THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE, gives you yet another chance to practice your Italian-American NYC Street Lingo, bada-binging back from your couch at the nonstop patter from the cliched characters. Assuming, that is, that you can stand to be around them, because the gibbering jerks in this dish of pastaforlosers start out obnoxious and mussingly mook their way to hateful. There are a few pieces of genuine-human-feeling interaction, chiefly three of the supporting players, but overall it feels like an elaborate acting workshop, with the vomitato material (Vincent Patrick adapting his novel, capisce?) more dog-eared than a Playboy with Farrah Fawcett, and a teacher (director Stuart Rosenberg) too much of a stunod/chooch/gavone to tell his unruly students to che cozz’?/fuidi dogo/numu fai shcumbari!  Q. Which occurs more often during that 121 minute running time: Mickey Rourke lighting up a cigarette or Eric Roberts screwing up his face to resemble a gargoyle on crack?

The southern section of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood.  ‘Charlie Moran’ (Rourke) loses his cush job as a maître d‘ thanks to his minchione cousin ‘Paulie Gibonni’ (Roberts) who thinks the ‘high life’ is something he’s destined for. Broke, in debt and with a pregnant girlfriend (Darryl Hannah, representing WASP goddess aerobic instructors) Charlie allows Paulie (how you will frickin’ tire of hearing them say their names and others ending in ‘y’ or ‘ie’) to talk him into a robbery, a literally ‘safe’ one. Except the locked bread basket holds dough that belongs to local mafioso ‘Bed Bug Eddie’ (Burt Young) and a cop (Irish, duh, and on the take, ma figurati!) manages to gets killed during the burgle.

Well-lensed by John Bailey (Ordinary People, The Big Chill, Silverado), nicely scored by Dave Grusin, with backup team that’s who’s who of ethnic types, mostly Italian-American (Young, Tony Musante, Val Avery—Armenian specializing in paisans, Philip Bosco, Tony DiBenedetto, Joe Grifasi, Frank Vincent) with a few Irish for stew flavor (Kenneth McMillan, M. Emmet Walsh, John Finn). Along with McMillan’s unlucky safecracker, the most reality-brushing characters and most affecting acting comes from reliable sad sack Jack Kehoe and guest dame Geraldine Page as his iron-spied mother: she has just two scenes and nailed them so well that she was given an Oscar nomination for Supporting Actress.

Rourke floats between interesting and irksome (Charlie’s supposed charm is left on the pages of the script) and Roberts is so wildly overheated that he claws at the apex of excess (and there isn’t an atom of likability in this Paulie dipshit). The wrapup is wretched.

Made for $8,000,000, grossing $6,836,000 in the States, 96th place in 1984.

Jack Kehoe, 1934-2020