Jerry Lewis was honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August, which gave me the opportunity to record several movies I haven't seen before; to be honest, I don't know that I'm going to get around to all of them before they expire from my DVR. Next up is a movie in which Jerry only has a supporting role: Cookie.
Cookie is a teenaged girl played by Emily Lloyd, but we don't see her at first. Instead, we get an introductory scene of one of those limousines that clearly looks like it's taken from a 1970s or 1980s mobster movie, which is appropriate since this is indeed a Mob-themed movie. The limo stops in an isolated part of New York one night, presumably for a meeting between the passenger there and somebody else, or perhaps to dump a dead body in the bay. But that's pre-empted by an explosion, killing the passenger in the limo. Fast forward a few days to the funeral of mobster Dino Capisco. And then....
The next scene informs us that it's a few months earlier. Cookie, together with her friend Pia (Ricki Lake in a small role) are out in Manhattan cruising the gray-market stalls with a modicum of money; running out of cash, they jump the turnstiles in the subway which gets them caught and sent to court. Poor Cookie seems to be about to go to jail since she can't pay bail, but at the last moment a strange man comes in and gets her released without bail pending a later appearance. That man then trundles Cookie into a limo and takes Cookie... to Sing Sing.
There, Cookie meets Dino Capisco (Peter Falk), who is her biological father. Except that he never married Cookie's mom Lenore (Dianne Wiest) because Dino has been married to Bunny (Brenda Vaccaro) who runs a doggy day care and won't grant Dino a divorce even though he's been in prison for the past 13 years. Dino is up for parole now, and doesn't want Cookie's legal problems to derail that parole even though apparently nobody really knows about Dino's illegitimate daughter. But with him about to get out of jail, he wants to do the right thing by her, or at least not have her screw up his post-prison life. He uses his influence with the other mobsters to get Cookie a job in New York's garment district at a sweatshop run by Dino's old partner Carmine, who is definitely the one preferred by the big boss Enzo (Lionel Stander). Likely they conspired to get Dino sent up to Sing Sing.
Before going to prison, Dino was involved in a construction deal in Atlantic City with the decidedly non-Italian mob-affiliated Arnold Ross (Jerry Lewis with the big 80s glasses, if you couldn't tell). Ross was supposed to hold a bunch of money in escrow, and Dino was hoping to use that to start a new life. But that money has ended up with Carmine and Enzo, and Dino wants it back.
Now, everything Dino is doing is decidedly a violation of his parole, and likely outright illegal. But then, this is the only life he knows. And in trying to get closer to his daughter Cookie, he's also getting her into the mob life, although she both doesn't quite want that and is also utterly naïve as to what being related to the Mob entails. She turns out to have a method to her madness, although there's that opening scene and the funeral of Dino on the horizon....
Cookie is a little movie, and although it's never going to be considered a masterpiece, it turns out to be a lot of fun. It was directed by Susan Seidelman, who did Desperately Seeking Susan a few years earlier, and it's easy to see the same influence in both movies. The movie has a bunch of twists and turns leading to a satifying conclusion, although I don't know if that conclusion is quite realistic.
Cookie slipped through the cracks for some reason, and that's a bit of a shame because of how entertaining it is.
No comments:
Post a Comment