by Glenn Kenny
Henry and Jimmy are not just dining; they’re anticipating news that the ceremony that accompanies being “made” has come to its rightful conclusion. Henry speaks of Jimmy having a “signal” worked out.
At Tommy’s home, the wiseguy is dressed to, um, be killed. Jacket in a tight plaid pattern, the white shirt with the vampire fangs collar, a black tie wide enough to make it look as if the shirt is black with a white collar, black pocket square. He walks into the living room and greets his mother like they’re about to start a Burns and Allen routine. Their exchange—how he looks wonderful, and how he should “be careful,” and God be with him—raises the question of what Mom knows about Tommy’s life, work, his “being made” and all. She seems very relaxed about having a criminal son.
“Just don’t paint any more religious pictures, please,” Tommy says as he goes out the front door. A funny line, but more a thing that would be said by someone going away for more than just the afternoon. How long are these “being made” ceremonies supposed to take, anyway?
The camera swerves, we see Tommy’s white Caddy in the driveway; in a more nondescript Buick sits Vinnie; waiting for Tommy at the rear of the four-door is Tuddy, dressed more formally than usual, so much so it’s easy not to immediately make him.
And here in voice-over Henry waxes most eloquent about how special it was to be a part of this band of brothers, even as the “Layla” coda still plays faintly under all the other sounds: “You know, we always called each other ‘good fellas.’ Like you’d say to somebody, ‘you’re gonna like this guy, he’s all right, he’s a good fella, he’s one of us? You understand? We were good fellas. Wiseguys. But Jimmy and I could never be made.”
No: “The Irishman,” Jimmy Conway, and the half-Irishman, Henry Hill, by dint of not being pure Sicilian, could never be full members of the crew. You had to be able to trace “all your relatives back to the old country.” There’s some awe in Henry’s voice as he says this. “It’s the highest honor they can give you. It means you belong to a family and a crew. It means that nobody can fuck around with you.”
But this assertion has already been disproven. Billy Batts was not just fucked around with, he was killed, and rather ignominiously at that. If you’re in a room with the right psychopath, being “made” means nothing. “Hey, I known you all my life.” Batts shrugs off Tommy. Billy Batts thought he was just having a night out with friends. And now Tommy thinks he’s being made.
“How many years ago was it you were made?” Tommy asks Vinnie after the Buick parks. The camera, on a crane, backs up and rises, a magisterial move that reveals a sizable but banal outer-boroughs suburban structure, a wide garage with a patio/garden on top of it, leading into a large house of brick and stucco exterior. Thirty years, Vinnie says, and Tommy notes, “Pikes Peak was a fucking pimple then, wasn’t it?”
At the diner an anxious Jimmy heads to a phone booth. Henry muses on Jimmy’s fallacious reasoning: “We were all being made.”
* * *
When Tommy turns a knob, pushes open the door, and walks into the room he’s been led to, he’s moving slowly. He stands and looks to his left, then to his right, then to his left. A fast cut reveals the room: looks like something you order out of a catalog, model “Long Island Sportsman’s Den.” There’s a marlin mounted on the wall. The thing is, it looks pretty much exactly like a catalog shot, because the room is empty. Which it should not be. The shot lasts maybe a second and a half and right before it ends Tommy says, “Oh.”
Cut back to a tight shot of Tommy saying, “No,” exactly as a bullet fires into the back of his head. There’s a quick cut to a wider view of the shooting, so you can see Tuddy’s impassive expression as he fires. He holds Tommy’s shoulder as he pulls the trigger. An exit wound forms at the top of Tommy’s hairline and blood runs down his right cheek. Vinnie looks on like a statue. Tommy hits a tile floor that looks like it could be from one of David Lynch’s alternate-dimension rooms. He falls with a force that is, as with Stacks’ fall, unrealistic, except for the possibility that Tuddy threw him down.
Let’s take a moment here to consider, once more, what’s happened. Paulie Cicero has ordered his brother Tuddy to kill a man they’ve known since that man’s childhood. Tuddy, who was not just the cabstand guy but the pizzeria guy. Remember Do the Right Thing, when Sal says to Pino about the Bed-Stuy kids, “They grew up eating my food?” Did not Tommy and Henry grow up eating Tuddy’s pizza? The point is that this community of good fellas, wiseguys, what have you, is absolutely depraved. As Tommy himself was. These people betray themselves and each other constantly and then shrug it off over bracciole.
