Word: prizzi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...inside look at organized crime any more than it is a study of the joys and dangers of sexual obsession. It is a parable of generational conflict in Director Huston's most sardonic (or Asphalt Jungle) vein. Its basic irony derives from the fact that the Prizzi hoods, colorfully impersonated by such welcome old pros as William Hickey, Robert Loggia and Lee Richardson, represent, despite their line of work, traditional values. They take the long, institutional view of their enterprise, understanding that its greatest asset is its reputation for squaring accounts with rigorous fairness. To preserve it, they are willing...
...Prizzi's Honor, Richard Condon...
...real meaning, inside the real meaning of the false meaning, which he would read as M." Pop is Angelo Partanna, consigliere to the nation's most puissant Mafia family. His son Charley is underboss and chief enforcer for the family, a geratic Brooklyn Mob headed by Corrado Prizzi, 84. Charley, the anti-hero of Prizzi's Honor, is somewhat deficient in the paternal paranoia that has helped earn the gang international clout and an annual gross income of $1.7 billion. However, he took out his first Prizzi foe when he was only 13, and has been earning great...
...semigorgeous broad named Irene Walker. To the hulking bachelor hoodlum, she is "a classic, like the Truman win over Dewey." Irene is not Sicilian, but a Pole from Los Angeles who is semimarried to a Jew; she is also a freelance assassin who has shot one man for the Prizzis and, on the side, scammed them for $360 ($360? The other 000 is always omitted in family conversation, supposedly "to confuse the tourists"). Novelist Richard Condon's Prizzi family is not boroughs but planets distant from Mario Puzo's Corleones. These soldiers have no dignity...
Condon's stylish prose and rich comedic gift once again spice a moral sensibility that has animated 16 novels since The Manchurian Candidate appeared in 1962. If wit and irony could somehow neutralize villainy, the novelist would make a fine FBI director. Prizzi's Honor, like most of his books, comes sometimes too close to the truth for comfort, and it has what many may regard as a shocking end. On the other hand, the crime family survives, its billions and precious omerta intact. And that, Richard Condon points out, makes it "the all-American success story...