It was a damp gray day in the East Bay of Northern California on a weekend in October 1990 when I went to see GoodFellas at Crow Canyon Cinemas (a movie theater I would later work at). I was 15 at the time, and family friend Joe drove me out to the theater and even paid for the tickets. To see an R-rated movie at a movie theater at that point in my life made me feel like a rebel. My parents were not there to stop me from seeing it, but by then, I found ways to sneak into them on my own. At that age, it started to feel like R-rated movies were the only ones worth seeing.
I wasn’t actually all that excited about seeing “GoodFellas” when it first came out. Back then, my idea of a good time was seeing Steven Seagal snap a bad guy’s arm in half in “Marked For Death.” It was fake of course, but Seagal was brilliant at making it look fairly real. It was either that or watching Bruce Willis fight terrorists in “Die Hard 2: Die Harder.” That was one of the most exhausting action movies ever made, thrilling to the very end. So the idea of going to see “GoodFellas,” even though it was an R-rated movie, was not the first thing that I wanted to do. It struck me as one of those “critically acclaimed” movies that were more for our parents than us kids. After seeing this movie, none of that mattered to me ever again.
“GoodFellas” was my grand introduction to the brilliant director that is Martin Scorsese, and I immediately became a fan. I still vividly remember seeing this movie for the first time almost 20 years ago, one day after it came out. We were sitting in one of the biggest theaters at Crow Canyon Cinemas, and it was half filled with many people who probably had no idea what they were in store for. It wasn’t just a movie, it was an experience unlike any other. Marty directs many of the scenes that make us feel like we are in the room with the characters or traveling along with them as they make their way to the best seats at the Copacabana. This movie grew on me so much after I first saw it, and when it was first released on video, I went out and rented it right away. Seeing this movie once was not enough, and it was something I wanted to experience over and over again.
For me, “GoodFellas” was everything a movie could be. It was exciting, at times very funny, at other times it was truly terrifying, and nothing else I seen at that point was as intense. It still holds up perfectly to this very day, and it has lost none of its power to enthrall the audience who dares to watch it. For all these reasons, “GoodFellas” remains my favorite movie of all time. It will take A LOT for another movie to top it.
GoodFellas” was based on the nonfiction bestseller “Wiseguy” by Nicholas Pileggi which was about Henry Hill, a member of a mob family who recounts his story of how he started and where he ended up from there. Yes, it is another movie that is “based on a true story.” But unlike other Hollywood versions of true stories, this one feels truly authentic in what it presents. Even if liberties were taken with the material, everything in this movie feels very grounded in reality. Plus, this movie was made back in 1990, and that was when the term “based on a true story” actually meant something. Today, the phrase is utterly meaningless.
The movie opens with three guys in a car driving on a lonely highway. The passengers in the car are Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), Jimmie Conway (Robert De Niro), and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), and they end up pulling off the road when they hear a noise that sounds like a flat tire. It turns out that there is a man in the trunk of the car that they thought was dead, but he is still clinging on to whatever bloody life he has left. Seeing Tommy viciously stabbing the guy brought an audible response from the audience I saw it with. This was not going to be another one of those movies with your usual cartoonish movie violence, this was going to be the real deal.
Once the opening credits have whisked by the screen, we are introduced to Henry Hill when he was a kid, and he is played here by Christopher Serrone. Scorsese shoots the movie as if we are seeing everything through this kid’s eyes. Each of the mob characters in the movie are given memorable introductions, most especially that of Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino in one of his best performances). From there, we the audience feel just like Henry Hill as we come to find the Mob life very alluring. Seeing Henry skip out of school on a daily basis made his life seem all the more appealing, and that remained the case even after his father practically whipped him to death his belt for skipping school.
That’s the great thing about “GoodFellas,” it shows how incredibly seductive the mob life is. This is no mere invention of a writer indulging in some illegal substances; the mob is a real thing even to this very day. Scorsese doesn’t try to sweeten their reality or treat this subject matter solely as a morality tale. Watching this movie, I have to admit that being a part of the mob became very appealing to me. To live extravagantly and have all the things you want, something about that is utterly irresistible. But therein lays the trap of it all. Nothing this good comes easy. There is a huge price to be paid, and it is much steeper than you would ever expect it to be.
