Wiseguys and Bad Ties
Goodfellas is a 1990 film directed by Martin Scorsese it is an adaption of the book Wiseguys: Life in a Mafia Family, which is a biography about Henry Hill a former associate of the Lucchese crime family between 1955 and 1980. This movie is one of Martin Scorsese best, without a doubt. This movie is the perfect example of a character piece. There is not much of a plotline but here is a recap of the film if you’ve forgot. (Spoilers) This film views the mob lives of three pivotal figures in the 1960’s and 70’s New York. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) is a local boy turned gangster in a neighborhood full of the roughest and toughest. Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) is a purebred loose-cannon gangster with a bit of a Napoleon complex, who turns out to be Henry’s best friend. Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) puts the two of them together, and runs some of the biggest hijacks and burglaries the town has ever seen. After an extended jail sentence, Henry must sneak around the back of the local mob boss, Paulie Cicero, so he can sell drugs and to live the life of luxury he has always dreamed of. In the end, the drugs get the best of Hill as he’s arrested and rats out his cohorts to save his own skin. Despite its reputation as a violent movie, the number of on-screen deaths actually portrayed in Goodfellas is only a surprisingly tame five (Spider, Billy Batts, Stacks Edwards, Morrie, and Tommy), or ten if you include the results of Jimmy Conway’s handiwork following the Lufthansa heist. Of course, it’s worth mentioning that violence, and the threat of violence, is a constant presence throughout the film. And the death of characters hits harder because most of them are developed characters not just random people getting shot. One of the most infamous and probably quoted scenes in the whole film, is a perfect example of the constant threat of violence and overall uncertainness of a live amongst mobsters, it comes at the beginning of the film when Joe Pesci’s character Tommy jokingly, yet uncomfortably, accosts Hill for calling him “funny”. This scene was not originally in the script. In addition to being the driving force behind the scene on screen, Pesci was also responsible with coming up with the premise. While working in a restaurant as a young kid, Pesci apparently told a mobster that he was funny, a compliment that was met with a less-than-enthusiastic response. Pesci retold the story to Scorsese, who decided to include it in the film. Scorsese didn’t include the scene in the shooting script and let Pesci and Liotta’s improvise their interaction so it would elicit genuinely surprised reaction from the supporting cast, just another reason why Scorsese is the best.
As you already know there are a lot of crimes committed in Goodfellas, and according to Henry despite combining characters and slightly altering plot points and timelines, Goodfellas was about 95 percent accurate. That’s a little unsettling to me. And what’s even more unsettling is that in real life Hill’s crime resume was way too long to fit into a single film, even one that’s 148-minutes in runtime. Scorsese even left out a Hill crime that eventually became a national sports controversy: The Boston College’s 1978-1979 point-shaving scandal. The plan was born when Jimmy Burke (Robert De Niro’s Jimmy Conway in the movie) and Hill recruited Boston College players Rick Kuhn, Jim Sweeney, and Ernie Cobb to manipulate scores to cover the point spread. Burke instructed Hill to warn the players to keep to their end of the deal because “you can’t play basketball with broken hands.” The Boston College basketball team ended its 1978–79 season with a 22–9 record. It is unclear how much money the players involved in the point-shaving scheme were paid. Hill reportedly cleared over $100,000 and bettors higher up the line were said to have made up to $250,000. In the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary Playing for the Mob, which chronicles the history of the scandal, Hill claims he mentioned the operation to federal investigators in passing after filling on his mob associates in 1980 without knowing that point-shaving was illegal. Kuhn was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, later reduced to 28 months, Sweeney was not charged, and the FBI did not have enough evidence to support charges against Ernie Cobb of any wrongdoing despite being given $1,000 in an envelope by Kuhn. Another great fact about Goodfellas, you know the fed that is laying out the ins and outs of the witness protection program to Hill and his wife Karen after they get arrested? That’s U.S. Attorney Edward McDonald, reenacting his conversation with the real Henry Hilland Karen after they flipped. McDonald volunteered himself for the part after Scorsese scouted his office as a filming location, and ultimately won it after a screen test. Like so much of the rest of the script, McDonald’s “Don’t give me the babe-in-the-woods routine, Karen” line was all improvised. Maybe he should find a new career in show business. Actually that’s kind of what he did later playing an attorney in Kiss of Death (1995), Father Flannigan in Sinatra Club(2010), and appearing in countless documentaries about the Mafia.This film is film is filled with improvisations, which really adds to the authentically real feeling portals of the characters. For example the ‘F’ word, in any of its tenses, is said 321 times, for an average of 2.04 per minute. Not to shabby. Funnily enough, Joe Pesci says about half of them. At the time of the films release, this was the most profane movie in history.
Many films have out ranked it now including two of Martine Scorsese’s other films Casino (1997) with 422 and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) with a whooping 506. Surprisingly the script only called for the word to be used a modest 70 times, but much of the dialogue was improvised during shooting while the actors tried to get in embrace their characters the expletives plied up quickly. Even with his 150 f-words he managed to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Pesci spoke just five words upon accepting the award (“It’s my privilege. Thank you.”), thus delivering one of the shortest Oscar acceptance speeches ever. According to Pesci, the speech was so brief simply because he didn’t expect to win. Lastly it wouldn’t be a Scorsese movie without a nod to a classic film in cinema history. The last scene in the movie featuring Pesci shooting directly into the camera, is an homage to the landmark 1903 short, silent Western film The Great Train Robbery, which ends with a similar shot. According to Scorsese, he saw his film as part of a “tradition of outlaws” in American pop culture and films, and noted that despite nearly a century separating the two films, they’re essentially “exactly the same story.
