Married to the Mob (1988)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Angela de Marco is fed up with her gangster husband's line of work and wants no part of the crime world. When her husband is killed for having an affair with the mistress of mob boss Tony "The Tiger" Russo, Angela and her son depart for New York City to make a fresh start. Unfortunately, Tony has set his sights upon Angela -- and so has an undercover FBI agent looking to use her to bust Tony.
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What critics compared Married to the Mob to
Although the handheld shaky-cam used to give the film an unnerving, voyeuristic, home-movie vibe would not have been an option early in Demme's career, "Rachel Getting Married" revels in the emotional chaos found in such 1980s films as "Melvin and Howard," "Something Wild" and "Married to the Mob," made before the Oscar/box-office double whammy of "The Silence of the Lambs" established Demme as a "prestige" director.
It's a shame, then, that Demme doesn't trust his deftness, saddling this intriguing chimera of Something Wild and Married to the Mob with well-trammelled Demme-as-auteur interludes that drag out, nonsensically, the corpses of Robyn Hitchcock and Sister Carol to cameo, grinding the whole shooting match to a halt at regular intervals.
The movie evokes such classics as “Married to the Mob,” “Goodfellas,” and “Prizzi’s Honor,” but it has a fizziness all its own and a pell-mell but lucid storytelling strategy that is one of the most impressive achievements in recent filmmaking.
Mercedes Ruehl (Married to the Mob) is almost unrecognizable as Mother but her few moments on screen are memorable.
The murderous, pasta-sucking Italian Americans of “Married to the Mob” have nothing on the Jewish underbelly of “Uncut Gems.”
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Take a heady dose of "The Player," with guffaws instead of snickers, add a little "L.A. Story" and throw in some "Married to the Mob," and you might end up with something almost like "Get Shorty."
Bridges is wallowing in self-pity, living with and taking advantage of Mercedes Ruehl ("Married to the Mob"), who owns and operates a small video store.
Jonathan Demme's ''Married to the Mob'' turns Mafiosos into characters out of a Preston Sturges comedy.
This is gangster life played for screwball comedy but the culture isn’t all that different than what Martin Scorsese would present in Goodfellas just a couple of years later, right down to the colorful names like Vinnie The Slug, Nick The Snake, Al The Worm, and Tony “The Tiger” Russo, the name of the philandering family boss played by Stockwell.
Afterwards, Scorsese simply had to do Goodfellas.