Goodfellas

Goodfellas is a 1990 film about the mafia directed by Martin Scorsese. It is based on the book 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.

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."

In the late 1940s and early '50s, Henry idolizes the Lucchese crime family gangsters in his blue-collar New York City neighborhood, and goes to work for them at a local cab stand, much to the dismay of his working-class parents. The local mob captain, Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino), and Cicero's associate Jimmy Conway (De Niro), help cultivate the boy's burgeoning criminal career. When Henry is arrested for selling 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, stealing over half a million dollars from Air France paying Cicero his due 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 Jewish and Hill is himself half-Irish and half-Italian. (Because of his and Jimmy Conway's own mixed ancestry, they can never be an actual "made men"--full members of a crime family.) When Karen learns first-hand 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 hijacking and 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 shoots dead a young man, first for not bringing him his drinks fast enough, and then for talking back.

DeVito's violent streak reaches a crest in June 1970 when he bludgeons to death Billy Batts (Frank Vincent), a "made man" in the competing Gambino crime family. Henry, Conway and DeVito place Batts's body in the trunk of their car, stop by DeVito's mother's house to pick up a knife, finish killing Batts upstate, bury him in an abandoned plot of land -- and then discover six months later that the land has been sold and the (badly decomposed) body has to be re-excavated. (This scene serves as an example of the movie's black humor.) During this time, Henry's relationship with his wife deteriorates when she finds he has a mistress; Karen threatens the other woman so violently that even Cicero has to mediate.

After beating up a Florida gambler whose sister works for the FBI as a typist, Henry is caught and sent to prison for six years. There, he deals drugs to keep afloat, and by the time he returns to his family has a lucrative drug connection in Pittsburgh. Cicero has warned him not to deal drugs outside of prison, but he ignores the older man and gets his confederates (and his wife, and new mistress (Debi Mazar), and babysitter) involved in a smuggling operation. At the same time, in December 1978, Conway plans and pulls off a record five million dollar heist at JFK airport, but grows disgusted when his associates flaunt their earnings in plain sight, and begins having them 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 life collide. He must set up a major drug deal, cook a meal for his family and brother, placate his mistress, avoid the police, and satisfy his cohorts, all the while jittering from snorting 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 placing.)

After Henry's drug arrest, Cicero abandons him, and the rest of his mob cohorts follow suit. Suspecting that he and his family will be killed if he doesn't act first, Henry spills the beans on his former criminal cohorts to the FBI, takes his family into the Witness Protection Programand disappears into anonymity. Now he is "nobody," 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.

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