Fans of mob movies watch Goodfellas (1990) to enjoy the acts of mob guys who behave as if gangster life has zero consequences. Based on the true crime book Wiseguys (1986) by New York City reporter Nicholas Pileggi, the movie is directed by Martin Scorsese to be watched like a true crime book revivified for the screen, ingratiating fans to a high-speed narrative crafted of local history. The book, says Scorsese in a 1990 Chicago Tribune review, “showed the excitement, the fun of being a crook.” But the comeuppance of these outlaws is the luxury of mob movie fans. “It turns out they have a very short life cycle. And, boy, do they pay for it.”
The main characters in Goodfellas, Henry (Ray Liotta) and Jimmy (Robert DeNiro) and Tommy (Joe Pesci), place no value on human life, only lifestyle, which is a paroxysm of fast cash, knighted larceny, more drugs, rabid assassination, and the gospel of Italian food. The good and violent times end ugly. The irony is sincere when slang words modify the guys as “wise” and the fellas “good.”
Adapted as a nonfiction book transposed to the language of film, Wiseguys “already read like a brilliant movie,” says Scorsese. “You could almost photograph every page.” When the “stories lend themselves to film, I’m interested,” Pileggi attests. “But I’ll always continue the journalism.” In Getting Made, a 2004 DVD featurette, Scorsese describes his vision to “make a film like the style of this book,” with a messianic loyalty to “detail, detail, detail.” Fans recognize the bowling shirt and pepperoni-armed 1950s which segue to the herringbone fleck and hatchet-collar heyday 1960s as the “My Way” 70s burn out in 80s motel room coke-snorting overhead helicopter paranoia. Editor Thelma Schoonmaker assures that Scorsese “wants you to come to the film, and you to look at it and decide how you feel about it, he doesn’t want to tell you what to think.” Fans get it that protagonist Henry Hill only hopes that his brother at home in the wheelchair keeps stirring the red sauce for that evening’s family dinner.
Author Scorsese shows the story which author Henry Hill tells in voiceover, as in the way Mikey Franzese and Moe Black’s brother Fat Andy are introduced at the Bamboo Lounge over “Il Cielo In Una Stanza” sung by Mina Mazzini. The audience may or may not catch that Fat Andy is played by Louis Eppolito, an ex-New York cop who now serves life plus 100 years as a convicted executioner for the Lucchese crime family. New to the world of Goodfellas, like Karen Friedman (Lorraine Bracco) escorted by Henry through the kitchen to a front-row table for a Henny Youngman show at the Copa, the audience still recognizes everything in it, the backyard Polaroid snapshots of baked ziti and barbecue family get-togethers, the most expensive white plastic Christmas tree, liqueurs glittering after hours, and envelopes pregnant with cash as wedding gifts. Pop semiotics inform the mob chronicle.
Sequences are captioned with a specific date and place, like June 11, 1970, Queens, when ex-con Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) parties at Henry’s bar with his crew of thin moustache and coiffure turtleneck-and-goldchain sickos, and busts balls like last rites. “I fucked kids like that in the can,” boasts Batts in regards to Tommy, “in the ass I fucked em.” As noted in a 1991 Cineaste review, “augmented by Scorsese’s knowing eye and ear,” Goodfellas however “makes no pretense at being a social document,” nor does the director “shape the film according to the tightly plotted narrative of traditional genre works.”
Henry is shown to succeed in devastating his personal and business life, and when he is pinched by the FBI, Henry is saved from the usual fate of mob guys, neither whacked nor incarcerated. Only a half-breed Sicilian, self-sabotaged by Irish patrilineage, Henry can never be “made,” a genealogical initiation into the “Family” which Henry describes as “real greaseball shit.” He sins against Jimmy “The Gent” Conway, a mentor Irishman who taught Henry the rules which Henry ultimately breaks. “Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.” Such rules, as Pileggi notes in a 1990 New York Times review, are “a myth… these guys betray each other constantly.” And mob guys love to talk.
