Married to the Mob (1988) Jonathan Demme’s Wise Guy Screwball Farce (Review)

Radiance Films continues an impressive run in its debut year with a new 2K restoration release of Jonathan Demme’s hit 1988 farce Married to the Mob, the movie that launched Michelle Pfeiffer’s star into its bright ascendency. Pfeiffer stars as Angela de Marco, a young Long Island housewife whose unfaithful husband, Frank ‘the Cucumber’ (Alec Baldwin) is an enforcer and hitman for mob boss Tony ‘the Tiger’ Russo (Dean Stockwell), who is routinely cheating on his own wife, mob queen Connie (Mercedes Ruehl). When Frank is iced by Tony for sleeping with one of his mistresses, Angela spies the golden opportunity to escape the cloistered criminal existence she has inadvertently married into for a life in the big city, but her big move sees numerous interested parties in hot pursuit; firstly there’s Tony, who has become smitten with her, and the insanely jealous Connie, who has her suspicions regarding the pair. Lastly, there’s Matthew Modine’s eccentric FBI agent Mike Downey, who believes Angela is the key to getting Tony behind bars once and for all.

The film was penned by Barry Strugatz and Mark R Burns, a pair of Long Island natives who sought inspiration from the times when stories from their own neighbourhood became front page national news (the crimes of Mafia boss John Gotti being a prime example) and their love of Preston Sturges movies from the 1940s. The film proved to be the duo’s first and only hit movie (She-Devil followed a year later, an ill-advised adaptation of Fay Weldon’s 1983 novel and the 1986 BBC drama series of the same name The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil, starring Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr, and their career effectively withered on the vine) and a significant contributing factor to their success here lies in the fact that their screenplay secured, in Jonathan Demme, a director who instinctively understood what they were trying to achieve.

By the time that Married to the Mob was released, Jonathan Demme was well on his way to mainstream success. Though his Oscar winning work on The Silence of the Lambs was still three years away, Demme had achieved critical acclaim and Academy recognition for his 1980 film Melvin and Howard, which led to 1984’s Swing Shift, his first major commercial release. Though Swing Shift was a troubled production he would ultimately renounce, his work on the Goldie Hawn/Kurt Russell vehicle granted him the opportunity to make 1986’s Something Wild, a screwball comedy reinvented for the yuppiefied climate of the 1980s, after he’d retreated from Hollywood to lick his wounds and make the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense in 1984. Despite this mainstream potential, Demme remained an idiosyncratic filmmaker as befits someone who broke into the industry making B movies for Roger Corman. It’s this inimitable, rough around the edges, cultish style and the affinity he showed in Something Wild for screwball farce that works well for Married to the Mob, a film that consistently defies mainstream conventions even when it is courting them.

Strugatz and Burns’ story is a relatively simple and familiar one, one which could work just as easily as a straight crime drama as it does a stylish comedy. It presents an attractive heroine in Angela, a woman who is individualistic by nature but who has made a few poor decisions along the way which have ended up leaving her trapped. Seizing the chance to break free and redeem herself, her old life continues to stand in the way of her second chance as represented by Tony who wants her to return to become his mistress, and Connie who fears and resents Angela’s individualism, which has set her apart from her and her fellow mob wives. As convention dictates, a hero figure must enter our heroine’s story when she is most imperilled, but the filmmakers aren’t interested in depicting FBI agent Mike as a knight in shining armour. Instead, he’s written as a goofball with a Keatonesque flair for silly physicality and the kind of Heath Robinson gadgetry normally reserved for Wallace and Gromit movies.

Tellingly, on the first night the pair sleep together – literally just sleep together. Back to back. Though it was scripted for the usual sex scene to take place, Matthew Modine objected, arguing that it would be out of character for his guileless, gentlemanly character to make such a move when Pfeiffer is vulnerable. As such, the pair never consummate their love on screen (they attempt to the morning after, but Mike’s partner, played by Oliver Platt, disturbs them) and Angela maintains enough agency to achieve her goals and evade her antagonists arguably without Mike coming to her rescue. Given that the film bucks convention, it’s easy to see why Tom Cruise repeatedly passed on the role of Mike. Thank God he did. Can you imagine how bad he, or indeed any other conventional romantic poster boy action hero, would have been? I’ve seen criticism of Modine’s performance as Mike but I don’t think it’s really justified. Anyone who finds him to be a weak link in the proceedings is, to my mind, really expressing how at odds the character is with the cinematic norm. For my money, Modine pitches his character just right. And if he still gets lost in the mix, it’s only because Demme has assembled a really strong, stacked cast.

