Goodfellas | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Chosen by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 greatest American films of the last 100 years, Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas (1990) has done more to demythologize organized crime than any other major contemporary film, while cementing its maker's reputation as, arguably, America's greatest director still living and working at the end of the twentieth century. GoodFellas was based on Nicholas Pileggi's 1985 bestseller, Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, which recounted the true story of Henry Hill. A low-level mobster who rose up through the ranks, Hill was involved in the biggest cash robbery in America's history, was caught dealing cocaine, turnedState's evidence, and entered the Federal Witness Protection Program. Behind its glossy and absorbing gangster-thriller surface, the film offered an unvarnished account of Mafia brutality that came to set a standard—seldom achieved since—for the moral focus of serious crime films, and illuminated public understanding of the culture in which organized crime flourishes.

Set in Scorsese's home ground of New York City, whose underbelly he had so successfully exploited in many of his films, including the early Mean Streets (1973) and the masterly Taxi Driver (1976), GoodFellas marked the climactic contribution to the director's cycle of underworld subjects, and the one to which he successfully brought an epic approach. His by now practiced craft and brilliantly individual brand of expressionistic realism imbued GoodFellas with black comedy, often memorably ironic, sharp social observation, and scenes of deeply shocking but never gratuitous violence. The film is very long, but absolutely enthralls in its unfolding of a tale in which audiences watch the young lad Hill grow to manhood in the Mafia, and was lent further power by a large cast that, as British critic Max Loppert wrote, was "a galaxy of New York character acting at its athletic, up-front best." At the center was Ray Liotta as Hill, surrounded and supported by, among others too numerous to mention, a menacingly detached Robert De Niro, Oscar-winning Joe Pesci as the viciously manic Tommy DeVito, Paul Sorvino as Mafia boss Paul Cicero and, as Hill's middle-class Jewish wife, a superb Lorraine Bracco. Together, this ensemble vividly and realistically impersonated the real-life sociopaths they were portraying, articulating a world of men whose daily business embraces every known felony from arson and extortion through dealing in drugs and firearms to cold-blooded killing in the pursuit of money and power.

Hill was an insider who remained outside; although he was involved in the mob's scams, thefts, and murders, he was half-Irish and half-Sicilian, and only thoroughbred Sicilians could become "made men" within the Mafia. While the book dealt with the facts of the case, Scorsese puts flesh on the bones by making choices as to what he includes and how he treats it. The book, for example, detailed the 1978 theft of six million dollars from a Lufthansa cargo at Kennedy Airport, but where a lesser director would show the theft in all its detail, Scorsese shrewdly omits it entirely; his concern is with the lives of the perpetrators and how they are affected in the aftermath of the operation. The haul is so huge that a number of them, though warned to lie low, start living extravagantly, thus worrying De Niro's Jimmy Conway that their behavior will tip off the cops. He deals with their indiscretion by having each of them—some ten in all—killed, fully aware that their elimination will bring the added advantage of increasing his own percentage of the take.

This expert and imaginative ability to transpose and select creates dramatic juxtapositions from the start. Pileggi's book began with Hill describing his childhood, lived across the street from a cab stand controlled by the mob. He reveals how he was attracted by the apparent glamour of the mobsters' lives, admiring them for their power and wealth so that, from the age of 12, his dream was to be one of them. By contrast, GoodFellas opens midway through the story, with the adult Henry driving along a deserted road at night, accompanied by Jimmy and Tommy. He hears a strange thumping sound, speculates on its cause (a flat? Did he hit something?), and they pull over to investigate. The three men climb out, circle to the back of the car, and Henry opens the trunk to reveal a beaten and bloody cohort who, to their collective astonishment, is still breathing. Tommy lunges forward with a huge knife and brutally stabs him, after which Jimmy pumps four bullets into him. As the stunned Henry moves toclose the trunk, he says in voice over, "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster."

The story then flashes back to Henry's formative years across from that cab stand, his first youthful errands for the mob, and his meeting of Jimmy and Tommy. In a now classic scene, Tommy is first spotted telling an anecdote that has his fellow mobsters in stitches and Henry saying, "You're funny." Tommy suddenly becomes threaten-ingly confrontational. "Funny how? … I mean funny like I'm a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh?" The tension builds until Henry finally realizes that Tommy is putting him on, and everyone laughs. From then on, whenever Tommy starts down the same confrontational road with someone else, audiences are lulled into thinking he's kidding again, so that his eventual explosion into uncompromisingly bloody violence is all the more shocking.

The film moves at a dazzlingly fast but perfectly controlled pace, its imagery enhanced by freeze-frames, jump-cuts, continuous takes, voice-overs, and on-screen date-and-place information that emphasizes its biographical origins. Unlike the book, which ends with Henry purporting to be happily ensconced in the Witness Protection Program, the movie ends with a distraught Henry trapped in suburbia. As he picks up the morning paper from the front porch of a row of identical houses, he says in voice over, "I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life as a schnook."

Comparisons with Coppola's The Godfather and its sequel proved inevitable—they are great films, epic in scope, and making much of the Family's code of honor. But as Nicholas Pileggi told the New York Times, "The honor code is a myth. These guys betray each other constantly. Once Henry's life is threatened, he has no qualms about testifying. He does no soul-searching, because he has no soul." GoodFellas is mired in the minutiae of everyday life, set among the lawns and shrubs of suburbia and stripped of other than fleeting, vulgar, and spurious glamour. The beatings and killings are always sick and brutal, never macho or alluring. The effect is to expose the sickening reality of the criminal lifestyle, revealing it in all of its violence, dishonor, and empty aspirations.

Brunette, Peter, ed. Martin Scorsese: Interviews (Interviews With Filmmakers Series). Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

Friedman, Lawrence S. The Cinema of Martin Scorsese. New York, Continuum Publishing Group, 1997.

Linfield, Susan. "'Goodfellas' Looks at the Banality of Mob Life." New York Times, September 16, 1990, sec. II, 19.

Pileggi, Nicholas. Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. New York, Pocket Books, 1985.

Thompson, David, and Ian Christie, editors. Scorsese on Scorsese. London, Faber and Faber, 1989.

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