Chazz Palminteri can make a dangerous man funny without making him safe. We rate him most when a part gives that threat something to do beyond establishing that he is playing another gangster.
Fi1m perspective
In Bullets Over Broadway (1994), Chazz Palminteri's Cheech is a gangster's bodyguard among theatre people, and he does not become harmless just because the company is ridiculous. We laughed at Cheech and remained wary of him, because Palminteri keeps the threat of criminal behaviour alive inside the jokes about art. That is the performance's particular pleasure. He can be funny without asking us to decide that Cheech is secretly a nice man. The comedy needs that discomfort, and he supplies it without making a separate business of being menacing.
His early screen breakthrough came from a part he had written himself: Sonny in A Bronx Tale (1993). Robert De Niro directed the film, for which Palminteri wrote the screenplay, adapting his own 1989 autobiographical one-man play. The familiar tough-guy casting therefore tells only part of the story of his work. We would not confuse that authorship with merely being well cast, however often subsequent films have returned him to similar roles.
Woody Allen gives him something similarly useful in Bullets Over Broadway: a reason to matter to the people around him. Allen and McGrath's writing lets Cheech challenge the theatre people's assumptions about talent, rather than merely interrupt their work with gangster business. Palminteri makes that challenge convincing while refusing to soften the man making it. The film still has theatrical clichés and stretches of stiff staging, neither of which a supporting actor can put right. But his presence gives the backstage comedy an edge it would be poorer without.
The Usual Suspects (1995), as Dave Kujan, and Analyze This (1999), as Primo Sidone, kept him in crime stories, the latter reuniting him with De Niro. Television and voice work have widened the list of jobs, including appearances as Shorty in Modern Family between 2010 and 2019. Yet the repeated tough-guy casting remains a limitation, even when he is good at it. Start with Bullets Over Broadway, where the actor is allowed to be more interesting than the casting shorthand.
Biography
Chazz Palminteri is an American actor, screenwriter and playwright. Born Calogero Lorenzo Palminteri on 15 May 1952 in the Bronx, New York City, he studied acting at the Actors Studio and began his career in off-Broadway productions while working as a nightclub doorman.
He wrote and performed the one-man play A Bronx Tale in the late 1980s, later adapting it into the 1993 film in which he starred opposite Robert De Niro, who also directed. In 1994 he played the mob henchman Cheech in Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He is also known for his role as Dave Kujan in The Usual Suspects (1995) and a recurring part as Shorty in the television series Modern Family.
