The Pope of Greenwich Village

Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts play two Italian-American cousins working in a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Rourke's Charlie Moran is a cool, focused, tough guy pursuing the realistic dream of owning his own restaurant one day. Roberts' Paulie Gibonni is the dimwitted loose-canon always looking for a shortcut. When Paulie gets them both fired, and Charlie learns his girlfriend Diane is pregnant, they find themselves drawn to a caper. Paulie hatches a plan to crack a safe with the help of a locksmith, played by Kenneth McMillan. But Paulie isn't the sharpest criminal mastermind in the world, and the victim of his plan is a local mobster, "Bed Bug Eddie" Grant (played by the great Burt Young), who doesn't take kindly to getting ripped off. Diane, played by the impossibly sexy Daryl Hannah (in her third but least noteworthy 1984 breakout performance following Reckless and Splash), is a WASP, which makes her an outsider who doesn't understand why Charlie is so loyal to his fuck-up cousin Paulie. The movie's success depends almost entirely on whether you share her view or feel simpatico with Charlie. Being a WASP myself, maybe I'm just not the target audience for this picture because I lose patience with both its main characters and, therefore, find the movie a bit tedious.

Rourke and Roberts give big, broad, colorful performances supported by some of the era's best New York character actors. This was a "hangout movie" long before that term was coined, with plenty of memorable scenes and dialogue. Robert's line, "They took my thumb, Charlie!" once ranked fairly high in the annals of most quoted lines in movie history. The film was a popular VHS rental back in the early days of the format but has slowly disappeared from movie conversations over the decades. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke, The Laughing Policeman, The Amityville Horror), the picture harkens back to movies of the prior decade, which was part of its appeal in the slicker, glossier era of the mid-'80s.

In 1984, Roberts and Rourke were two of the hottest young actors in Hollywood and seemed to be on dual trajectories into long-term movie super-stardom. Roberts had started his film career with a leading role in Frank Pierson's King of the Gypsies (1978), for which he received major accolades. He'd been similarly acclaimed for his starring role as Paul Snider in Bob Fosse's controversial Star 80 (1983), and he was Oscar-nominated, along with his co-star Jon Voight, for Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train in 1985. But after those highs, Robert's career stumbled and was overtaken by his younger sister Julia while he settled somewhat comfortably into lead and supporting roles in B-movies and the occasional character part in a prestige picture. Rourke was an amateur boxer whose impossibly good looks and dark, slightly dangerous sex appeal made him a natural for the silver screen. He'd appeared on the scene in the early '80s with small roles in Steven Spielberg's 1941, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, and, most notably, in Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat, before stealing ensemble films like Barry Levinson's Diner and Francis Coppola's Rumble Fish, and making the jump to leading man status in films like Cimino's Year of the Dragon, Adrian Lyne's 9½ Weeks, Alan Parker's Angel Heart, and Barbet Schroeder's Barfly. But in the early 1990s, he returned to his first love, boxing. He eschewed Hollywood, reportedly turning down countless roles that became career-defining hits for other actors like 48 Hrs., Platoon, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, The Untouchables, Rain Man, and Pulp Fiction. So it's both fun and interesting to see these two talented actors appearing together just as they both were becoming major movie stars for far briefer periods than they, or anyone else, figured.