Goodfellas

Henry Hill and his friends work their way up through the mob hierarchy.

• Director: Martin Scorsese
• Genre:Biography / Crime / Drama
• Runtime:145 minutes

Cast

Robert De Niro : James ‘Jimmy’ Conway
Ray Liotta : Henry Hill
Joe Pesci : Tommy DeVito
Lorraine Bracco : Karen Hill
Paul Sorvino : Paul Cicero

In the opening scene, the protagonist Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) admits, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” referring to his idolizing the Lucchese crime family gangsters in his blue-collar, predominantly Italian-American neighborhood in East New York, Brooklyn in 1955. Wanting to be part of something significant, Henry quits school and goes to work for them. His Irish-American father, knowing the true nature of the Mafia, tries to stop Henry after learning of his truancy, but the gangsters threaten the local postal carrier with dire consequences should he deliver any more letters from the school to Henry’s house. Henry is able to make a living for himself, and learns the two most important lessons in life: “Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut,” which is said to him after young Henry remains silent after a court hearing.

Henry is taken under the wing of the local mob capo, Paul “Paulie” Cicero (Paul Sorvino) and his associates, Jimmy “The Gent” Conway (Robert De Niro), who loves hijacking trucks, and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), an aggressive armed robber with a hair-trigger temper. In late 1967, they commit the Air France Robbery, marking Henry’s debut into the big time. Enjoying the perks of their criminal life, they spend most of their nights at the Copacabana with countless women. Around this time, Henry meets and later marries a Jewish girl from the Five Towns named Karen (Lorraine Bracco). Karen at first is troubled by Henry’s criminal activities, but when a neighbor assaults her for refusing his advances, Henry pistol-whips him in front of her. She feels aroused by the act, especially when Henry gives her the gun and tells her to hide it.

On June 11, 1970, Tommy (with Jimmy’s help) brutally beats Billy Batts (Frank Vincent), a mobster with the Gambino crime family, for insulting him about being a shoeshine boy in his younger days. However, Batts was a made man, meaning that he could not be touched without the consent of his Gambino family bosses. Realizing that this was an offense that could get them all killed, Jimmy, Henry, and Tommy place the body in the trunk of Henry’s car and bury him upstate. But six months later Jimmy learns that the burial spot will be the site of a new property development, forcing them to exhume the half-decomposed corpse and move it to another location. Read more

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