Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  About eight minutes prior, Henry told us that, “Everybody loved Stacks.” Now, in voice-over again, he says, “Stacks was always crazy. Instead of getting rid of the truck like he was supposed to, he got stoned, went to his girlfriend’s, and by the time he woke up, the cops had found the truck.” Gregg Hill, Henry’s son, described the real-life Stacks with affection; Hill’s daughter, Gina, recollected her father being especially affected by Stack’s death: “My dad spent Christmas Day at the funeral parlor.”

  There’s a nearly overhead shot of Stacks on the floor in a near-fetal position. Blood runs down his left shoulder and over his back. The bed is washed with blood that looks to have splattered in a circular motion from the right-hand side. The shot is held for nearly ten seconds. It is a little reminiscent of Scorsese’s treatment of the bloodbath following Travis Bickle’s massacre of Iris’s traffickers at the climax of Taxi Driver. That chronicle of human devastation is stomach-churning. This is, too, and it’s meant to prick the conscience more. Henry offers a “Stacks had to die” narrative. The movie comments that his death was...well, this disgusting, this detached, this grotesque. There’s no human dimension to it. “Everybody loved Stacks.” But here’s Tommy, abusive, insulting, finally murderous, and acting like a robot, like this is nothing. As the shot holds, the song seems to get louder: “The bells/of St. Mary’s/I hear they are calling...”

  The shooting is also a culmination of the racist loathing expressed in prior scenes by Henry and Tommy and others. And while one doesn’t want to read too much into it, the fact that the film’s next African American character is a doctor, played by Isiah Whitlock, Jr., assists in ushering into the movie a world apart from Henry’s, a world into which he will be forced to assimilate at the end.

  “I gotta talk to you” about Stacks, Henry says on meeting Jimmy in the bar.

  “Don’t worry about that.” Jimmy and Tommy are drinking because “Everything is beautiful. There’s nothing to worry about,” according to Tommy. “Didn’t you tell him yet?”

  Jimmy to Henry: “No, I didn’t tell him yet. Guess what?” Henry: “What?” Jimmy: “They’re gonna make him.”

  Henry looks at Tommy: “Paulie’s gonna make you? Tommy!”

  “They opened up the books,” Jimmy says. “Paulie got the okay. You believe that? This little guinea bastard?” Here we are circling around the tenderness with which Henry evoked Tuddy at the movie’s beginning. Jimmy’s twinkly eyes and grin bring more of the genuine exuberance De Niro was so determined to put across when he gave Henry a “taste” of his Lufthansa share. “Motherfuckers, we got ’em now,” Tommy says.

  * * *

  We should pause here. Not once, but twice, it is stated that Paulie has given the okay for Tommy to be made. As we know, Tommy will not be made, but killed. Ergo, it is Paulie who pulls the switch on Tommy’s execution. Tommy, who he’s known, like Henry, since he was a kid. Tommy, who he stood up for, without even saying a word, in front of the Bamboo Lounge owner Sonny. Tommy, the guy Paulie came to see as a “crazy cowboy” with “something to prove,” sure. And now he’s going to have Tommy killed. “I just can’t have it,” Paulie complained to Henry about Karen’s bitching and moaning about Henry’s abandonment of her and the kids. That idea has finally come to apply to Tommy. And so he’s going to die.

  * * *

  Then Morrie barges in on the three ebullient wiseguys to kill their buzz. “Fuck him, I want my money!” he practically screeches to Henry. The “him” is Jimmy. “Good, go tell him,” Henry says. This shuts Morrie up. Morrie knows that Jimmy will not have Morrie in his face. So he yells at Henry, who will listen. Up to a point. Morrie’s impotence is epic. In the face of it he can only become the affable high-vocabulary schmuck he ever was, singing “Danny Boy,” changing it to “Oh Henry boy.” (Behind him, at a table outside the back room, one can see Vincent Gallo, then one of the other lot of young New York actors who scrambled for just about any role in this movie.)

