On Screen

...Blow your bloody brains out...

...That, I think, is why the critics have been misled...

...After the two of them set up house, Irene prepares dinner behind the counter while Charley discusses business with family members...

...Some underlying...

...If it is possible to speak of a mass-market cult figure—someone whose great number of admirers are all convinced they have a unique angle on him— Jack Nicholson is that figure...

...The movie is disfiguringly bleak, without an ounce of humor or a glimmer of light to set against the darkness...

...The eyes, though, are what I am beginning to tire of...

...Eventually she joins him in one of the clan's nefarious undertakings, but when she proves too greedy for the boss Charley is instructed to get ridofher...

...Except for her forlorn yet determined Maerose, no one in Prizzi's Honor evokes more every other respect it seemed fuzzy, less about the stifled emotions of the period than its physical feel...

...With her thick honey tresses, bright blue eyes and sexy curve of a mouth, Turner's Irene is the picture perfect woman men dream of installing in their kitchens...

...It has not hurt the reception of the movie, quite obviously, that the director is 78-year-old John Huston and the stars are Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner...

...Easy Rider, in 1969, brought his rascally face and insouciant style before a broader public...

...Kathleen Turner, who was so skillful in Romancing the Stone and steamed up the screen as the evil enchantress in Body Heat, plays Charley's romantic foil, Irene Walker...

...In Prizzi's Honor, however, he isn't asked to do anything very strenuous in the way of acting...

...From the opening scene, in which a squalling newborn is visited at the hospital nursery by his doting Godfather, through the following couple of takes showing the growing youngster first happily trying on a pair of brass knuckles he receives as a Christmas present, and then as an adult pricking thumbs in the blood rite initiating what the Godfather describes as "your boif into our Family," we are signaled that we are watching a raucous put-on...

...Following a whirlwind courtship, Charley proposes, despite the knowledge that his blue-eyed darling is a cold-blooded contract killer— his mirror image...

...Written and directed by the playwright David Hare, it is the most self-consciously literary venture of these three excessively literary movies...

...In a truly effective parody, such as Romancing the Stone, the script goes much further: It is both a sophisticated send-up of the high-adventure movie, and a high-adventure movie...

...to images of Death (brains being splattered against the wall...

...In fairness it would be difficult for Nicholson to play his latest role straight when the movie around him keeps winking at us...

...Under the Volcano, his previous picture, albeit less accessible and essentially a failure, was in my view infinitely more intriguing than Prizzi's Honor...

...Of course, I might have paid greater heed to the uniformly disappointed reactions of most of the people I knew who had rushed out to see this movie immediately after reading the reviews, and spared myself the chagrin...

...It is full of portentous lines like "The lonely recognize the lonely" (even Vanessa Redgrave can't salvage that one), and of obvious cutting back and forth from images of Life (everyone here makes love on the floor, aren't there any beds...

...Presumably concerned with the incipient collapse of the aristocratic way of life, and the bloodlust that will lead to World War I bubbling just below the surface of a highly ritualized hunting party taking place over a weekend at a country estate, the movie commits the mistake of stating its themes rather than suggesting them...

...Get this, he seems to be saying between the lines given to his character to speak, take a took at this guv...

...Never mind that the genre being sent up—the film noir,k\a Double Indemnity, complete with the heroine possessing a heart of pith—is already perilously close to the parodic in and of itself...

...Even the music, composed by AlexNorth, isaparodyof those '40s swelling-viohn scores, full of sound and fury, signifying in this case nothing more than the next reductio-ad-absurdum development...

...The role, now that I think of it, had a lot in common with Nicholson's first major onein?asy Rider...

...Miss Huston takes an almost lascivious delight in speaking Brooklynese, and she manages to convince us that she really is the person she says she is—a decorator who thinks pillows are all-important—in a few throwaway lines...

...never mind, too, that the particular territory the movie slices into is the underworld of the Mafia, possibly the most overstaked region in movies of the last decade: Prizzi's Honor considers itself to be very clever indeed...

...The British, who produce ambitious television programs with panache, seem to be spinning their wheels in their big screen efforts these days...

...While there are few things I prefer to watching the cosseted doings of the English aristocracy, with their elaborate table services and plump bedding, we have all seen the painstakingly accoutered houses on countless PBS programs and in movies that have more on their minds than the houses themselves—for example, Joseph Losey's The Go-Between...

...Finally, and most egregiously, there is Wetherby...

...Director Alan Bridges seems overly transfixed by the very grandeur The Shooting Party aims to expose as well as depict...

...To this end, it does a lot of winking at the audience, an awful lot...

...Prizzi's Honor means to be a parody...

...Prizzi's Honor was written by Richthan cackles...

...Nevertheless his daughter, Anjelica, is marvelous in the roleofMaerose, thePrizzis' dishonored daughter scheming to win back the attentions of her former lover, Charley...

