Ethics Among the Ethnics

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE Directed by Stuart Rosenberg Screenplay by Vincent Patrick

Charlie (Mickey Rourke) has an expensive taste for European-cut suits, a beautiful blond girlfriend named Diane (Daryl Hannah) who teaches aerobics, and a good job as maiire d' in a restaurant. Though burdened by debts and the dream of one day owning a country inn, he is, or would like to think he is, upwardly mobile from the streets of Little Italy that formed him. His problem is that his best friend and cousin, Paulie (Eric Roberts), has enough downward mobility for any two inhabitants of the fringe. It's not long before the looniest of his cracked, crooked schemes has them being pursued by both police and Mafia.

By any reasonable standards, theirs is a mysterious relationship, and from Charlie's point of view, a destructive one. Diane demands, just before leaving in final disgust, "Why are you always one inch away from being a good person?," knowing full well the answer lies in the tribal loyalty that keeps him bound to his wackily wayward kinsman. But there is more to the male bonding than that, as this bleakly, sneakily comic movie explains. For all his sharp airs and knowing style, Charlie is a rather passive character. He needs the lift hat Paulie, bouncing through life like a Spauldeen in a stickball game, can give him. For his part, Paulie needs to be caught every once in a while and stuffed in a warm, dark pocket to restore his elasticity.

Their adventures, with Paulie always fouling up and Charlie always covering up, are intricately and surprisingly plotted by Screenwriter Vincent Patrick, adapting his own novel. He has a fine, unforced understanding of how clan loyalties work, a bemused acceptance of corruption as a natural part of New York City's municipal style, and a sharp sense of how Irish and Italian ethics and ethnics mesh to mutual advantage and grind to mutual exasperation. In Rourke, with his alert inwardness, and Roberts, with his burbling extraversion (as opposed to his work in Star 80 as it is possible to be), he has a dream team, actors capable of suggesting unwritten levels of intimacy in the film's central relationship while maintaining a strong, easy and persuasively naturalistic stride. With fine impartiality, Patrick has provided good roles for Burt Young and Tony Musante among the Mafiosi, for Jack Kehoe and Geraldine Page as a crooked cop and his adoring mom, and for Kenneth McMillan, playing an aging safecracker with a sad personal life, who provides a note of weary realism. Under Stuart Rosenberg's intelligently permissive direction, they provide the film with a rich variety of eccentric life.

Rosenberg's vision of New York's streets is sometimes a trifle too romantically picturesque. On occasion it distances one from his material and tames it.

Even so, his sober formalism helps maintain the viewer's bearings in the midst of a busy, vertiginous film. He is, on balance, right to let material as original as this speak in its own peculiar and arresting accents. --By Richard Schickel