Goodfellas

Martin Scorsese's 1990 movie Goodfellas, starring Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, and Paul Sorvino, narrates the rise and fall of Mafia associate Henry Hill and his friends and family from 1955 to 1980. The film focuses on the half-Irish Henry Hill (Liotta) and his Jewish spouse Karen (Bracco), who envy the gangster lifestyle but can never fully be part of the Mafia’s inner circle because of their ethnic identities.

Dana Polan's compelling study chronicles the production history of the film, starting with Nick Pileggi’s source book, Wiseguy (1985), and its transformation into a script by Pileggi and Scorsese. Polan moves on to consider thematic and formal aspects of the movie: the many moments (aural as well as visual) that make filmic form palpable and celebrate cinematicness; Goodfellas' ethnographic concern with communities whose members build up special worlds for themselves; and, connected to that, the complicated relation between artists and other kinds of world-builders (such as the Mafia men Scorsese depicts through his own art of cinema).

The study also explores the complicated interweave of dynamic form and morally dubious content; a narrative that has the ambition of historical sweep combined with a frequently nonchronological time-frame; the contrast between everyday victims and the special community (of criminals); the role of outsiders who want in (like Henry and eventually Karen—who at first wants to stay out but is seduced into the lifestyle), and the function of voice-over narration.

Polan concludes with a consideration of the film’s reception and its lasting impact on later popular culture, such as the TV series The Sopranos.