Film Notes
     Martin Scorsese's 1990 masterpiece GoodFellas immortalizes the hilarious, horrifying life of actual gangster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), from his teen years on the streets of New York to his anonymous exile under the Witness Protection Program. The director's kinetic style is perfect for recounting Hill's ruthless rise to power in the 1950s as well as his drugged-out fall in the late 1970s; in fact, no one has ever rendered the mental dislocation of cocaine better than Scorsese. Scorsese uses period music perfectly, not just to summon a particular time but to set a precise mood. GoodFellas is at least as good as The Godfather without being in the least derivative of it. Joe Pesci's psycho improvisation of Mobster Tommy DeVito ignited Pesci as a star, Lorraine Bracco scores the performance of her life as the love of Hill's life, and every supporting role, from Paul Sorvino to Robert De Niro, is a miracle.
     Based on Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family this wry, violent, and partly true story spans thirty years in the life of Henry Hill, an aspiring criminal; his milieu, the psychotic wiseguy he courts, and Scorsese's inimitable rendering of Mobland habits and mores, which features one of the longest "tracking shots" in film and a virtual timeline of hit songs.
     Shot on location in Queens and Manhattan, New York, and Fort Lee, New Jersey. In competition at the Venice Film Festival, where director Martin Scorsese won the Silver Lion. It was shown at The American Museum of the Moving Image during a Scorsese/De Niro Festival. It was voted best film by the New York Film Critics Circle, who also voted Scorsese Best Director. Robert De Niro was voted Best Actor by the same organization for his work in this film, and in Awakenings. It won the Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Joe Pesci), Best Supporting Actress (Lorraine Bracco), and Best Cinematography (Michael Ballhaus) awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Joe Pesci also won a Best Supporting Actor of 1990 award from the National Board of Review. GoodFellas is the sixth film that Robert De Niro has made with Martin Scorsese. They worked together the following year in Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear. The two started their association in the early days of Scorsese's filmmaking career, when he was casting Mean Streets (1973). Scorsese was looking for an actor who could bring an air of authenticity to the role of Johnny Boy, a crazy boy from the streets of Little Italy on a collision course with disaster. De Niro was suggested by Scorsese's friend, Francis Ford Coppola, and was hired. They have since formed a legendary working relationship, with Scorsese providing De Niro with some of his most complex roles, including James Conway in GoodFellas, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), and Max Cady in Cape Fear (1991). The film also reunites De Niro and Joe Pesci, who played brothers in Scorsese's 1980 masterpiece Raging Bull. Scorsese has been known to use his parents in his films, as he does here, and he actually made a documentary about their lives, Italianamerican. His mother, Catherine Scorsese also had a bit part in Coppola's The Godfather Part II (1974). Actress Debi Mazar, former makeup artist for Madonna, plays a small role here. She went on to become the wisecracking receptionist on the TV series Civil Wars, and is joined the cast of L.A. Law for the 1993-4 season. Chuck Low, who played Morris Kesssler, was actually Robert De Niro's real estate broker, who rented him the penthouse in what later became the TriBeCa Film Center.