* * *
Jimmy is on the pay phone, agitated. “This is Vinnie,” says Vinnie on the other end. Jimmy asks if everything’s been straightened out, and Vinnie says, “Well, we had a problem. We tried to do everything we could.”
We have not been made privy to the trying-to-do-everything-they-could part. We just see them take him into a room and kill him.
“He’s gone,” Vinnie says, “and we couldn’t do nothing about it.”
In 1957’s The Brothers Rico (a 1957 Mafia picture, based on an American-set story by Georges Simenon, directed by Phil Karlson, and much admired by Scorsese), Harry Bellaver’s West Coast enforcer Mike LaMotta listens to Richard Conte’s Eddie Rico plead that the organization spare his younger brother’s life. Expansive in sympathy, LaMotta replies, “That’s the way you shoulda talked at the beginning. Not that it would’ve done any good.”
Before he’s made to pay with his life for betraying the Corleones, Tessio, in The Godfather, says to Tom Hagen, “Tell Mike it was only business. I always liked him.” In a rather extraordinary display of mercy, for him, Hagen replies, “He understands that.” Seeing a possible lifeline, Tessio asks, “Tom, can you get me off the hook? For old times’ sake?”
“Can’t do it, Sally.”
In The Irishman the planned, then impending, murder of Jimmy Hoffa is discussed thusly: “It is what it is.” The orders come from nameless “higher-ups.” Hoffa himself is a “higher-up,” notes his future assassin, Frank Sheeran. No, there are higher up higher-ups. “If they can takes out the president, they can take out the president of a union.”
In Cosa Nostra fictions internecine murder is always referred to in fatalistic terms; it’s inevitable, inexorable, it cannot be helped. With few exceptions it is always done at the behest of an unnamed “they.” This is arguably the most Kafkaesque convention in the genre. Years before in this movie’s world, we will recall, Paulie asked an indignant Sonny Bunz about the even then out-of-control Tommy, “What am I supposed to do, shoot him?” One can imagine a conversation between Paulie and a figure who has real power over him, in which the answer to the same question is a “Yes” that cannot be responded to except by performing the action.
“The fact that Tommy gets killed that way is very important,” Scorsese told Ian Christie and David Thompson. “Neither Henry nor Jimmy could have done anything about it, because it was among Italians. It was my father on the phone telling Jimmy, ‘He’s gone.’ Bob De Niro asked my father not to tell him directly what had happened, but to talk around it. I suggested my father should say he had done ‘everything he could.’ In fact, the mob had been shielding [Tommy] for years, but he was out of control, causing a lot of trouble and angering everyone. Finally they decided he had gone too far. Even Jimmy and Henry are not part of the big organization, though Jimmy was a professore type, in charge of the young kids. I especially liked the way Bob held down the emotion after he comes out of the phone booth. He’s just standing there with his hands on his hips. Henry doesn’t even know yet. The body language is great between the two of them.”
Here Scorsese misremembers things a bit. De Niro’s Jimmy, in tears, takes to destroying the phone’s receiver as soon as he processes the full import of Vinnie’s “He’s gone.” He then composes himself, leaves the booth, stands
before Henry, and says, “They fucking whacked him.” He kicks, then knocks over, the booth. De Niro told GQ: “One of the hard scenes for me was when I heard that Joe’s character was killed—to be crying and emotionally really upset. I tried my best. I might have wanted to get even further than I did in it—not expressing just the anger but the emotional distraughtness, if you will. For my character, for him, because they were close. It takes a lot out of you emotionally, the things that you’re trying to...it takes so much effort and energy. Either you’re there or you’re trying to get there, but both of those processes take a lot out of you.” In GQ Michael Ballhaus said: “I think we shot that scene only once. He was so much into it that you couldn’t do it again.” Ten years after being interviewed for the GQ piece, and thirty years after shooting the scene, all De Niro could say to me about Jimmy and Tommy was, “They were good friends.”
