goodfellas

More particularly, while Goodfellas does not shy away from the violence and mayhem of street life, it interrogate the nature of criminal enterprise, its “profit motive” (P.210, 2)

Goodfellas (1990) directed my Martin Scorsese, is a film that focuses around the rise and fall of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in the world of organized crime. Scorsese based the film off of the 1985 book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi. The film was nominated for best picture and best director at the 63rd Academy Awards. The film opens up to a flashback with voce over narration from Henry Hill, foreshadowing Henrys involvement with the mob. It is a scene where Henry, James Conway (Robert De Niro), and Tommy Devito (Joe Pesce) murder an individual in the trunk of a vehicle. The individual who they murder turns out to be Billy Batts (Frank Vincent), a very important member of the mob. The next scene takes us back even further. Scorsese takes us to Brooklyn, NYC in 1955. We see a young Henry Hill, 13, a clean-cut innocent young man who seems to have a bright future. Henry admires the “gangsters” in the neighborhood. “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” Henry said. Henry admired that they were untouchable and well respected throughout the city. A young Henry took up a job at a local cabstand across the street from his house, owned by the mob. The longer he worked there, the deeper he got involved with the gangsters. Henry went from parking their Cadillac’s, to doing their dirty work.

The first evil deed the audience witnesses Henry involved in, is where he is breaking the windows of several vehicles and pouring gasoline into them, with the intent of blowing them up. Right when the cars explode, Scorsese uses ...

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...oint of view, the initial contact between the film and its audience is an agreed conception of human life: that man is a being with the possibilities of success or failure. This principle, too, belongs to the city; one must emerge from the crowd of else one is nothing. On that basis the necessity of the action is established, and it progresses by inalterable paths to the point where the gangster lies dead and the principle has been modified: there is really only one possibility – failure.” (P. 585, 1)

Organization is a huge theme in the film. Throughout the film you get a firsthand look at how organized Henry and the mob are. The tracking shots through the restaurant and poker game are metaphor for this. Everyone had a job and they executed it well. Even when they were in prison, everything was smooth and organized. Cooking was a big deal in prison and they had a