Prizzi's Honor

To say the film is the treasure of the year would be to bad-mouth it in this disastrous season. Prizzi's Honor would be the vastly original centerpiece of a great year. It's a rich, dense character comedy in which Huston, working from a screenplay Richard Condon and Janet Roach adapted from Condon's novel, cocks a playful but unblinking eye at love, family loyalty and the togetherness of a happy marriage--Sicilian style. Read full review

Probably the funniest mobster movie ever...A sublime meld of black satire, high camp and happy farce. Read full review

This film would be a winner any time of the year. It`s a classic piece of moviemaking that I plan on seeing again very soon. Read full review

This was the penultimate film from the ailing great director. It is also one of his best. Read full review

From start to finish, this exhilarating adaptation of Richard Condon's phantasmagorical and witty novel -set inside the world of the Mafia - ascends, plunges and races around hairpin curves, only to shoot up again and dive over another precipice. [14 June 1985, p.C8]

Huston is the unquestioned master of the greed-fueled plot, crammed with treacherous types aiming to destroy each other. He is in top form once more, presenting a gallery of low-lifes that could even baffle Sam Spade. [17 June 1985]

It's a showcase for Nicholson in an astounding performance as the dim but lovable hit man, Charley Partanna. [14 June 1985, p.27]

The zinger of a climax is, appropriately, the blackest joke of this blackest of comedies. [17 June 1985, p.89]

It's like "The Godfather" acted out by The Munsters...Everything in this picture works with everything else - which is to say that John Husto has it all in the palm of his big, bony hand.

This is the most bizarre comedy in many a month, a movie so dark, so cynical and so funny that perhaps only Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner could have kept straight faces during the love scenes. They do. Read full review

A work of crazed distinction. [14 June 1985]

The movie's success lies in Huston's very sure manipulation of mood and tone, somehow connecting black comedy, tongue-in-cheek acting, heavy irony, and even high camp into a coherent story. Read full review

Picture is a stretch for Nicholson, who speaks in a street-tough, accented gangster-ese that initially takes some getting used to, but shortly becomes totally convincing. Turner manages to use her loveliness to jolting results. Read full review

Not one of Nicholson's best, but an enjoyable comedy nonetheless. Read full review

Someone involved with Prizzi's Honor, the new film from John Huston and starring Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner, doubtless thinks it's a fine satire, a comedy so black it will have us all squirming. There's no other explanation for the long stretches of time the movie spends on "idle," all that potential power, going nowhere. [14 June 1985, p.D1]

Huston does a reverse take on the material, underplaying the grotesque situation until it turns into a parody on the problems of the average working couple, but the pacing is so lugubrious that the laughs never materialize. Read full review