Just as we were served doubles on the deaths of Batts and Stacks, now, too, we are again shown, from overhead, Tommy dead on that floor, the only thing in motion the blood coming out of his skull. “It was revenge for Billy Batts.” You then hear the shrug in Henry/Liotta’s voice: “And a lot of other things.” Vinnie moves into the shot from the right side, Tuddy from the left. “And that’s that,” Vinnie says. “And there was nothing that we could do about it.”
Henry, who has just been lauding the ways of this organization and the high honor of becoming a made man, now dismisses it all, disgustedly: “It was among the Italians, it was real greaseball shit.” As Jimmy weeps Henry can only shake his head. They’re gonna show those motherfuckers now, all right. This was supposed to have been a new beginning. Instead, as Scorsese observed to Christie and Thompson, the killing of Tommy “puts them all in their place, and it’s the beginning of the real end.”
MAY 11: THE TO-DO LIST
It’s a Sunday. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s not the actual date this all went down, which was in late April of 1980.
It’s not even seven in the morning. Herbie Flowers plonks the pickups on his electric bass and then launches into the tense but bouncy riff of “Jump into the Fire,” the hardest, loudest song on the pop singer Harry Nilsson’s 1971 album Nilsson Schmilsson.
Henry’s doing coke off the linoleum of his kitchen table. In the left of the frame a gun barrel points out. Once you’ve stopped doing cocaine to get high, or “high,” and begin using it as a general everyday stimulant, you’ve developed a dependence. For years, decades, maybe, perhaps because of its long periods of relative scarcity from the US and European narcotics market, cocaine had established a reputation as a nonaddictive substance. The great jazz pianist Bill Evans, a hopeless addict for all his adult life, managed to provisionally kick heroin in the 1970s and rejoiced in his discovery of cocaine, which was invigorating and, as far as he knew, would not get you hooked. Of course it did, and he died at the age of fifty-one. On the other hand, there are, even today, hundreds and perhaps thousands of people who will go through periods of recreational use and then walk away. Whether they are ingesting cocaine of the quality that Henry Hill and Bill Evans were able to obtain probably has something to do with that, but it’s not really the purview of this text.
The pinpoint clarity, or illusion thereof, that the drug is said to produce when you are first introduced to it, is in this sequence undercut by Henry’s overall sloppiness as he goes about his errands, and in one shot by the sight of Henry’s raw, red nostrils. (Frank Zappa’s late song “Cocaine Decisions” nails an end product of the drug: “You make expensive ugliness/how do you do it/let me guess:/cocaine decisions.”) One thing cocaine does is empower denial. As does heroin, but the drugs do it in inverse ways. Heroin denial is “It doesn’t matter,” cocaine denial is “Actually, I’ve got this!” Henry keeps boosting all day to keep up the lie that he is handling his shit.
* * *
He carries a paper bag out of the house and goes to his car, a brown Cadillac Coupe de Ville. He lays out his to-do list in voice-over: “I was gonna be busy all day. I had to drop off some guns at Jimmy’s to match some silencers he had gotten. I had to pick up my brother at the hospital and drive him back to the house for dinner that night and then I had to pick up some new Pittsburgh stuff for Lois to fly down to some customers I had near Atlanta.”
In the book Hill remembers: “On the day I finally got arrested my friends and family were driving me crazy.” There’s even more to do in that chapter than in the movie, including a meetup with Bobby Germaine, the stick-up guy whose cover story was that he was a freelance writer.
Another thing cocaine does is engender paranoia. Here’s a helicopter, flying at a diagonal through the frame, seen through tree branches. First, Henry finds it curious. Soon he will determine that it’s following him. It is. But that doesn’t mean he’s not paranoid.
Jimmy’s wearing a blue bathrobe when Henry shows up at his house. Here is the oldest we will see the character, and one of De Niro’s most vivid memories, looking back at the movie today, is how difficult it was to get his hair right. “I remember going out to Queens Boulevard where they were shooting, we were trying to get my hair as white and as light as possible, with a woman I worked with, the hair and makeup person at that time. I’d worked with her a long time, quite a few years. And we kept going back to the hair place on Madison Avenue, because stripping my hair was harder than we thought it would be. When we did it for a test, it wouldn’t look as white or light as we wanted it to. So we did it a few times, more than a few times.”
