At a glance an underworld comedy in the general vein of Married to the Mob -- but intermittent or even more frequent admirers of Paul Morrissey, quite unlike those of Jonathan Demme on the occasion of Mob, will have no need to make apology. First off, as Morrissey edges closer to the commercial middle-of-the-road, his unprofessionalism prevents him from quite getting there: the movie is curiously flat and paceless, and only at its best in those stagnant times (reminiscent of his Warhol Factory work) when you are buttonholed by pure and unadulterated "character." This, if anything, opens the way to a kind of personal charm inaccessible to slicker, glossier movies. Or if what it opens the way to is not always charm, at least it is always personal: it doesn't smack of something made by committee for consumption by millions. And Morrissey scores much better than Demme -- a higher shooting percentage if not a higher point-total -- in the area of character-revealing costume and décor (the tray of Pop Tarts on the coffee table, next to the bowl of wax grapes). So much so, in fact, as to liberalize the definition of his so-called unprofessionalism. The cast, further liberalizing that definition, is almost uniformly good, Sasha Mitchell and Talisa Soto better than others. With Ernest Borgnine and Sylvia Miles. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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