Obviously much of Married to the Mob rests on the shoulders of Michelle Pfeiffer. The former beauty pageant queen and trainee court stenographer had secured her first major film role just six years earlier with Grease 2. An unmitigated flop, Pfeiffer nevertheless emerged unscathed, receiving the only favourably plaudits and a year later she went on to play her first mob wife, the cocaine-addicted Elvira, wife of Al Pacino’s monstrous Tony Montana in Scarface. From there a succession of roles in modest commercial successes followed, building up to an impressive one-two punch with The Witches of Eastwick in 1987 and Married to the Mob in 1988. Heralded as a sex symbol for the era, Pfeiffer nevertheless dresses down for the role of Angela, sporting a curly brunette wig and a Brooklyn accent. She looks tough, but feminine nonetheless and throughout the movie, Pfeiffer skilfully walks the line between both these traits to create a strong and sympathetic character. For her performance, she received her first Golden Globe nomination for the role, beginning a six-year streak of consecutive nominations.

For me though, the film belongs to Dean Stockwell and, to a lesser extent, Mercedes Ruehl. Stockwell had an illustrious career which stretched all the way back to his years as a child actor in the 1940s, yet it was his performance in Married to the Mob that Stockwell personally considered his best. The actor, who sadly passed away at the age of 85 in 2021, approached the role of Tony ‘the Tiger’ Russo, a little differently from other roles in that he employed the Method technique to stay in character throughout the production. However it seems that his unwillingness to come out of character was actually an indication of how much fun he was having! Whatever the reasons, it certainly paid off as he received his only Oscar nomination for his performance here. One of the delights we have as an audience in watching Stockwell here lies in the fact that we are witnessing an inveterate and impeccable character actor take centre stage with a kind of stoic delight. As with a lot of really good character actors, there was always something a little different in each role Stockwell tackled, his range was exquisite. Faced with the opportunity of such a role, your A-listers like Jack Nicholson would arguably seize upon the flashy gaudiness inherent in the role as evinced by the fabulous 80s costume designs of Colleen Atwood, but a character actor like Stockwell knows that it’s best to let the fashions do their thing. His performance is kept in perfect check, subtle yet hilarious.

Likewise Ruehl – for whom Married to the Mob was arguably her biggest role at that point – was canny enough to approach the role of Connie with an empathy and an appreciation of the multidimensionality of the character. It would have been very easy for an actress to play the part as caricature, a grotesque pride mother lacking in taste or appreciation, but for Ruehl this was a woman whose heart was breaking as a result of her husband’s indiscretions and at an unspoken, perhaps even unconscious, envy that she felt for Angela’s free spirit. Ruehl gets some of the very best lines that Strugatz and Burns can offer, but she never once plays Connie as comic relief or as a woman who knows that she is funny. The humour comes from Connie’s increasingly frustrated reactions to her life in freefall. Quite rightly, Ruehl was awarded the Best Supporting Actress prize from the National Society of Film Critics Awards (with Stockwell bagging Best Supporting Actor) and her career on film and TV went from strength to strength. Rounding out the stacked cast are names like Alec Baldwin, Oliver Platt, Joe Spinell, Joan Cusack, Al Lewis, Tracey Walter, Charles Napier and Chris Isaak. Some of these appearances may be brief, but Demme clearly knew that Strugatz and Burns’ characterisation is so effective for even the smallest of roles that good actors could be attracted.

Demme’s approach to the material is to make it all a kind of comic book stylisation, and this is never more apparent than in the violence. Quite apart from Stockwell’s seemingly invincible status and incredible sharp-shooting, Demme approaches the shootouts with a balletic, almost unreal grace that is at odds with some of the mundanity that often leads up to it; it feels like Stockwell singing the advertising jingle for a burger joint prior to a spectacular aborted hit was something Tarantino definitely made a mental note of. Likewise I love how cultish and edgy Demme is even when he’s operating in the mainstream. It’s there in his choice of music as, quite part from David Byrne composing the score, we also hear Q Lazzarus’ Goodbye Horses here (it would later appear significantly in The Silence of the Lambs) as well as New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle to name but a few, many of whom appear over the ‘rip it up and start again’ approach Demme has to the end credits, which sees cutting room floor material played as a means to retell the story of the film you have just watched from a different angle.

Radiance’s attractive package includes a raft of new interviews featuring Modine, Ruehl and Strugatz and Burns, a newly recorded audio commentary from Danielle Henderson and Millie De Chrico of the I Saw What You Did podcast, an image gallery and trailer.

Mark’s Archive: Married to the Mob (1988)