Goodfellas: No 10 best crime film of all time
Martin Scorsese, 1990
Killian Fox
Sunday 17 October 2010 11.46 BST
H
as Martin Scorsese made a better film in the last two decades than this visceral insider's view of New York mob existence, drawn from the real-life story of Henry Hill? Whatever you make of its morals, and the charge that it glamourises the mafia, it's hard to deny the sheer explosive power of Goodfellas, still undiminished 20 years after its release. Mafia allure is precisely what the film is about. Ray Liotta's Henry Hill says it loud and clear at the very start: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me, being a gangster was better than being president of the United States."
To this young, half-Sicilian half-Irish kid growing up in an impoverished Brooklyn, joining the local mob opens up a world where everything exists for the taking. It means sharp suits, flash cars, gold watches, beautiful women. It means being able to ignore the line at the Copacabana and swagger through the kitchens with your girlfriend while a table is being laid for you up front – a scene that Scorsese unfolds in a masterful 184-second tracking shot, one of the most celebrated in cinema. The photography, by Michael Ballhaus, is one of many pleasures here. Thelma Schoonmaker's editing, notable for its use of jump cuts and freeze-frames, gives this two-and-a-half-hour movie its blistering speed.
The ensemble cast is magnificent, particularly Robert De Niro as Henry's mentor Jimmy Conway and, in a gleefully nasty turn, Joe Pesci as his partner-in-crime, Tommy DeVito. DeVito shows how instantly the good life can give way to horrific violence. And Henry's trajectory through the film, as he spirals into drug use and paranoia in the late 70s, reveals an altogether more bleak vision of criminality. But the overriding impression we are left with is of the irresistible appeal of being a gangster. It's driven home in the final scene with Henry, in witness protection, bemoaning the awfulness of living as an "average nobody". This, depending on your point of view, is the film's fatal flaw, or its masterstroke.
THE GUARDIAN
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