Richard Condon's comic novel of love and "family" loyalty inside the Mafia has a long and tortuous plot, taken at a very slow walk by John Huston (and, even so, with some very wide and wobbly turns). The pace allows you plenty of time to admire the design of the thing, and it gives the humor a dryness bordering on evaporation. For all the pokiness, there is too little development of the love match between a Brooklyn hit man and out-of-town hit woman. Indeed most of the character interest, in this film of forced and flaunted eccentricity, resides in externals: the wheezing pipes and papyrus skin of William Hickey as the patriarchal Don (why didn't Huston himself play this role?), the vampirish and adenoidal Anjelica Huston (John's daughter) as the family's black sheep. Jack Nicholson, who looks as if he keeps a wad of chewing gum behind his upper lip, sets the standard in this department: a sort of cross between Humphrey Bogart and Burt Young. Kathleen Turner, conventionally cast as the conventional femme fatale, seems to belong in another movie. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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