Situationist agitator Attila Kotanyi, in “Gangland and Philosophy” (1960), explores the choice of real-life pinched mob guy Gondolfo Miranti to keep his mouth shut in the 1957 trial against Johnny Dio. Miranti would have been key to convicting Dio for hiring a thug to throw acid in the face of labor journalist Victor Riesal, but Miranti decided not to talk and got five years for contempt. “It is difficult not to recognize an analogous pattern of behavior in someone who doesn’t dare speak of problems as he knows they are,” suggests Kotanyi. Posing the mob as a fascist clan, Kotanyi asks “What is the mechanism common to these two kinds of fear?” In Goodfellas, moral law is absent and the justice system is flouted. If imprisoned, wiseguys can look forward to an easy life in jail slicing the garlic so thin it liquefies in the pan. “What the Vatican is to the Roman Catholics,” figures Pileggi, “Bensonhurst was to the Mafia.” Henry’s first pinch is sacramental. “You broke your cherry!” cry the cab stand mob guys on the courthouse steps. The judge enounces the rite for the record under docket number 704162 State of New York v. Henry Hill.
In the closing sequence of the movie, Henry, in the federal courtroom after his final pinch, steps from the stand where he ratted testimony as if from a confessional box and speaks directly to the audience. “Anything I wanted was a phone call away. We ran everything. And now it’s all over.” As Henry ends up in the witness protection program, the audience is also a witness protected. The tapestry of bloodbath local history lingers, the diner parking lots and blown-off heads and Lucite gold mirror tiles, as the audience exits the theater back to real life. “The violence,” says Pileggi, “and not anything else, is what distinguishes these people from you and me.”
The real Henry Hill assumed the fake name Martin Lewis, no doubt after the smash nightclub duo Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis of the late 1940s and 50s. Mob guys were “funny.” Even though egg noodles and ketchup constitute Italian food in his new neighborhood of Independence, Kentucky, Henry smiles at the camera with the local newspaper under his arm before walking back into his new tract house.
The mob guys in Goodfellas are working-class but loathe work and prey on working-class peers who actually work. Like the penny-stock brokers in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), the mob guys do not commit crimes to subvert the bigger system in which they are expendable cogs. They pummel truck drivers, exploit airport employees and Canarsie restaurant managers, screwdriver the neck of Morrie the wig shop owner, and shove a mailman into a pizza oven. Early in the movie, Henry explains how Jimmy “The Gent” would steal truck cargo and extort the drivers, but because they were so well paid-off, “the drivers loved him.” Everybody was making money, but the lucrative camaraderie could not be mistaken for equity between working-class people. Henry is clear that “to us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks, who took the subway to work every day and worried about their bills, were dead.” Karen asks Henry, “What do you do?” as the couple’s table at the Copa is graced with a bottle of wine “from Mr. Tony over there.” Henry says he is a union delegate “in construction.”
Jordan Belfort, the narrator of Wolf, a middle-class schnook from Bayside, derives his extravagant profits from selling “garbage to garbagemen.” The men of these Scorsese movies are mortified by honesty in business. Lack of deceit is a sign of weakness, emasculation, and stupidity. Henry does not rat out Lucchese mob boss Paul Cicero because it is just, but to safely avoid death and prison. “These guys are yuppie hoods,” says Pileggi. “They have all the moral fortitude of a cheap-jack stockbroker trying to hustle.” When the FBI targets the office in Wolf, Belfort goodfella Donnie Azoff stands on the desk, unzips his fly, souses the court documents stuffed in the trashcan, and yells “Fuck you U.S.A.!”
In 2019, Scorsese released The Irishman, where DeNiro, Pesci, and Harvey Keitel joined Scorsese first-timer Al Pacino in a highly-anticipated 209-minute gangster opus that premiered for mass audiences on subscription television. The $160 million Netflix production employed 117 locations, over 100 speaking parts, and vanguard digital technology that altered the appearance of the septuagenarian actors, a process referred to as “de-aging.” Though the scope of The Irishman is broad, covering fifty years of late-20th century American political and labor history, the impact of the film often results from two people talking in a room. “The scale of the movie is big,” notes Scorsese in “Designing the Everyday,” a Netflix behind-the-scenes video, “but it’s intimate.” Like Goodfellas, the movie is based on a true crime book, but it makes no claims to any truth of “what really happened.” Instead, the thematic core of The Irishman questions the concept of “what really happened.” The framing device is title character Frank Sheeran narrating experiences of his life in the mob, and those experiences are crafted in the explicit artifice of movie magic, which itself is a modality of the visual representation of memory. Other than the heated rants of Jimmy Hoffa, most of the talking in The Irishman is subdued, quiet, sparse, matter-of-fact, casual. The characters bond and create friendships upon a tone and manner that says nothing about, and usually conflicts with, what is actually in occurrence. “It’s what it is,” is a mantra repeated by mob bosses to justify the actions in the last act of the film, and even before Hoffa is whacked by Frank, the sounding of the phrase grows phenomenological. It is no surprise that former First Lady Michelle Obama used the same concatenation to articulate the Trump administration at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. Bookending the career of Scorsese as a filmmaker of mob movies, The Irishman evolves the subject of organized crime as a total metaphor for the nihilism of postwar 20th century America. The search for meaning is depicted as the reality of its absence. Men in power up to the millennium in western civilization do not reckon their lives, no matter how violent and cold-blooded the acts that have sustained them. In The Irishman, Scorsese executes what might be called the Cinema of the Void, where intense, devoted, grandiose production using sophisticated and budget-busting digital technology is applied to the dramatic representation of nothingness.