Jimmy rejects the guns. He demonstrates to Henry how they’re not right, trying to screw one of his dingy-looking silencers to one of Henry’s dingy-looking automatics. “What the fuck are these things?” he grouses, cigarette in mouth. “None of them fit.”
In the 1976 Taxi Driver, in the scene in which De Niro’s Travis Bickle buys several firearms from the motormouthed dealer Easy Andy, there are a number of close-up shots of the pieces that practically caress them. Gun fetishization wasn’t an overwhelming characteristic of the filmmakers of Scorsese’s generation/circle, but it was a characteristic, and an unappetizing one. A photograph from the 1970s included among the illustrations in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls showing Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader smiling with a small revolver in hand doesn’t seem as cute today as it might have. And while Scorsese is playing a character in Taxi Driver, that character’s ruminations on the destructive powers of a Magnum have been contributing to inaccurate impressions of the man for decades. (The director’s cameo as an actual gunman in Mean Streets—an associate of wannabe wiseguy Michael, who’s referred to as “Shorty” by Harvey Keitel’s Charlie in an earlier scene—who shoots and probably kills Johnny Boy is more immediately recognizable as a metafiction character bit.)
In Goodfellas, guns are deadly but they’re also garbage. When Tommy is hitting Billy Batts with his revolver, the gun slips from his hand and slides across the floor, lubricated with blood, its chamber smashed loose from its body; it’s defunct. For his May Sunday, Henry’s carrying a bunch of them in a supermarket brown bag. A far cry from the “elegant” leather holster Easy Andy tacks on to his firearms sale to Bickle.
* * *
“Jimmy was so pissed off he didn’t even say goodbye.” What he says is “Stop with those fuckin’ drugs, they’re making your mind into mush. You hear me?”
Henry is reflected in the rear bumper of the Cadillac. He tosses the bag into the trunk, and the camera swerves to the left and up for a medium close-up of Henry in his Ray-Bans, his mouth slightly agape. Because he’s played by Ray Liotta, he still looks pretty cool. But not nearly as cool as he did at the diner by Idlewild.
Ry Cooder’s slide guitar kicks off “Memo from Turner,” a song first sung by Mick Jagger in Performance, a film whose grab-you-by-the-back-of-the-head style was surely an influence on this one, although it’s scarcely been cited as such. If you know the song, its lyrics, while not yet heard here, will
carry some thematic resonance—not just “weren’t you at the Coke convention back in 1965,” but the final line, “Gentlemen, you all work for me.” It’s 8:05 in the morning and Henry would like to enjoy a cigarette. He can shrug off Jimmy’s rejection of the guns. He’s seeing the guys from Pittsburgh that day and they are always in the market for guns so “I was pretty sure I’d get my money back.” He’s on top of it! He looks up his windshield for the helicopter.
“Turner” segues into the middle of the Who’s “Magic Bus” with singer Roger Daltrey repeating, “I want it I want it I want it.” Henry looks up again. Cut to outside the car, through the windshield at Henry, looking up.
Here occurs a nifty bit of breakneck montage. After Henry looks up, he looks straight ahead again, straightens out his steering arm, thrusts his torso into the seat, and screams. Cut to what he sees: a collision stopping traffic, cop car on the other side of the thruway. Cut to one side view of Henry in the car, swerving his torso and turning the steering wheel left; cut to a closer version of the same perspective; cut to his foot coming off the gas pedal and hitting the brake.
In a return to the outside-the-car view, Henry, holding tight to the wheel, grimaces. He’s not gonna make it. He looks down to his left and has a eureka moment. Cut to him putting his foot now on the emergency brake. Cut to his perspective: the car is still dead aimed at the rear of a stopped Mustang. A view of the Cadillac skidding to a halt over a yellow line at the side of the asphalt. From the opposite angle, the front of the Cadillac stops just short of the Mustang’s bumper. Ten shots in less than seven seconds, resolving on Henry exhaling with no little relief. “Oh my God,” he says. In a sober state this near-collision would be bad enough; the montage gets the heightened coked-up panic Henry feels.