  Cut to De Niro smoking. He hears the singing. He looks vaguely disgusted with Morrie’s schtick. Cut to Morrie entering the front room. Striding to the bar. He steps out of frame. Cut back to the bar. The Cream song “Sunshine of Your Love” comes on the soundtrack, loud. Is it the jukebox or is it the score, so to speak? Scorsese, in Mean Streets, brought the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash” out of the jukebox at Tony’s bar when De Niro’s Johnny Boy entered the joint in slow motion, then he put it back in/on the jukebox, letting it settle into the ambient noise when Johnny Boy and Harvey Keitel’s Charlie began to talk. Here, the distinction doesn’t matter: it’s the insistence of the drums, of the tensile guitar riff. The words don’t matter. It’s the way the music constitutes a kind of incantation in itself. (Of course, this is the “cream” that Scorsese had Sinatra lover Nick Pileggi type into their script.)

  Jimmy continues to regard Morrie, to size him up, not that he hasn’t sized him up before. What he could do to that guy. What he should do to that guy. It’s a slow dolly in to Jimmy at the bar. Jimmy looks left, right, left, then gives a little grin to nobody but himself. He takes a long drag on his cigarette. A look flashes on his face, pure hatred. Then another, of resolution. His eyes almost meet the camera lens at the end of the shot.

  A film actor is often required to ignore the presence of a camera. Because De Niro’s work so often has an emotional immediacy that implies “naturalism,” the amount of time, especially in Scorsese’s films, in which he’s required to almost directly interact with the camera isn’t much noted. The scenes in which Travis Bickle talks to his mirror in Taxi Driver are pertinent examples. This shot in Goodfellas is one of several in which the actor has to be almost synchronized to the movements of the shot. De Niro describes the process with standard straightforwardness: “Marty just had a shot, and then he explained what he wanted to do, and that’s pretty much what it was, you know, he’s gonna come in slow, and...that’s it.” Producer Barbara De Fina says, “Well, yes, that is pretty much how it works. But with a lot of takes.”

  * * *

  Given the intensity of the “Sunshine” shot, Henry’s subsequent voice-over—“I could see for the first time that Jimmy was a nervous wreck”—is a bit of a “no duh” moment. With a freeze-frame and a return to the gang’s social life, we get this peculiar ping-ponging between “That’s when I knew Jimmy was gonna whack Morrie” and then an exhalation over Jimmy not whacking Morrie, underscored by Henry’s self-serving voice-over insistence “I was just stalling for time.”

  This is at a card game at the bar where the gang has been hanging out, never named in the movie, but mostly the interior of the real-life Neir’s Tavern in Queens, standing in for what was Robert’s. On the wall behind Henry is a reproduction of the 1924 George Bellows painting Dempsey and Firpo, the one showing a fighter being literally knocked out of the ring. A great work of art but a near-egregious cliché of old-school New York bar decoration. “Sunshine” is playing in the background, softly this time—it’s definitely the jukebox—and the camera pulls back to show Jimmy next to Henry, laughing as Tommy tells another one of his stories. Cut to, of course, Tommy telling one of his stories. Morrie’s laughing, Frankie Carbone is laughing. It’s the Bamboo Lounge and “I thought I told you to go fuck your mother” again. Except it’s not. The laughter is rote, forced. Tommy is maybe kind of a bore when you come down to it.

  But Tommy’s tale does have Jimmy feeling the bonhomie. “Forget about tonight,” Jimmy says to Henry. “Poor bastard, he never knew how close he was to getting killed,” Henry says in voice-over.

  And THEN THEY KILL HIM. Morrie follows Jimmy, Tommy, and Carbone to the car, and from the back seat behind the passenger seat, Tommy sticks an icepick in the back of Morrie’s head.

  Morrie’s last words: “You hear about the points we were shaving up in Boston?”

  “No, I didn’t,” says Carbone. “Oh, it’s terrific. Yeah. Nunzio up in the—” Then there’s an �
��ugh!” and a crack and that’s it for Morrie. Grunting himself, Tommy puts the icepick in the back of Morrie’s neck, pushing it in to the hilt; pulling it out, he says, “I thought he’d never shut the fuck up,” and looks at Jimmy, who says, “What a pain in the ass.” Tommy seems to have absorbed Jimmy’s own hatred of Morrie.

