GoodFellas is director Martin Scorsese’s stylistic masterpiece – a follow-up film to his own Mean Streets (1973), released in the year of Francis Ford Coppola’s third installment of his gangster epic – The Godfather, Part III (1990). It is a nitty-gritty, unflinching treatment of a true mobster story about three violent “wiseguys” [Mafia slang for ‘gangsters’], enhanced by the Italian-American director’s own experience of his upbringing in Little Italy.
The film’s factual, semi-documentary account was adapted from both Nicholas Pileggi’s and Martin Scorsese’s screenplay – based upon Pileggi’s 1985 non-fictional book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. Film posters were subtitled: “Three Decades of Life in the Mafia.”
The real-life story concerned a low-level, marginalized gangster (or ‘foot-soldier’) of mixed ethnic roots (half-Irish, half-Sicilian) – Henry Hill, who ultimately broke the gangster’s code of ‘never ratting on your friends’, and turned informant for the FBI and entered the Federal Witness Protection Program to save his life by disappearing from view.
The fast-moving, energizing, episodic story, with plentiful profanity (the F-word is repeatedly spoken by Joe Pesci’s character), forceful editorial cuts and visuals, shifting points of view, and characters speaking directly to the camera, is told with voice-over narrative commentary by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta).
It includes about thirty years in his life, from his teen years as a Brooklyn Irish neighborhood kid to maturity as an adult gangster, covering the years from the 1950s to the drug-saturated 1970s when married to wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco). The additional voice-over of his wife’s point-of-view provides even further insight into the all-encompassing culture and lure of life within the ‘family.’ Freeze frames sprinkled through the film accentuate the indelible, impressionable moments in Henry’s experiences.
Goodfellas (1990)
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, Frank Sivero, Tony Darrow, Frank Vincent, Gina Mastrogiacomo, Catherine Scorsese
Screenplay by: Nicholas Pileggi, Martin Scorsese
Production Design by: Kristi Zea
Cinematography by: Michael Ballhaus
Film Editing by: James Y. Kwei, Thelma Schoonmaker
Costume Design by: Richard Bruno
Set Decoration by: Leslie Bloom
Art Direction by: Maher Ahmad
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: September 19, 1990
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