“What struck me most,” says Pileggi about writing Wise Guys, “is the total emptiness of their lives, the lack of any spirituality, the lack of interest in children, the unexamined life.” Complicit mob wife Karen Hill is the sole character afforded a perspective in soundtrack voiceover other than Henry. While the audience listens to Karen, Henry never does. In six-season TV gesamtkunstwerk The Sopranos, Lorraine Bracco plays the New Jersey psychologist to whom mob boss Tony Soprano only listens. The Sopranos is ripe with references to Goodfellas, including multiple cast-members, and bridges the examined life where in therapy sessions Tony characterizes his psychic predicament as the “strong, silent type,” personified by Western movie icon Gary Cooper.
Goodfellas is a mob movie made by a fan of old Westerns. In the last shots, Tommy in fedora and white-on-black necktie aims his gun at the screen and “pumps bullets toward us like a gangster in an old Warner Bros. B-picture.” But, continues Scorsese, “I framed that shot just like a shot from The Great Train Robbery,” the 1903 canonical first Western, filmed in New Jersey, home state of Best Supporting Actor-winner Joe Pesci. When the murder of mob social club lackey “Spider” (Michael Imperioli) is preceded by Tommy shooting the kid in the foot, the gangster recalls a Western starring gangster actors Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney. “I’m The Oklahoma Kid!” cries Tommy. The mob guys avow a freedom similar to the myth of the lawless frontier, and the braggadocio of the characters is straight off the covers of old Western Yarns and Thrilling Western magazines. “The film,” says Scorsese, “is about money.” The real-life Jimmy Conway (James Burke) named his two sons after outlaw bank-robbers Frank and Jesse James.
Tommy spiels like toilet nightclub comic Joe E. Ross, but his use of a butcher knife to kill Billy Batts is the way a slasher ends victims in a Forty-Deuce home-invasion chop ’em up. The alligator skin shoe skull-stompers and swag warehouse beefcake psychos match the iconography of Milanese thugs in Fernando Di Leo action manifestos like Kidnap Syndicate (1975) or Shoot First, Die Later (1974). The body count is redolent of sprocket trash guignol like Massacre Mafia Style (1974), directed by Dean Martin look-alike Duke Mitchell.
In Scorsese On Scorsese (2003), Scorsese describes his own Boxcar Bertha (1972) as for “the guys on 42nd Street.” Boxcar was produced as a follow-up to Bloody Mama (1970), the 1930s Ozarks gangster brood biopic directed by Roger Corman, which opening disclaimer wryly states that “any similarity to Kate Barker and her sons is intentional.” Corman’s flick, like Goodfellas, weaves archival footage and pop culture to portray a mutant criminal family who steals money and brutalizes innocent locals. Goodfellas cinematographer Michael Ballhaus casts these visual rhymes in vernacular arthouse color schemes while the set design is as finely described as a passage by Edith Wharton.
“The point,” argues Scorsese, “is the subject matter of the movies hasn’t changed all that much over the last 90 years.” Such tradition finds a correlative in the title of the movie itself, which slang word, indigenous to the American mob, invites the audience to participate in the cinematic experience of both past and present. “To the modern gangster an old-timer is good-people,” writes David W. Maurer in the year 1935, “when crime… was in the horse-and-buggy stage and had not yet become one of the major industries of this great republic.” Maurer spent time with law-breakers, convicts, carnival workers, drug-users, confidence men, and contributed his ongoing findings to the journal American Speech. “I have tried, wherever possible, to link the dead with the living, to present the lingo of the good-people as a stage in the development of the racy argot now spoken wherever those outside the law congregate.”