  Morrie’s mention of the Boston College basketball point-shaving scheme is a useful shoehorning in of the real-life caper that had substantial consequences for Hill, but which is not depicted in detail in the movie.

  After Tommy and Carbone are instructed by Jimmy to “chop him up,” Carbone gets out of the car, which prompts Tommy to call him a “dizzy motherfucker.” Because they’re not going to do the chopping in the bar parking lot. First the thing with the coffee, now this.

  * * *

  In fairness to Jimmy, it’s clear throughout the picture that he never much liked Morrie. Still, the way he shrugs off Henry’s concerns about what to tell Belle is brutal. Morrie, for all his flaws, was a devoted husband. Before bringing up Boston College he announced to the guys his intention to pick up some Danish pastries for his wife, a gesture about which Jimmy, Tommy, and Frankie Carbone could scarcely give half a fuck. When a frantic Belle comes to Henry and Karen’s house in a panic, she says that Morrie’s “never been away all night without calling.”

  With Jimmy at a diner, Henry is at a loss. “What the fuck you want me to tell Belle.” The showing-off of the house to Morrie and Belle earlier indicate that the Hills had been constructing a simulacrum of normal suburban life, and indicates the social awkwardness of having a friend in that life get whacked. Jimmy’s life as depicted in the movie is more isolated, which enables his arguably nihilistic indifference. His answer to Henry’s question is “Who gives a fuck?” In fact, he’s a little puzzled. “What do you care about her?

  “Watch this,” Jimmy says, pointing out some sleeping plainclothesmen in an unmarked car. He goes over and taps on their window while Henry pleads he not give the cops the satisfaction.

  “Come on, fuckos, let’s go for a ride,” he says to the now-awake cops. “Keep ’em up all night,” he laughs to Henry. De Niro’s note in the script: “This guy is tough!”

  * * *

  The pink Cadillac, its sticker still in the passenger side window—sharp-eyed viewers will detect it has a big blood patch on it—is parked next to an overpass archway. Two young boys—the one in the lead, holding a piece of wood that looks like a broken slat from a fence, is particularly angelic looking—approach the car. They stop and stand together in a nearly noble composition practically out of Sergei Eisenstein.

  Cut to the grille of the car practically filling the frame as the camera begins to move up. Then the piano comes in. Those block chords from the coda to Derek and the Dominoes’ “Layla.”

  The song was famously written by Eric Clapton as a lament for the woman he wanted but it seemed he could never have, Patti Harrison, originally the spouse of Clapton’s great friend George Harrison. (In 2011 Scorsese would create a lengthy documentary about the former Beatle.) To use its final, mournful but eventually soaring postscript as the accompaniment to a series of death tableaus is arguably counterintuitive. But there’s also something undeniably cinematic about its pacing, the way it uses the markedly Beatles-esque device of starting with a single instrument and having the other pieces in the ensemble come in gradually, as with “Ticket to Ride.” In the Cahiers du Cinéma book entitled Scorsese on Scorsese (not to be confused with the Faber and Faber book entitled Scorsese on Scorsese), the director told Michael Henry Wilson that yes, this was, like “Sunshine of Your Love,” a song that Scorsese heard for the sequence from the start: “The scene was even shot to fit the song. I had ‘Layla’ running in playback. The pink Cadillac, the refrigerator truck, all the executions Jimmy ordered, were shot with ‘Layla’ in playback. Why? Because it’s a tragedy, a tragic procession passing before our eyes. It has a certain majesty, even if our actors are no princes. They’re called common criminals but they’re human beings who don’t deserve to die. The music conveys the tragedy; its sadness should arouse sympathy.” The sight of Johnny Roastbeef and his wife, who loved the car, stiff in place hours after breathing their final and perhaps terrified breaths, is too shudder-worthy at first to register as sad. But it is.

