Blogging the AFI’s top 100 films of all time: #94, ‘Goodfellas’
Because somebody's got to do it...
I’m blogging the AFI’s ‘Top 100 American Movies of All Time’ list, from 100 to 1. Last time, using Inglorious Basterds as a springboard, anticipating its fifteenth anniversary, we answered the question: Does ‘Pulp Fiction’ still hold up? Before that, I spent some time on a pony helpin’ the Duke Search for his Injun-corrupted niece. This time out we take a nervous look back at a bunch of wise guys, or “Good fellas” as they liked to call themselves. Why nervous? Because, as Henry Hill himself said, when it comes to good fellas, either “They come at you smiling, or you don’t see them coming at all. You’re dead.”
Goodfellas was made exactly 10 years after Raging Bull, which has been called “the best film of the decade” (the decade being the 80’s, so: faint praise?). Between the two films, Martin Scorsese made four other features, two chunks of two omnibus movies, Michael Jackson’s classic “Bad” music video, and a documentary about Georgio Armani. I once took Scorsese to task for some of his recent choices. All I can say is, we’re hardest on the ones we love.
I hadn’t seen Goodfellas for several years before sitting down the other night, with a bowl of garlicky pasta and a big glass of Borolo, and I gotta hand it to Marty, it’s a very, very good film. Maybe it’s even a great film. But mostly, it’s a joyously exuberant film. And since it’s a movie about mobsters, including some notorious real life cold-blooded killers (Jimmy Conway alone was suspected of at least 50 murders and, as played by De Niro, he pales in comparison to Joe Pesci’s unhinged Tommy DeVito), the effortless exuberance is a hell of a feat.
More than anything else, Martin Scorsese is an expert creator of sequences. One way to gauge his influence is to realize how many film auteurs these days build their movies from sequences rather than scenes. If the quality was trademarked, it’d be the “Scorsese Glide®.” It’s everywhere in Goodfellas; in fact, it makes the movie. And versions of it can be easily spotted in Boogie Nights, Pulp Fiction, and the films of Wes Anderson and plenty of other youngsters toying with celluloid today. I know there were others in film history who dabbled with this idea, but it seems to me that Scorsese was one of the first to really wrap both arms around it and run. He took rudimentary runs at it as far back as Boxcar Bertha.
With 1958’s A Touch of Evil, Orson Welles is widely known to have set the standard for the long, choreographed tracking shot. People remember it being eight minutes. Ten. Twenty! It’s actually 3:17, which may not sound like that big a deal now-a-days. But at the time, even the idea of a continuous, carefully choreographed three-and-a-half-minute shot was something new. It’s a wonderful shot, containing its own narrative arc, and a genius way to start a movie.
And with his “Copacabana” sequence in Goodfellas, Scorsese may not have matched Welles in terms of length (Scorsese’s shot is 3:00), but he trumped the hell out of him in terms of difficulty. We start outside, on a close shot, just like in Touch of Evil. Hill hands someone his car keys and escorts his date across the street, through a line of people waiting to get in, through a service door, down a set of stairs, through another door (where he tips a guy), down a hall, into and through a busy kitchen (where he smacks the hell out of his hip on a steel table), and out into the club. Scorsese could have stopped the shot there, but he didn’t. He finds a natural way to extend it, by following the action. The action becomes a table, carried through the busy club by a waiter, to its new stage-side location, “the best seat in the house.” Scorsese could have ended his shot there, as well, but he doesn’t. He pans loosely over to the next table to pick up a few friendly waves, pans back to Hill and his date as the lights dim and an M.C. introduces Henny Youngman. The camera at this point rises and pulls back to settle on Youngman long enough for him to tell his most famous, and pretty damned tired, joke. “Take my wife, please!” Rim-shot. Bada-bing. Then the shot ends. Whew.
But it’s not so much the outside-insky thing that makes it so great. It’s not even the precision choreography, though it all really does go off without a hitch (how many times, say, around two and a half minutes, did somebody bump the camera or flub a line?). What makes the sequence so remarkable is the lighting. As Henry and his date make their way into and through the club they encounter five completely different lightening scenarios, from outside to silhouette to the deep red corridor to the bright gray kitchen to, finally, the club itself. And Scorsese doesn’t stop there. Once they’re seated, the house lights dim and a spot illuminates Youngman. This stuff is not easy. I’ve worked on movies. I’ve seen how long it takes to light a freaking locked-down shot of a bowl of soup. This really is something exceptional.
And Michael Ballhaus, the German cinematographer who has worked with Scorsese since After Hours won a BAFTA for it. Of course, he wasn’t even nominated by the Academy. Though Goodfellas was. It lost to Dances With Wolves. Remember that!? Doh! I wish I had the video of Scorsese, sitting there, waiting. “And the Oscar goes to… Kevin… uh… what!? Let me just check the back of this thing… huh… damn it… okay I guess, yeah… Kevin, um, Costner.” It’s not out there, at least not that I could find. But this is:
Novice director Costner beat out not only Scorsese but also Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Frears, and Barbet Schroeder. You know, nobody special. It just makes you wanna fly to Los Angeles with a very large bat.
Goodfellas actually makes me nostalgic. For actors. For films that give actors stuff to chew on. Liotta is fantastic. Pesci is frightening as hell. And De Niro, who is so often so very good, is really pretty amazing here. People argue that De Niro plays, basically, the same dude again and again. It’s simply not true (or at least, it didn’t used to be true). His brilliance as an actor is in his shadings; they’re often subtle, but they’re always perfect. He owns Jackie Brown. Pam who? De Niro. He doesn’t own Goodfellas because the film is structured around Liotta and Liotta is great, but he’s a hell of a pleasure to watch.
"Jimmy the Gent"
At the end of the film a title says that the character De Niro played, Jimmy Conway, would be eligible for parole in 2004. Born to, and abandoned by, a prostitute, the real life Jimmy adopted the name of the foster family who took him in after he’d spent several years kicking around (and being kicked around by) the system. When he was 13, he was traveling with his new parents. You know how dads love to play the “I will turn this car around right now!” game when the kids are acting up in the back seat? Apparently that’s what happened. But when Jimmy’s foster dad turned around to smack him, he lost control, crashed, and, um, died. Talk about your guilt trips! Jimmy was unhurt, but his foster mother blamed him for the accident, and never let him forget it. Life for young Jim had just started to look decent. It’s a sad thing when a kid’s life goes off the rails at 13 and it’s the sort of turn he’s already accustomed to. The bloodthirsty Burke didn’t drop out of the sky fully formed. The system formed him. People formed him. And he spent his life punishing them for it.
So yes, Burke would have been eligible for parole had he not died in prison in 1996, of lung cancer, at the age of 64. Burke named his two sons after America’s most notorious criminal brothers, Frank and Jesse James. Frank James Burke followed in his dad’s (and even more in his namesake’s) footsteps. He was gunned down in Brooklyn in 1987 at the age of 27. Though it seems that Jesse James Burke wanted no part of the family bizz. Instead he chose the path of “an average nobody,” a regular Joe content to “live the rest of my life like a schnook.”
The Final Judgement from the mighty ‘Closely Watched’ tower:
Top 100 of All Time? Really? Or somebody made a mistake? Top 100.
Check in next time for #93 (progress, people, progress!), Billy Wilder’s classic comedy, The Apartment.
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If our criteria was quotable films, Top 20, maybe Top 10. How many times did you tell an old buddy, or even better, an old buddy’s younger brother, “Go getcha shinebox.” Young Liotta, Pesci before he went camp/annoying, and a very subtle De Niro.
I wonder how many comedians have gotten easy laughs spoofing Henry’s placating call of “Kaaaaren!” or Karen’s manic buzzing on her husband’s mistress’s apt screaming in that wonderful Brooklyn accent “Stay away from my husband, you WHORE! A WHORE lives here!!”