Goodfellas inaugurated a template philology that has been imitated since by so many crime movies, opening the pop floodworks of a philosophy of how to present a story within a world. When the dream of youth unravels in voiceover, and an unprecedented audacity is portrayed in the adult pursuit of the dream, the code of the clade is anchored to a certain virtue whose disciples are soon found in a truck freezer impaled on a meathook.
The true public enemies in Goodfellas suffer a deep malaise in defiance of what the audience expects is civic good. The good of mob guys has already been established as that which one desires at no cost. When gained, there is a group dynamic, though the main characters are not in the Family and only bond when things are good. Henry says that when Tommy is promised to be a made guy, “it was like we were all being made.” Tommy shows up expecting a ceremony, but in retribution for his past crime against the Family—the Batts hit—an old timer with a cane shoots Tommy through the back of the head straight through the face, “so his mother couldn’t give him an open coffin at the funeral.” After news of the hit, Jimmy cries and thrashes a phone booth, likely more in fear of the consequences for his own future than in mourning a slain brother.
In June, 2015, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its release, Goodfellas played a brief run at Film Forum in New York City. One sold-out 7pm show was preceded by a retro trailer for In Cold Blood, where the marriage of fiction and fact based on a true crime book very much related to ideas in Goodfellas. Several audience members laughed at the midcentury black-and-white seriousness promoting how “real” locations were used, the casting of “real” jurors, and that even the principal actors physically resembled their characters in “real” life, demonstrated by the superimposition of the actors’ faces over the faces of the real killers. Such an attempt at unprecedented verisimilitude, seemingly indicating that a new movie language was at hand regarding the reproduction of a story of true violent acts, again, was not so unlike Goodfellas. The audience laughed throughout the trailer. Then the movie started, and when Joe Pesci drew the big butcher knife he borrowed from his mother’s kitchen, audience lunacy emerged. “Here it comes! Here it comes!” one man cried with manic delight as the knife plunged into Billy Bats. When the title “Goodfellas” appeared in the credits, people cheered with the bloodlust of hockey fans and many fist-pumped the air. The guffaws and hurrahs of the crowd continued to suffocate the next two hours; perhaps it was ironic, and perhaps it was honest demented enthusiasm. As Tommy asks Henry, “what the fuck is so fucking funny about me?” It might be that fans over the last thirty years have succumbed to the effect Goodfellas has had on the central nervous system of movie-watchers, unlike any visual experience heretofore. Motion pictures are in an infancy that still has powerful, behavior-altering effects on the viewer. Much more is coming, and the potential is unhinged and transgressive. Goodfellas might be a radical notch in such agency in the revolution of images; Scorsese is no more than simply an honest artist.
In 1987, Wiseguys publisher Simon and Schuster sued the New York Crime Victims Board in dispute over the “Son of Sam Law,” which would have demanded that Henry Hill place the $100,000. he was paid for Wiseguys in an escrow account to remunerate victims of his criminal activity who had obtained civil judgments. The case was argued before the Supreme Court, which held in favor of the publisher against prior decisions by both District and Appeals courts. It was now unconstitutional for Henry Hill to exercise the First Amendment but suffer financial burden from state government as a result of past criminal behavior.
During and after the trial, Fat Andy actor Louis Eppolito was allowed to collect the tax-free disability pensions for which the mob cop qualified as a retiree of the NYPD. State law protects pensions from seizure no matter the crimes of the former city employee. In 2009, the Daily News found 450 “disgraced pols, crooked cops and bribed judges” receiving millions in pensions. Eppolito surely was not talking in court, but did publish a 1992 memoir, Mafia Cop. The Daily News quoted a Brooklyn City Councilman that “it’s a world that rewards people who lie, cheat, steal, take bribes, betray the public trust and embezzle public funds.”
In the opinion of the court for Simon & Schuster v. NY State Crime Victims Board, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor writes that:
“… on semantic grounds, any entity that enters into a contract with a convicted person to transmit that person’s speech becomes by definition a medium of communication, and, second, on constitutional grounds, since the governmental power to impose content-based financial disincentives on speech does not vary with the identity of the speaker…”
Mob guys love to talk. It is now the benefit of movie fans that Henry Hill was paid for free speech, during which recordings Henry articulated deranged acts (apparently while scarfing down potato chips). Roger Ebert may have said it right that Goodfellas is “the best mob movie ever.”
