Married to the Mob

When philandering Mafia hitman 'Cucumber' Frank de Marco is killed by his boss Tony 'The Tiger' Russo, his widow Angela (Pfeiffer) decides to abandon her stockbroker-belt home (bursting with stolen goods) and start anew with a job and a dingy room on the Lower East Side. Easier said than done: obsessively amorous Tony (Stockwell) courts her with a vengeance, while FBI agent Mike Downey (Modine) suspects that she planned Frank's death with Tony. If the slim plot of Demme's romantic black comedy lacks the outrageous panache and exhilarating twists of Something Wild, the film nevertheless delights through its sheer good-humoured glee in all that is kitsch or off-the-wall, and its wealth of inventive incidental details. While it's all relentlessly shallow, the performances, music and gaudy visuals provide a fizzy vitality for which many other directors would give their right arm. Amazingly, for all its hip anarchy, it's finally an oddly old-fashioned slice of entertainment. Preston Sturges might have approved.