I especially love when Karen narrates an expression of disdain regarding the other mob wives – priceless… We all know DeNiro, Pesci, Liotta are great; but personally, i think Lorraine Bracco is an overlooked gem in this classic film.
Good call, Andy, and I totally agree. I had this whole Lorraine B. riff ready but realized my word count had hopped the thousand fence and felt like I should just wrap it up. But I’m glad you gave her a shout-out. And structurally too, it’s interesting, in that when she gets introduced, the narrative slips into her POV, along with her own voice over. At first I found it abrasive, but after a while, I was happy to spend time in the film via her point of view. This too makes Goodfellas a rare beast.
In response to another comment. See in context »Agreed! I totally whiffed on that one.
I think it’s actually vastly underrated in this list – I’d put it in the top 20 or 30. Not only that, but you could make a good case for Goodfellas being the best film of the 90’s (especially if you ignore a little film called Fargo). The level of craft in this film – from acting to directing to editing to writing – is unparalleled. It foreshadows the frenetic MTV style pacing of the decade to come, but with none of the laziness that the method came to embody. It, along with Terminator 2 (don’t laugh) is what made me want to go into filmmaking. Goodfellas will always have a special place in my heart, and I will never get tired of watching/quoting it.
Not to mention I probably say “I thought you said I was alright, Spider” about once a week and hardly anyone ever knows what I’m talking about.
You know, Joseph, I agree with you, and I actually prefer it to Fargo (though we are kinda talking apples-oranges here). And I actually hear you on the T2 shout-out. I LOVED T2 when it came out. Cameron brought – always brings – a similar level of precision to his movies; he’s just not the film artist that Scorsese is, or at least, not in the same way.
And with Spider there were, what, 2 cast members who made it into The Sopranos?
In response to another comment. See in context »To clear things up, I hope I’m never on record putting Scorsese and Cameron in the same category as artists. But those two wildly different movies just happened to be what made me sit up and notice that films were a thing people made a living making, and how cool it would be to be one of those guys and get to play with transfer trucks and gangsters and whatnot.
I will say that I hope Michael Bay watches a scene from Aliens or T2 and cries himself to sleep at night, wondering why he doesn’t have the chops to make an action set piece with half the panache that Cameron does.
Duly noted, and I’m with you about Mr. Bay’s sleepless nights. And while, no, T2 sure isn’t Raging Bull, it is a film put together carefully by someone with mad skills, as the kids say these days.
In response to another comment. See in context »Scorsese is one of a few directors who actually knows what he is doing with the story at all times, in every scene, every shot, every piece of dialog and yes, sequence. His movies are works of precision and mood and repeated viewing brings new insights. Most directors are technicians or craftsmen (Cameron one of the best), but Scorsese is an artist who uses the entire palette at his disposal. I once watched Raging Bull with the idea to find a wasted scene or a redundant one, a setting that did not work, or a piece of hammy acting from De Niro, (who on his own, loves to chew scenery for other reason than he can), but I couldn’t find anything that flat out didn’t serve the story. He deserved the award that year but crazy things do happen. The Sting, the picture, Heimlich best music…
That’s a great point about Scorsese’s facility with storytelling. This is definitely what separates him from so so many craftsmen out there. He knows that all of this stuff is in the service of telling a story, and he, unlike so many others, actually knows what that means. I’m glad I get to watch Raging Bull again fairly soon (though at this rate, not too soon; it’s #24).
Whereas Dances With Wolves is 75. And Fargo is 84. And I know we risk diving once more into apples & oranges territory, but I think Goodfellas is a better film than The Deer Hunter, which is not to say that I don’t love The Deer Hunter. It’s 79.
In response to another comment. See in context »I was actually on set the day they shot the “I amuse you? I’m a fucking clown?” scene. It was amazing to see how simple and unpretentiously that was created.
That’s amazing! Sorry I missed your comment; I was distracted by more recent posts and it sorta snuck in under the radar. But I’d love to hear more!
In response to another comment. See in context »