Chazz Palminteri, Damn Good Fella (Part Three)
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In 1996 he returned to his writing roots, only this time in a
comedy. His play, Faithful, was made into a movie with Cher as a rich woman stuck
in a miserable marriage. Ryan O'Neill co-starred as her husband who has hired a hitman,
Tony (Chazz), to kill her. But before Tony can kill her he has to wait for a phone call
from her husband. He spends the next two hours caught between the wife, his conscience and
phone calls to his degenerate gambler shrink.
Again Chazz showed that his talent for comedy more than matched his
dramatic roles. (This happens to be my favorite Chazz film! I highly recommend finding it
if you haven't already.)
One theme of the film is what it means to be faithful. In a very funny
scene Chazz's character insists that oral sex doesn't count as cheating. But the real
Chazz knows better. "Remember that girlfriends become wives sooner or later. You
think you could be married and have a girlfriend on the side, but sooner or later the
girlfriend will become your wife. After the success of A Bronx Tale, I started to
look at my life differently. I wanted a family, and the thought of having one woman the
rest of my life intrigued me. I went out with a lot of women in my time. I'm not going to
hide that. At one point in the story a guy asks, "What's really cheating?" Some
men think blow jobs don't count. But they do. No action in your life is innocuous. Even
though nobody caught you, even though nobody saw you, you know. And that chips away at
your soul. You'll be less tolerant of your children and wife. You'll hate yourself a
little more. You have to work at a good marriage. There are moments when you may not feel
attracted to each other. But you have to stick it out. When the time came to do the right
thing, I did the right thing." "Playboy", July 1996
In his next two films he played corrupt cops who took the law into their own hands. Mullholand Falls tells the story of a special unit of the L.A.P.D. in the 40's that kept organized crime out of Los Angeles by less that official methods. The title refers to a cliff in the Mullholland area that they threw the unfortunate hoods
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