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So much of John Huston’s career was a series of big-ideas dramatic films about groups of people banding together and forming a kind of destructive alliance, that it makes perfect sense that towards the end he would turn that thematic obsession into a dark comedy about the Mafia and romance. In his first film, The Maltese Falcon, Huston perfectly captured Dashiell Hammett’s acidic droll, it was a meeting of two artists with similar ideals and tastes. In Prizzi’s Honor, Huston continues that tradition of baroque humor in depicting the love triangle at the heart of the story.
Unlike The Godfather, which also told the story of one family’s tarnished reputation and eventual return to prominence in the underworld, the main thrust and tone of Prizzi’s Honor is not some elegiac tribute to the family. Instead we focus in on the adoptive son of the Prizzi crime family, Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson). Charley is the main thug and killer for the family, a man who’s brain power is, shall we say, limited at best. At a family wedding he meets a beautiful woman named Irene (Kathleen Turner), and runs into his jilted ex-lover, the Don’s granddaughter Maerose (Anjelica Huston). The beautiful woman is a killer-for-hire and a thief, and much of the movie’s tension comes from this fact. That, and Anjelica Huston’s scheming, bruised pride being harnessed into taking the two of them out as a form of ego-boosting (hers is, without a doubt, the best in the entire movie).
It all sounds far more serious than it is. The pitch-black comedy comes in thick, like the scene where Turner and Nicholson are making dinner plans while disposing of the bodies that have accumulated after their latest killing. Or the way that Huston’s character pretends to have black eyes in order to frame Nicholson for taking advantage of her. But nothing hits the subversive streak quite like the fact that Nicholson and Turner get contracted to murder each other. Before Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were sexing up the screen in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Prizzi’s Honor was giving you confused giggles over a matrimonial strife.
