen Turner
Academy Awards - Nomination - Best Supporting Actor - William Hickey
Academy Awards - Nomination - Adapted Screenplay - Richard Condon
Academy Awards - Nomination - Adapted Screenplay - Janet Roach
Academy Awards - Nomination - Editing - Rudi Fehr
Academy Awards - Nomination - Editing - Kaja Fehr
Academy Awards - Nomination - Costume Design - Donfeld
New York Film Critics - Winner - Best Picture - PRIZZI'S HONOR (John Foreman)
Los Angeles Film Critics - Winner - Best Picture - PRIZZI'S HONOR (John Foreman)
Golden Globe Award - Winner - Best Picture, Comedy - PRIZZI'S HONOR (John Foreman)
New York Film Critics - Winner - Best Director - John Huston
National Society of Film Critics - Winner - Direction - John Huston
Golden Globe Award - Winner - Direction - John Huston
New York Film Critics - Winner - Best Actor - Jack Nicholson
National Society of Film Critics - Winner - Best Actor - Jack Nicholson
Golden Globe Award - Winner - Best Actor, Comedy - Jack Nicholson
Golden Globe Award - Winner - Best Actress, Comedy - Kathleen Turner
New York Film Critics - Winner - Best Supporting Actress - Anjelica Huston
National Society of Film Critics - Winner - Best Supporting Actress - Anjelica Huston
Los Angeles Film Critics - Winner - Best Supporting Actress - Anjelica Huston
British Academy Awards - Winner - Best Adapted Screenplay - Richard Condon
British Academy Awards - Winner - Best Adapted Screenplay - Janet Roach


Notes:
Writers Guild Award, Winner, Adapted Screenplay, Richard Condon and Janet Roach National Board of Review, Best Supporting Actress, Anjelica Huston

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