...Aside from the always-luminous Vanessa Redgrave, on screen almost constantly playing a schoolmarm, the film espouses the kind of philosophy one depressed adolescent might recite to another more depressed adolescent: Is there any reason to live...

...What can I tell you...

...Set in a claustrophobic English village, Wetherby is flat-footed and dour...

...The movie reconstructed an Edwardian mansion in loving detail, down to the silver-backed brushes and combs...

...Still, it would be hard to miss Nicholson's eyes, slightly dazed yet knowing, set beneath eyebrows like two circumflex accent marks...

...Another British import based on a novel, this time by the contemporary Isabel Colgate, suffers the same affliction...

...Charley is given enough quirks to make him appear many-sided—he wears a siren-yellow jacket on his first date with the blonde beauty he spied at a gangster wedding—but there is no interior depth to the plot to support any perception besides subversion of form...

...I finally caught it at a local theater recently, along with an audience full of fellow stragglers, and I am here to report that not only wasn't I diverted but I was bored silly...

...And after an hour the cackles also run rather thin...

...It is possible to mistake the smoothness of this film, its tight fit, for something larger-scaled: for mastery...

...As she did in Body Heat, Turner manages to portray a bad character without any hardness, almost as though being bad were simply another genetic endowment, like good looks...

...The film asks the question: "Do we become the way we look or do we look the way we become...

...Even a figureof ridicule, Charley Partanna, has to sustain our interest long enough for us to care what happens to him...

...First there was Return of the Soldier, based on the Rebecca West novel, featuring a miscast Julie Christie, a wholly unmade-up Ann-Margret and abaf fled Alan Bates...

...They work against the character here, as they worked against the character in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining...

...The script has a definite if hollow tang that would have been enhanced by a subtlety Huston's direction does not provide...

...in ard Condon and Janet Roach, from Condon's novel...

...On Screen SUMMER WITHOUT HONOR BY DAPHNE MERKIN I put off seeing the much acclaimed Prizzi's Honor for the longest while, thinking it would pro vide me with something to look forward to this summer— a pleasant two hours of diversion from peering at the pitiful embers of would-be cinematic fires...

...A setting does not a drama make, and that in a nutshell was the trouble with the quickly expired Return of the Soldier...

...In Wetherby we are presented with a psychological puzzle whose pieces fit together in a pattern that is wholly arbitrary...

...So what should you do...

...Worstofall, Hare has abandoned the most basic of dramatic con ventions: You have to kno w a character before he kills himself...

...That reviewer for New York, again, thought the movie was "directed with great gravity and an underlying spirit of mockery...

...The Shooting Party boasts the presence of James Mason in a last, magnificently performed role, but it is too much costumed ado about too little...

...In one of the movie's more genuinely humorous scenes, it is a toss-up who will kill off whom under the pretense of a mutual seduction...

...Nicholson has exuded what is known as "star chemistry" ever since he made his first coy entrance into front-rank films from a back-seat career as part of Roger Cor-man's B-movie stable...

...Just as in The Shining the audience picked up on the Nicholson character's craziness way before his wife and son did (very early on, in fact, when he's driving them out to the deserted lodge he's agreed to caretake), so here Nicholson seems to be skipping around and sticking his tongue out at Charley's regular-guy personality, his ability to fall moondog in love as easily as he can rub out an enemy...

...Although his output has been of a strikingly mixed caliber, he has gained the stature that comes with longevity and versatility...

...he instantly became, and has remained, an audience favorite...

...The only part in recent years Nicholson has not treated mockingly was that of the ex-astronaut in Terms of Endearment...

...I assume the script specified that Partanna is on the pudgy side, because Nicholson did put on weight for the role, his usually vulpine features softened-over with an extra layer of flesh...

...Both characters were right-of-center, coming out of a belief-system seemingly far from Nicholson's own, but he was able to humanize them in a way that he has otherwise eschewed...

...Huston, especially in his productive old age, is the sort of director critics love to admire...

...I suppose there really is no accounting for perception, mine or anyone else's...

...What I want to know is: Why is this an interesting question...

...In addition there is Jack Nicholson playing Charley Partanna, an imperturbable Prizzi Family hit-man who believes women should stay home and "practice" their "meatballs...

...So much for "strange and wonderful...

...Either I came too late to the wrong party, or else all those critical intelligences making a hoopla about John Huston and his ain't- we-cute little film ("A strange and wonderful gangster movie," said New York magazine's reviewer) are running around without any wits on...

...The film is beautiful yet strangely inert, the way wives were once advised to be...

...But whereas Volcano, with its longueurs and abiding sense of nostalgia, went against the natural grain of Huston's talent, the new movie—all cocksure innuendo—seems to be the kind of production he could shoot in his sleep...

...Nicholson uses his eyes—which actually might belong to a con man or a drug addict, a hip dude—to establish a torpid rapport with his audience...

...The problem with all of Huston's heavy-breathing satire is that it's hard to take an interest in anyone...