One of the greatest moments in “GoodFellas” captures the seductive nature of the Mob life perfectly. It is shown in the now famous scene of when Henry Hill takes his girlfriend Karen (the fantastic Lorraine Bracco) to the Copacabana. But instead of waiting in line like everyone else, Henry and Karen end up going into the club through the back way, and we follow them every single step of the way in one shot. This may very well have been the first time I had ever seen a steadicam shot, the kind that lasts for several minutes and doesn’t have a single cut in it. It’s an amazing sequence that has me wondering how they managed to put it all together. But with that shot, you are basically along for the ride. You are a participant as Henry and Karen make their way through the kitchen to the front of the audience, and you feel like they do as the manager welcomes them, and you are just as appreciative as they are when some guests at a table across from them give them a bottle of wine as a gift. Like these two, you are given a front seat to all that the mob life has to offer. The separation between you and what’s on the screen completely evaporates, and you are along for the ride even after that amazing shot ends with Henny Youngman doing his famous one-liners.
But even as we delight in the extravagant lifestyle than most others will never experience, there is a dark side to this life that even we as audience members cannot hide from. Early in the film, we see young Henry Hill come to the aid of a man who has just been shot and is bleeding bad. Henry wraps the man’s hands in aprons and towels, and all the while is berated by the boss of the pizza joint he works at for wasting all those towels on the guy. This is the moment that haunts Henry throughout the rest of the movie, and if he thought that was bad, it was nothing compared to the violence that he comes to witness next.
That’s the thing about the violence in “GoodFellas,” it is very visceral. I hadn’t seen violence this harsh since I saw Brian DePalma’s “The Untouchables” at the wrong time in my life (just before I turned 13 I believe). Whereas you could get a huge kick out of watching Steven Seagal dare a man to take a shot at him by throwing his weapon away and sitting Indian style and daring him to take a shot, hence giving him the easiest target a person could have even while we know Steven knows exactly what he is doing, the violence in Scorsese’s movie is much more real. The fights in a Scorsese movie are never fully choreographed, and they are really more an unleashing of anger that has been bottled up for way too long. While we may laugh and get a huge kick out of Seagal taking apart a bad guy with a simple calculated movement, we are left utterly shocked and devastated by the violence in this movie. It was raw and frightening, and it served as a fact that moviegoers are not completely desensitized to movie violence.
To this day, I still remember the shocked responses of the audience members (mostly adults in their 40s or 50s) who were taking this all in. Clearly, this was nothing like they expected it to be. Pesci’s character beating Billy Batts was a moment of unbridled fury as he kept punching away at him even as Billy’s blood was spilling over him. The moment where Stacks Edwards (Samuel L. Jackson, in one of his pre “Pulp Fiction” performances) is assassinated right out of the blue, seeing the blood just fly over his bed and the wall left us all in a state of shock. The specter of death, as it soon became clear, hung over the heads of all the characters. Whether they realized it or not, they could end up dead at any second. No one in “GoodFellas” could ever make themselves believe that their life was never in any danger.
Ray Liotta is always going to be best remembered for his performance as Henry Hill in this movie no matter what happens. This is not to take away from other great work he has done in movies like “Unlawful Entry” and “Copland” to name a few, but his role in this movie remains his best work to date. I can’t think of any actor who could have brought Henry Hill to the screen other than the real Henry Hill himself, but he was probably too old to do that by the time they started to make this movie. Ray brings the perfect blend of reckless energy to this part, and there is no doubt of how fully invested he became in this character. We watch him go from the exhilarated heights of stealing from people, to bottoming out in a world of drugs and inescapable danger.
In retrospect, I feel like I took Robert DeNiro’s performance as Jimmy “The Gent” Conway for granted. Seeing him in this movie was one of the first chances I had at seeing what an amazing actor he can be. It’s like DeNiro is not even trying to act when you watch him. You get the feeling that this is all coming to him naturally, and not the result of intense and focused research of the character he is playing. From watching him in this movie and every role he took thereafter, DeNiro became one of my role models of what an actor should be. There may be many other actors who commit to their part passionately, but none will come to mind as quickly as DeNiro.
