‘Prizzi's Honor' at 40: How John and Anjelica Huston made history together with his penultimate picture
John Huston directed some of the best movies in film history. From his pathbreaking noirs like The Maltese Falcon and The Asphalt Jungle to The African Queen or The Man Who Would Be King, Huston was nominated for 14 Oscars, winning two for The Treasure of Sierra Madre (Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay). Huston directed his final film, The Dead, while ill with emphysema, and died months before the film's release. His penultimate film, the black comedy organized crime film Prizzi's Honor, was easily one of his best — and that's saying something.
Based on Richard Condon's 1982 novel, Prizzi's Honor was released 40 years ago, on June 14, 1985. The film centers Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson), a mob hitman for the Prizzi family, who falls for Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner). The two become romantically entangled before the situation gets messy: he discovers Walker was married to a man Charley killed for stealing from the mob. That's a problem Irene and Charley can get through, but there are further problems in store. First, estranged Prizzi daughter Maerose (Anjelica Huston) has a past with Charley and ambitions of her own. Second, is the reveal that Irene's secretly an assassin, too, and the Prizzi family hired the duo to take each other out (in the murderous way, not the dating way), in an ever-shifting set of alliances and romantic entanglements.
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There's an obvious resemblance here to 2005's Mr. & Mrs. Smith, where a loving married couple live secret double lives as killers, and one day are ordered by rival agencies to kill each other. Where Smith plays such a premise for ironic action-comedy, Prizzi's Honor highlights Charley's struggles between his duties to the family and to his love. It takes the dangers of mob life seriously, but the made men themselves are treated with humor (referring to protagonist Charley, Huston reportedly told Nicholson repeatedly to 'remember, he's stupid'), setting up an enjoyable parade of double-crosses and complex situations with a hint of tragic irony.
The film was a surprise sleeper hit, finishing in the top 30 in a stacked movie year, and it was Anjelica Huston's big break. In Watch Me: A Memoir, Huston notes that no talent agency would bring her aboard before the Yvette Bikoff Agency. Huston was hired on for the SAG minimum, and she convinced Bikoff to negotiate for pay above scale. As Huston recounted in her memoir, the producers weren't thrilled, saying: 'You want more money for Anjelica Huston? You must be kidding. … We'd like nothing better than to see her dropped from the film. She has no talent. Her boyfriend is the star and her father is the director, that's the only reason we are even having this conversation.'
20th Century Fox courtesy of the Everett Collection
At the 58th Academy Awards, The Color Purple and Out of Africa received a leading 11 nominations each, with Witness and Prizzi's Honor next with eight apiece. Out of Africa was the night's biggest winner with seven statuettes, while Purple was entirely shut out. Despite prestigious nominations including Best Picture (John Foreman), Best Director (John Huston), and Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Prizzi's won only one. Anjelica Huston collected the film's only Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress, a well-earned accomplishment given what she went through to land the role.
Though he didn't win Best Director, the film still made history for John Huston, who became the oldest person to receive a Best Director nomination at 79 for the film (now eclipsed by Martin Scorsese who was 81 in 2024 when Killers of the Flower Moon received a nomination). It also made John Huston the only person to have directed both his parent (Walter Huston, who won Best Supporting Actor for The Treasure of Sierra Madre) and his child to acting Oscars. Prizzi's Honor is a stunner of a black comedy that still holds up, and a testament for John Huston's ability to find levity even in dark moments.
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