GoodFellas (1990)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
The true story of Henry Hill, a half-Irish, half-Sicilian Brooklyn kid who is adopted by neighbourhood gangsters at an early age and climbs the ranks of a Mafia family under the guidance of Jimmy Conway.
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17 films that influenced GoodFellas
What critics say influenced GoodFellas
Yes, Ford elevated the western to more elegant heights, but Scorsese did the same to the gangster film with GoodFellas without matching the elegance and honesty of Mean Streets.
Movies like "Little Caesar" (1930), "The Public Enemy" (1931), and "Scarface" (1932) elevated the hoodlum to near-iconic status, creating antiheroes of lowlifes.
The 1920s and 30s saw the first Golden-Age of gangster flicks, offering such classics as The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932).
Movies like "Little Caesar" (1930), "The Public Enemy" (1931), and "Scarface" (1932) elevated the hoodlum to near-iconic status, creating antiheroes of lowlifes.
The 1920s and 30s saw the first Golden-Age of gangster flicks, offering such classics as The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932).
It wasnt until the 1972 release of The Godfather that the second Golden-Age of gangster films began, an age that was fully realized in 1990, with Goodfellas, a gangster-epic masterpiece.
Following Hill's rapid rise from eager-to-please youth to gang kingpin, and from there to his inexorable descent into cocaine-fuelled mania, Scorsese's fast-paced, violent masterpiece ranks alongside " The Godfather " as one of the most vivid and truthful depictions of the Italian-American Mafia.
The best known and most accomplished of these films, The Godfather , stakes out its territory firmly in the first area, leaving Goodfellas to stand atop the other.
No finer film has ever been made about organized crime - not even " The Godfather ," although the two works are not really comparable.
Then Francis Coppola resurrected the genre with perhaps the most important gangster picture of them all, "The Godfather," and suddenly mobsters were in again, opening the door to a succession of gangland features.
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Goodfellas carries on the tradition of the gangster movie genre, which began as early as D.W. Griffiths Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), and Raoul Walshs Regeneration (1915), a film that director Martin Scorsese has said greatly influenced his work, with its use of natural light, on-location shooting, stark reality, and stylish camera-work.
It’s an adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi’s non-fiction book Wiseguy (with a Pileggi screenplay), given the breakneck pace of Raoul Walsh’s 1939 underworld history lesson The Roaring Twenties.
Movies like "Little Caesar" (1930), "The Public Enemy" (1931), and "Scarface" (1932) elevated the hoodlum to near-iconic status, creating antiheroes of lowlifes.
His career has faltered since, and I know that GoodFellas was an isolated incident for him (perhaps the same as Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil), so it can be forgiven.
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Robert Redford and Kevin Costner were hardly upstarts, but will "Ordinary People" and "Dances With Wolves" stand the test of time?
But, in Goodfellas, Scorsese's selection of "Then He Kissed Me", "Ain't That a Kick in the Head", "Gimme Shelter", "Monkey Man", "The Magic Bus", "What Is Life", and dozens of others proves to be invaluable.