Kayleigh Donaldson
The latter half of John Huston’s directorial career is defined by a series of films that saw one of the true icons of the industry’s golden age delve into New Hollywood experimentation—and showed him more than able to keep up with the new generation of film school brats. Even as he became increasingly frail due to emphysema, forced to direct scenes in other rooms while dragging along an oxygen tank, Huston retained a vitality on-screen through adaptations of tricky literary classics, from Flannery O’Connor to James Joyce. With his penultimate film, which turns 40 this month, Huston landed one last commercial hit and his final Best Director Oscar nomination with what seemed an easy crowd-pleaser to many. But, in a typically Huston-esque manner, the end product was far darker and weirder than first impressions could convey.
Prizzi’s Honor follows Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson, half committing to the Italian-American accent), a hitman loyal to the Prizzi family. He falls head over heels for a beautiful non-Italian woman and outsider to the family, Irene (Kathleen Turner.) Their whirlwind romance is, alas, complicated by his job and the revelation that she is both a hitman herself and is embroiled in Prizzi drama that has put an expensive target atop her head.
The film, adapted from the novel by Richard Condon (author of The Manchurian Candidate) was described by Pauline Kael as being “like The Godfather acted out by The Munsters.” That captures some of its strange tonal jumps but not quite. There are moments of cartoonish absurdity, most notably in a particularly twisty sex scene between Nicholson and Turner. There are plenty of big accents and mafioso movie tropes that, over a decade on from The Godfather, had started to feel overfamiliar to audiences. Those cartoonish qualities, however, are sharply contrasted with the bleak perspective of this world, one where violence is a mundane part of everyday life.
Lots of people die in Prizzi’s Honor. Hitmen kill targets. Enemies are whacked. Even fellow family members are knocked off if their presence has become inconvenient. It’s all talked about so casually and so openly, with the same cadence of a waiter asking if a customer would like to see the dessert menu. The most animated anyone gets is when Charley and Irene make their lavish declarations of love at (almost) first sight, a scene of such sincerity that it feels out of place in a film of such matter-of-fact cruelties. Irene talks about her job with the pep of an Avon lady. Some of the things Nicholson and Turner are directed to say are so absurd that it’s a miracle they remained so straight-faced.
For a comedy – and it is a very funny movie – Prizzi’s Honor is also astonishingly nasty. Its most likeable characters are killers for hire. Everyone is involved in some sort of corrupt deal, from Charley to the cops who turn a blind eye when the bribe is big enough. Nobody gets out of the film with their soul intact. Maerose (Anjelica Huston, in her Oscar-winning role), the disgraced daughter of the Prizzi heir, starts out as a sympathetic figure, the black sheep of the family who breaks down in tears when her own father calls her a slut. But she may be the canniest player in the game, going so far as to lie about being sexually assaulted to twist the odds to her favor. The film ends with her getting what is shot like a glowing Hollywood happy ending, but it’s a corrosive conclusion that only emphasizes how every person involved is just collateral for someone else’s successes or failures.
Huston was never one to take the easy way out, and with Prizzi’s Honor, he stuck to his guns and kept the novel’s hopeless ending. There is nothing funny or traditionally comedic about how this story ends because even a comedy about the mafia can’t ignore the cycle of violence that taints every corner of this underworld. One can easily imagine the more audience-friendly rom-com conclusion where true love wins the day, but it would have been an obvious cop-out. Really, it’s not all that different from The Godfather in its honest cynicism. The laughs don’t make it go down any easier either.
Huston’s work often delved into the darker side of humanity with tales of greed (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon), addiction (Under the Volcano), and faithlessness (Wise Blood). Prizzi’s Honor may seem like the outlier, especially with his late-era works of decidedly anti-Hollywood nihilism, but its cold black heart and rejection of the safety of a traditional movie comedy structure make it a perfect companion to the likes of Fat City and The Kremlin Letter. It just has a funnier sex scene.
“Prizzi’s Honor” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and is available for digital rental or purchase.
