Mafia Princess, Dream Queen MARRIED TO THE MOB

By RICHARD CORLISS

For too long Angela has lived in a domestic cage with rococo bars and gilded walls. Her husband Frank "the Cucumber" De Marco (Alec Baldwin) boards the morning Long Island commuter train, but he does his work in transit, putting a bullet in the brain of a rival Mafia goon in the seat ahead of him. Angela has a cute son, but the kid runs a three-card monte game in the backyard. Her home must have been decorated by Wheel of Fortune: all the furniture and appliances are studiously ugly, and half of them are still in crates. As she tells Frank, "Everything we wear, everything we eat, everything we own -- fell off a truck."

So when Frank gets prematurely deceased, courtesy of his jealous capo Tony "the Tiger" Russo (Dean Stockwell), Angela moves to a scuzzy Manhattan flat and makes friends with a nice guy named Mike (Matthew Modine). He's an FBI agent on a Mob detail, but what does this vulnerable widow know? As the camera tiptoes closer, Angela pours out her valentine-on-velvet heart. Tony this, Frank that, life sure does stink. And at the precise intersection of streetwise agony and Method acting -- the very moment at which an actress is expected to secure her Oscar nomination -- Michelle Pfeiffer crosses her eyes.

This goofy gesture, which America's most criminally pretty actress flashes smack in the middle of Jonathan Demme's high, wild and handsome comedy Married to the Mob, is no wink to the cognoscenti. Nor is it the white flag that a leading actress must eventually wave to the cartoon figures -- the Mafia dons and prima donnas -- scampering around her. It is the distress signal of a young woman, once cocooned in marriage, who now sees herself as an adolescent spilling confidences over a two-straw chocolate soda.

Demme is tops at luring these confidences, these comic grace notes, out of his performers. And Pfeiffer knows how to dish them out with the generosity of an haut-monde hostess casting intimate glances at strangers. Both artists have made funky music before -- easy on the ears, with reverberations that jangle provocatively in a moviegoer's memory. But the violent mood swings Demme programmed into films like Melvin and Howard and Something Wild often kept viewers at a bemused remove. And once or twice Pfeiffer has been stuck in films she could ornament but not inform. This time, though, these two and a gang of co-stars have created a coherent farce symphony.

The mobsters here are plodding, put-upon businessmen, and their wives are as bored and possessive as if they lived in Stepford. They are refugees from New York City's orphan boroughs who have disguised themselves as middle-class Long Islanders. And they have brought their gruff camaraderie, their accents and their animosities with them. This is not Jay Gatsby's West Egg (he was a gangster too, but he dressed better); this is New Yawk transplanted, with a lawn and a sauna. For these tough guys, upward mobility carries a hefty price tag: the pretense of a solid marriage. So a sleaze lord like Tony Russo can sign rub-out contracts but can't handle his wife Connie, played to the gritted teeth by Mercedes Ruehl.

When the script deftly maneuvers Angela, Mike, Tony and Connie into the most expensively hideous suite in a Miami Beach hotel, Demme finds a satisfying comic payoff for the first time in his career. And in Pfeiffer -- a California blond in black wig and cramped Queens patois -- he has secured the emotional anchor to his vertiginous sight gags.

You have perhaps heard that Pfeiffer is beyond gorgeous: serene blue eyes, jawline by Garbo, perfect teeth unstained by the occasional Marlboro. The bearer is more modest in appraisal. "Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, they're beautiful," Pfeiffer says. "I think I look like a duck. The way my mouth curls up and my nose tilts, I should have played Howard the Duck." Sure, but Howard couldn't work his mouth so that when fashioned into a smile, it has the innocence of a shy Cinderella's, and when upended, it curdles into the sulk of a party animal no man should even bother trying to impress.

It was as the sulky siren that Pfeiffer made her first mark, as a punkette in Grease 2, as Al Pacino's coked-out wife in Scarface, as a Hitchcockian heroine with a Los Angeles '80s twist in Into the Night. Then, switching on the Cinderella smile, she became a princess in the medieval adventure Ladyhawke and the sweetest witch in Eastwick. She has played movie stars in Sweet Liberty and PBS's Natica Jackson, two fables about creatures of illusion manipulating the reality of voyeurs who dare mistake the actress for the role.

Which one is she? All of them and none. "I have five points of view about everything," Pfeiffer says. "I mean, the rooms of my house are decorated in all different styles." She also has a minority opinion of her acting: "I keep doing these comedies, and I don't think I'm funny." She is a cover girl with the inverted-searchligh t soul of a Woody Allen heroine.

Pfeiffer, from Orange County, Calif., is one of four children born to an air-conditioner retailer and his wife. "I was a tomboy," she says, "always beating somebody up. The comments on my report card said that I needed to work on my mouth -- I talked way too much. Then, in fourth grade, boys started to find me attractive, so I put away my boxing gloves." At school Michelle acted up; at home she acted out. "I'd sing into the garden hose and pretend I was Elvis," she recalls. "Whenever I'd try to con my mother, she'd say, 'What a drama queen!' "

From 14, this princess worked, mainly for the Von's supermarket chain: "I still think I'm the best box girl Von's ever had." But one day in 1977 revelation smote the check-out girl when she came out short on her register. "I said to myself, 'What do you want to do?' The answer was acting." By 1981 she was Greased.

The same year she wed Actor Peter Horton (thirtysomething); they were separated last year, and now the all-American girl is beauless. "Dating is a disaster for me. I don't know how to, and I don't get the point. You're not really friends, you're not really lovers. Besides, I never go anywhere. For a while I dated ((Actor)) Michael Keaton, whom I met at Fireside, my local grocery store. So I guess I'll just wait to meet somebody at Fireside again."

Line forms at the check-out counter, gents. Pfeiffer will be busy onscreen for now -- in this Christmas' Tequila Sunrise, with Mel Gibson, then in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, with Glenn Close -- and perhaps for decades. But if you're lucky enough to encounter Hollywood's dream queen in a Santa Monica grocery, she may cast those famous blue eyes your way. And cross them.

With reporting by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles