Books, Arts & Manners: Shooting Parties

Eureka! According to the New York Times’s Vincent Canby, we now have in Prizzi’s Honor “the only other great movie of 1985,” along with Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo. That may be more greatness than this still relatively young year can bear. And let’s remember that “eureka” is how a movie actor with a fake Italian accent would pronounce “you reek.”

Actually, Prizzi’s Honor doesn’t reek; it is, just like Purple Rose, a mediocre film with delusions of grandeur, which make it slightly less than mediocre. It seems to be intended as a mordant satire on the Mafia, and, beyond that, American capitalism, and, beyond that, human nature, but it is too simplistic, too guarded, too farcical to be more than a modest entertainment with suppurating ambitions; I would love to know what Bertolt Brecht would have made of it, if someone could have coerced him to sit through its 130 minutes. Prizzi’s Honor is based on a novel by Richard Condon, with a script by Condon and Janet Roach. Several novels by Condon have been made into movies—he is that kind of hack— most notably The Manchurian Candidate. But this one is no Candidate, not even a contender.

JS

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John Simon

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Eureka! According to the New York Times’s Vincent Canby, we now have in Prizzi’s Honor “the only other great movie of 1985,” along with Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo. That may be more greatness than this still relatively young year can bear. And let’s remember that “eureka” is how a movie actor with a fake Italian accent would pronounce “you reek.”

Actually, Prizzi’s Honor doesn’t reek; it is, just like Purple Rose, a mediocre film with delusions of grandeur, which make it slightly less than mediocre. It seems to be intended as a mordant satire on the Mafia, and, beyond that, American capitalism, and, beyond that, human nature, but it is too simplistic, too guarded, too farcical to be more than a modest entertainment with suppurating ambitions; I would love to know what Bertolt Brecht would have made of it, if someone could have coerced him to sit through its 130 minutes. Prizzi’s Honor is based on a novel by Richard Condon, with a script by Condon and Janet Roach. Several novels by Condon have been made into movies—he is that kind of hack— most notably The Manchurian Candidate. But this one is no Candidate, not even a contender.