I'm not sure Richard Condon has ever written a serious word in his life. "The Manchurian Candidate" had its pathos but it was largely masked by Condon's prose style -- detached, ironic, and humorous. In another novel he describes a typical meal for his Alfred Hitchcok character and it takes up half of a full page. (So many "rashers of bacon," a joint of mutton, three apple pies, and so on.) John Huston has got the style pretty much down pat in this film, although if you're not prepared for it, the intentionality might slip by you and you wind up with a pale drama.
I guess by 1985, the year this film was released, the mob movie was ripe for a parody. Some seventeen years elapsed between "Frankenstein" and "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein," and about thirteen years between "The Godfather" and "Prizzi's Honor." When a genre is so near exhaustion it doesn't have many places left to go.
No one in this movie seems authentically "Italian", as we've learned that authenticity from the mob movies, not even Robert Loggia. The most hilarious impersonation is given by William Hickey. He's a wizened, gaunt Don Corrado, a tiny frame, his voice a hoarse, goaty whine with more ups and unanticipated dips than a roller coaster ride. The other performances are good too. The dialog is out of a comic book. People "clip" one another or they "zotz" each other. Nine hundred thousand dollars is "nine hundred dollars." Everyone is evil but some are more evil than others, just as in "The Godfather." There is a happy ending for Jack Nicholson as Charlie Partanna, a hit man who winds up murdering his own wife. (Man, what happened to the code?) You probably won't respond to this very warmly if you are looking for another movie about the Mafia with lots of tragedy and gore. But if you're able to accept this as an adumbration of movies like "Analyze This" (a much more obvious and funnier movie) you'll get a kick out of it.
I guess by 1985, the year this film was released, the mob movie was ripe for a parody. Some seventeen years elapsed between "Frankenstein" and "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein," and about thirteen years between "The Godfather" and "Prizzi's Honor." When a genre is so near exhaustion it doesn't have many places left to go.
No one in this movie seems authentically "Italian", as we've learned that authenticity from the mob movies, not even Robert Loggia. The most hilarious impersonation is given by William Hickey. He's a wizened, gaunt Don Corrado, a tiny frame, his voice a hoarse, goaty whine with more ups and unanticipated dips than a roller coaster ride. The other performances are good too. The dialog is out of a comic book. People "clip" one another or they "zotz" each other. Nine hundred thousand dollars is "nine hundred dollars." Everyone is evil but some are more evil than others, just as in "The Godfather." There is a happy ending for Jack Nicholson as Charlie Partanna, a hit man who winds up murdering his own wife. (Man, what happened to the code?) You probably won't respond to this very warmly if you are looking for another movie about the Mafia with lots of tragedy and gore. But if you're able to accept this as an adumbration of movies like "Analyze This" (a much more obvious and funnier movie) you'll get a kick out of it.