  * * *

  This section of “Layla” was credited to Jim Gordon, the drummer for Derek and the Dominoes. Gordon was a prodigy who made his recording debut backing the Everly Brothers when he was just seventeen. He came into Clapton’s orbit via Delaney and Bonnie, the American roots rock act to whom Clapton was drawn while recuperating from what he came to see as the psychedelic excesses of his prior group, Cream. The singer Rita Coolidge was Gordon’s girlfriend (she, too, had been affiliated with Delaney and Bonnie, and also the Joe Cocker/Leon Russell aggregation called Mad Dogs and Englishmen, for which Gordon drummed). In her 2016 memoir, Delta Lady, she writes of a day in California when Gordon came to visit. “He sat down at my piano, and played for me a chord progression he’d just composed.” The virtuoso drummer was also, per Coolidge, “a capable pianist.” The progression, in C-sharp, was one Coolidge found “haunting [...] especially when the bright major chords suddenly dipped to B-flat 7th for the refrain.” The progression wasn’t a whole song, and in Coolidge’s account, she took over and added a countermelody and wrote some lyrics. The composition was called “Time (Don’t Let the World Get in Our Way).” Coolidge writes that she and Gordon demoed it (the year was 1970), played it for Eric Clapton, got a noncommittal reaction, and then forgot about it. “But our song, with Jim’s wistful melody and my sweet countermelody, would come to haunt me the rest of my life.” She does not mention Goodfellas in the book, but one can be reasonably sure that it has played a part in the haunting.

  * * *

  As the bodies tumble—literally, in the case of Frenchy and Joe Buddha coming out of the garbage truck—Henry speaks of Jimmy “cutting every link” to the Lufthansa heist. “But it had nothing to do with me,” he says, maybe trying to explain to himself how he lived through this slaughter. “Anyway, what did I care?”

  Still, Henry says: “Months after the robbery they were finding bodies all over.” And here is possibly the most dangerous shot in the movie, the discovery of Frankie Carbone’s frozen-solid corpse in the back of a refrigerated meat truck.

  It begins far behind the truck, at the height of almost three stories. The camera moves toward the truck and as its doors open, the camera descends, and goes deep into the truck, and moves in to a medium close-up of the frozen Carbone, hanging from a meat hook.

  The original idea, according to Larry McConkey, was to do it all from a crane, a small crane. But the crane did not have sufficient maneuverability to get deep enough into the truck, which, besides frozen Carbone (the actual actor, Frank Sivero, in effects makeup and strapped in a harness), was stuffed with sides of beef.

  One morning, possibly a Saturday, very early, Michael Ballhaus called Steadicam operator McConkey. Can McConkey suit up and get to the meat-packing district in Manhattan to do a “step-off?” A move in which an operator goes to handheld, or Steadicam, from a moving crane by stepping off said crane and continuing the movement. “What crane do you have?” McConkey asks.

  “Usually for a step-off they’ll be using a Chapman-Titan crane,” says McConkey. This sturdy piece of equipment has a sizable platform.

  To avoid a potential corporate defamation action, I will not repeat the name of the crane actually being used, and merely record that McConkey’s reaction on being told. “That’s like a death trap.”

  Death trap or not, McConkey decided to accept the challenge. Major film productions are generally insured to the hilt, but every now and then a technician will assess a situation and, having considered its considerable risk, go for it, anyway, without going to the trouble of getting an okay or checking on whether or not they’re protected in this case. Also, the set is p
repped and ready and the actors are there and time is money. (For the record, Joseph Reidy’s recollection is that the Steadicam shot was always part of the plan for this scene.)

  “I got my gear together, went to the set, I was shown the shot, worked it out.” The choreography, so to speak, and the timing were precisely calculated. When the truck door was opened, the viewer should not be able to see the floor of the truck, because there was a crate there that McConkey had to step onto from the platform of the crane. There also had to be someone out of frame on the crate to keep it steady for McConkey to step onto it. “We did not completely nail it; there’s a little wobble when I’m stepping off the crane.” (It’s barely noticeable but it does in fact occur about twenty-six seconds into the shot, a slight jar to the left.)

  THIS WAS THE DAY THAT TOMMY WAS BEING MADE

  “Still, I never saw Jimmy so happy.” A dolly tracks in from outside the diner, where Jimmy enthusiastically chows down with Henry. The Pittsburgh thing is bringing money in for him, he presumably has gotten to keep all the money he hasn’t given to the Lufthansa crew, and the heat from the cops on that matter is going down. “But the thing that made Jimmy so happy that morning was that this was the day that Tommy was being made.”