Goodfellas
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Goodfellas.jpg
Goodfellas is a 1990 film about the mafia directed by Martin Scorsese. It is based on the novel Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, which is itself based on a true story. The film stars Robert De Niro as Jimmy Conway, Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, Lorraine Bracco as Hill's wife, Karen Hill, and Joe Pesci as the irascible Tommy DeVito (based on Tommy DeSimone).
Story
In the film, Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, becomes involved in the mafia at a young age: as he says in the film, "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster."
As a boy, Henry idolized the Lucchese crime family gangsters in his blue-collar New York City neighborhood, and in 1955 quit school and went to work for them at a local cab stand, much to the dismay of his working-class parents. The local Lucchese mob captain, Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino), and Cicero's associate Jimmy Conway (De Niro), help cultivate the boy's developing criminal career. When Henry is arrested for selling stolen cigarettes, he wisely tells the police nothing and is lauded by his superiors for "being a standup guy."
As an adult, Henry and his friend Tommy DeVito (Pesci) conspire along with Conway to steal much of the billions of dollars in cargo passing through Idlewild Airport (later JFK). They help out in a key moneymaking heist, in 1967 stealing over half a million dollars from the Air France cargo terminal paying Cicero his percentage of the take as per the mafia's code of tribute.
Henry also meets and falls in love with Karen (Bracco), although there is conflict between families since Karen's parents are prosperous and Jewish and Hill is himself poor and half-Irish and half-Italian. (Because of his and Jimmy Conway's own mixed ancestry, they can never be actual "made men" – full members of an Italian crime family.) When Karen learns firsthand about what Henry actually does for a living, she is fascinated instead of repelled; it impresses her that Henry has the nerve to steal instead of just "sitting around, waiting for a handout."
As the years go by and Henry earns Cicero's trust, his compadres become more daring (and therefore dangerous)--Conway's excessive love of truck hijacking and grand theft is bad enough, but DeVito is nearly psychotic in his need to prove himself through violence. In one of the film's most controversial scenes, DeVito thoughtlessly shoots dead an innocent and unarmed young man (Michael Imperioli), first for not bringing him his drinks fast enough, and then for talking back to him.
DeVito's violent streak reaches a crest in June 1970 when he bludgeons to death one Billy Batts (Frank Vincent), a "made man" in the competing Gambino crime family, a major offense that could get them all killed by the Gambinos if discovered. Henry, Conway and DeVito place Batts's bloody corpse in the trunk of their car, stop by DeVito's mother's house to pick up a shovel and a knife, finish killing Batts upstate, bury him in an abandoned plot of rural land – and then discover six months later that the land has been sold to a real estate developer and the (badly decomposed) body has to be re-excavated, moved and reburied. (This scene serves as an example of the movie's black humor.) During this time, Henry's marriage deteriorates when Karen finds he has a mistress; Karen threatens the other woman so violently that even Cicero has to mediate.
After beating up a debt-ridden Florida gambler whose sister works as an FBI typist, Henry and Jimmy are caught and sent to prison for six years. There, Henry deals drugs to keep afloat, and by the time he returns to his family he has a lucrative drug connection in Pittsburgh, one which he had established while still in prison. Although Paul Cicero tolerated Henry's prison drug deals, he has sternly warned him not to deal drugs on the outside and to inform him of those who do, but Henry ignores Paul and gets Tommy and Jimmy (as well as his wife, and new mistress (Debi Mazar), and babysitter) involved in an elaborate smuggling operation. At the same time, in December 1978, Jimmy Conway and friends plan and carry out a record six million dollar heist from the Lufthansa cargo terminal at JFK airport, but Jimmy soon grows disgusted and paranoid when his associates foolishly flaunt their gains in plain sight, threatening to draw police attention, and begins having them gradually eliminated. Worse, after promising to welcome DeVito into the Lucchese family as a "made man," the elder members of the family instead kill him as retaliation for Batts's death.
In an extended, virtuoso sequence named "Sunday, May 11th, 1980," all of the different paths of Henry's complicated criminal career catastrophically collide. He must coordinate a major cocaine shipment, cook a meal for his wife, children and paraplegic younger brother, placate his drug-addled, emotionally unstable mistress, cope with his clueless, superstitious babysitter/drug courier, avoid federal authorities who, unknown to him, have had him under surveillance for several months, and satisfy his sleazy customers, all the while a nervous wreck from getting too little sleep and snorting too much cocaine. The editing and scoring of the sequence have been acclaimed as some of Scorsese's best work, with a montage of popular songs such as The Who's "Magic Bus" and Harry Nilsson's "Jump Into the Fire" forming the soundtrack. (The rest of the film also uses the same sort of scoring strategy, where the music provides not only an emotional backdrop but a sense of historical context.)
After Henry's drug arrest, Cicero abandons him, and the rest of his mob cohorts fast follow suit. Convinced he and his family are marked for death, Henry acts swiftly and decisively, spilling the beans on his former criminal cohorts to the FBI, sending them away for long prison terms. He and his family enter the federal Witness Protection Program, disappearing into anonymity to save their lives. Now he is a "nobody"; as he laments in the film's closing lines, "I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook."
Awards and recognition
The film is #94 on the American Film Institute's list of 100 Years, 100 Movies and is consistently in the top 30 on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films. In 2000 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. Joe Pesci received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Tommy DeVito in 1990.