There are many other performances worthy of mention in this movie. Lorraine Bracco is a powerhouse as Henry Hill’s wife, Karen. Seeing her and Henry go from a horrible first date to being in love could have seemed unbelievable, but the two of them make it seem real even during the bad times that will eventually visit them both. Seeing her scream through the intercom at the woman her husband is having an affair with shows that this is no woman to be taken lightly. She loves her man in spite of all the things he does. Even after Henry brutally pistol whips the boy across the street who takes advantage of her, she is ultimately turned on by him and won’t look in any other direction even if she knows she should.
For Paul Sorvino, his role as Paulie Cicero became was of his very best performances. It’s almost impossible to believe that Paul thought that he wouldn’t be able to pull this role off. As Paulie, there are several moments where he shows that he doesn’t have to say a single word in order to show who is truly in charge of the mob. His presence is a towering one throughout the movie, and his presence is felt throughout even when he is not onscreen. When he slaps another person in the face, you know that this is a person to be taken seriously. The only thing more memorable about Paul Sorvino than his performance in this movie is when he burst into tears after his daughter Mira won Best Supporting Actress for “Mighty Aphrodite.”
But the very best performance to come out of this Scorsese classic is from Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito. To say that he absolutely deserved his Oscar for Best Supporting Actor would be to overstate the obvious. As Tommy, Pesci creates one of the most entertaining as well as one of the scariest mobsters ever brought to the big screen. The scene between him and Ray Liotta still stands as one of the most intense scenes that I have seen in any film. The audience I saw it with was held in utter silence when Joe asked Ray while he said he was so funny. Watching that scene, you could hear a pin drop or a plastic cup of coke descend to the ground, and you would still be riveted to what was going on in the silver screen. This is a scene where one person could have died for saying or doing the wrong thing.
Remember the scene where Spider (Michael Imperioli, years before “The Sopranos”) tells Tommy to go fuck himself? That remains one of the scariest moments I have ever had in a movie theater, and it reaches an intensity on a par with Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” You know at that exact moment that Spider is going to die. The question is, how is Tommy going to kill him? The tension in that scene becomes so thick that, yes, you could cut it with a knife. I know that previous sentence is an annoying cliché, but it is the perfect way to describe that ominous moment. I was curling up in my chair in the theater (soon to be my future place of employment) waiting for the explosion that eventually occurred onscreen. It remains one of the most viscerally implosive moments in cinema that rarely gets matched in other movies.
But make no mistake, the real star of “GoodFellas” is Martin Scorsese himself. Scorsese has a style all his own, like all the great directors do, and this movie is one of the very best examples of that. His use of songs in the movie in each individual scene is unsurpassed by any director, including Quentin Tarantino. What makes his style of directing so incredibly effective is that it is so personal. Scorsese grew up with kids like Henry Hill and Jimmie Conway. It could easily be him looking through the window at the cab stand across the street like Henry Hill did. I was immediately hooked, and I soon went on to watch various other Scorsese features like “Mean Streets,” “After Hours,” and “Taxi Driver” (my second favorite movie of all time) among others. There is such an intense energy to his movies that not many other directors can achieve, and this is the case with the movie that finally won him the Best Directing Oscar, “The Departed.”
“GoodFellas” never tries to moralize its tale of crime and murder, and it doesn’t need to. The lessons to pick up from this movie we can figure out for ourselves. In fact, the movie has a no holds barred honesty to it that makes it all the more effective. In the end, when Henry Hill goes into the witness protection program, he is not upset about what he did. Henry is more upset that he cannot go on stealing some more. That is his biggest regret, that and the fact that he has to now spend the rest of his life as an “average nobody.” The sound effects of jail cell doors closing in as he closes the front door emphasize this point perfectly.
This movie remains my all time favorite for all those reasons. Can any movie possibly top this one for me? I’m not sure about that. If any movie were to surpass it for me, it would probably be another Scorsese movie. This movie changed the way I saw movies forever, and I will always love it for that.
**** out of ****
