Comprehensive information and links about Goodfellas

Goodfellas 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, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as the irascible Tommy DeVito (based on Tommy DeSimone).

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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, promidently Italian 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), (based on the actual Lucchese mobster Paul Vario) and Cicero's close associate Jimmy "The Gent" 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 (Joe Pesci, in a widely-acclaimed and Academy Award-winning performance) conspire 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 the Air France cargo terminal in 1967 and paying Cicero his percentage of the take as per the mafia's code of tribute.

Henry also meets and falls in love with Karen (Lorraine Bracco), although there is conflict between the families since Karen's parents are prosperous Jews and Hill is himself poor and half-Irish and half-Italian. (Because of his and Jimmy Conway's own Irish ancestry, they can never be actual "made men" – full members of an Italian and Sicilian 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."

"From left to right: Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, Robert De Niro as Jimmy "The Gent" Conway, Paul Sorvino as Paul Cicero, and Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito." From left to right: Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, Robert De Niro as Jimmy "The Gent" Conway, Paul Sorvino as Paul Cicero, and Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito.

As the years go by and Henry earns Cicero's trust, his friends 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 - with an explosive quick-temper to boot. In one of the film's most controversial scenes, DeVito thoughtlessly shoots an innocent and unarmed young man (played by Michael Imperioli), first in the foot for not bringing him his drinks fast enough, and then fatally for talking back to him.

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, 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) has to be re-excavated, moved and reburied. (This scene serves as an example of the movie's black humor; Tommy, Jimmy and Henry go to dig up the , a scene shot mostly in silhouette; while Henry reacts badly to the excavation of the corpse, eventually vomiting, both Jimmy and Tommy remain nonchalant - even joking about it, the exhumation is just business to them). 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 brutally beating up a debt-ridden Florida gambler whose sister works as an FBI typist, Henry and Jimmy are caught and sent to prison for four 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 (any association with drugs is strictly forbidden in most Italian crime families), 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 some of his associates foolishly flaunt their gains in plain sight, possibly drawing 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' death. Henry reports that "DeVito is shot in the face so his mother couldn't have an open coffin funeral."

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 babysitterdrug 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 (not without giving him $3,200), 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. He is now an "average no"; as he laments in the film's closing lines, "I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook."

Themes

Goodfellas is widely regarded as the first gangster film to show in detail how the "working class" mafia lived. Unlike The Godfather series, there is no central "don" character. Henry, Jimmy and Tommy are "blue-collar" soldiers in a larger family, but the film never shows us their ultimate superiors, Paul Cicero's bosses. (According to Nicholas Pileggi's book, , Cicero was a Capo for one of the Five Families, the Lucchese Family.) A detail that is hardly noticeable (perhaps because of Scorsese's staccato, almost frantic directionGoodfellas is the actual lack of any discernable plot for the first hour; up to the point that Billy Batts is murdered, the story is made up of slice of life vignettes, simply concerned with familiarizing the audience with the way Cicero's soldiers operate his day-to-day business.

Additionally, while presents the audience with sympathetic characters (particularly Michael Corleone and Kay Adams), the mobsters in are often seen as antisocial, cold-blooded, and violent. Henry is the only character worthy of any sympathy, and is also considered an anti-hero (although he is still a criminal). Also, while he did get violent with people, he never killed anyone, and usually tries to play peacemaker when violence erupts between his fellow criminals. However, when we see the ultimate effect it has on his family and relatives (not counting his fellow Mafiosi), audience compassion may vanish. His treatment of his own wife is equally appalling, however much it may be a staple of Mafioso life. The counter to his cheating nature is Karen herself, in whom Henry has met his match. A terrifying moment occurs when Henry wakes up, obviously hung over from a night of partying, and sees Karen pointing his own gun directly at his face. In the early stages of Henry and Karen's relationship we see a darker side of Henry. The young man who lives across the street from Karen (whom she's "known all her life") attempts to rape Karen while driving her home, and in response to this Henry walks over to the boy's house and relentlessly pistol whips him in front of his friends, apparently shattering his nose. This scene shows that even though Henry is normally sympathetic, he is still a member of the mafia.

Other viewers, however, find the most sympathetic character in the film to be Paul Sorvino's Paulie Cicero, the Capo of this particular crime family and the boss of the neighborhood. Though he can be seen as a menacing criminal who makes a living through extortion, Paulie is not as impulsive or treacherous as his sociopathic underlings. For many, Paulie's fate illustrates the lack of honor within the criminal life, since he's the only honorable character and he ends up in prison. Indeed, while many gangster films would put such a character in the forefront, Paulie is a supporting character without much of a role in the film other than highlighting this central theme.

The film's dominant themes include blind ambition, dangerous excess, and watching the company one keeps. The first half of the movie seems to glorify the mob life, but the second half effectively exposes its less romantic aspects. Henry devolves into a drug-addled mess, the ultra-violent Tommy gets his comeuppance, Jimmy becomes so controlled by greed and paranoia that he turns on his friends, and Paulie can no longer control his now reckless subordinates.

Dark humor, a Scorsese hallmark, saturates the film. An early scene shows Tommy arguing with a nightclub owner when he won't pay a hefty tab. In a surprise burst of violence, Tommy smashes a wine bottle over the man's head while his cohorts (Henry included) laugh uproariously. Both scenes where Tommy shoots the hapless bartender, Spider, feature the same sort of attitude from the guys; to them, violence is simply a way of life. There is a bit of concern from Henry when Spider lies dead on the floor; however, after the still surprised Henry announces "He's dead," Tommy replies with a shrug "Whatta'ya want? It was good shot."

Awards and recognition

Joe Pesci received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Tommy DeVito in 1990.

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. In 2005, a British film magazine, Total Film, named Goodfellas as the greatest film of all time.

Roger Ebert, a friend and supporter of Scorsese, named the 'best mob movie ever' and named it among the best films of the nineties. Ebert isn't alone in his praise. Several critics consider , a seminal film of the nineties and consider it the third in his trifecta (Scorsese's earlier films Taxi Driver and Raging Bull were considered masterpieces of their respective decades with a masterpiece of the nineties).

A highly influential film, it is perhaps the largest inspiration for the popular HBO series The Sopranos, which also chronicles the life of a "working class" gangster. The presence of Lorraine Bracco as Tony Soprano's therapist further solidifies the connection. It has also been homaged on TV shows such as (Bart the Murderer).

The famous introductory tracking shot which circles the club as Henry Hill's voiceover introduces them one-by-one is regarded by film afficionados as one of the best camera shots of all time considered on par with the opening shot of Touch of Evil. It was homaged in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights.