by Glenn Kenny
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At Sandy’s, Henry is relieved, and riding high on a wave of artificial energy. Against all odds, he’s completed his to-do list. One thing not on it was staying any longer than he had to with Sandy on the drug preparation, which inspires some fresh indignation on her part: “You think you can come over here and fuck me and leave?” Henry sweet-talks her and practically goads her: “Do you believe me? Do you believe me?” Then he jumps back and goes out the door with a wicked laugh.
Was dinner delicious? The camera cranes out from a close-up of a serving dish containing a still-substantial portion of ziti and meat and it looks pretty good. But poor Henry looks exhausted.
MAY 11: MY LUCKY HAT
We had seen the drug mule Lois in a previous scene, introduced by Henry thusly: “I had everybody working for me. Even our old babysitter, Lois Byrd.” Our first look at Lois is an hour and a half into the movie, in a POV shot from the perspective of a baby. Henry and Karen are cooing at the baby with apparent sincerity; Lois, wearing a beige bucket hat, and looking like she could be the salty cousin of a character played by Lisa Gerritsen on a ’70s sitcom, has a more cynical bearing that’s immediately evident. She is not a happy worker. “I hate Pittsburgh,” she sniffs to Henry. “Where did you find such creeps?” While no couple are heroes to their babysitter, Lois finds Henry’s business associates creepier than Henry himself.
The baby is a prop that Lois brings on a plane with her to escape detection by airport security as she shuttles drugs and money between Long Island and Pittsburgh. This is well before the age of the enhanced TSA. (Detection dogs for drugs came into use in the US in the early ’70s, but weren’t ubiquitous and largely were not, to speak to our immediate point, directed at white women who were carrying infants.) The Hills and Lois are amused by their ruse. “Is this the same baby you used last week?” asks Karen. “No, that was my sister’s. This one’s Deirdre’s,” says Lois.
Lois’ attachment to the aforementioned beige floppy hat will lead to Henry being arrested several minutes, at least, earlier than he might have been. In the May 11, 1980, scene, Henry decries Lois’ sloppiness. He’s arranging to send her off on a deal on the same day as he’s making the epic dinner for his brother Michael. Lois is at the Hills’ home.
Henry calls her from the motel where he and Karen meet his “Pittsburgh guys.” Back at the Hill house, Lois eye-rolls almost before she’s got the receiver fully to her face.
“Tell Michael not to let the sauce stick,” he insists. “I’m stirring it,” Michael insists back. “Jesus, you must think I’m dumb,” Lois says after Henry tells her to call Atlanta from an outside line. On hanging up, he says, “Un-fucking-believable. All of them. Every fucking girl in my life.” It’s one of the last really funny lines in the movie.
“So what does she do after she hangs up on me? After everything I told her, after all her yeah yeah yeah bullshit? She picks up the phone and calls from the house.” During these shots is where occurs the docudrama visual—the blacked-out airline logo on the ticket Lois holds with one hand (a lit joint is in the other).
Once Henry returns home he gets the dinner back in order as Lois sits at the kitchen table, paging through an issue of the black-and-white Marvel “adult” comic Tales of the Zombie (these comics were printed in a magazine format and not subject to Comics Code oversight/censorship due to that distinction from smaller-size books). After dinner, it’s almost airport time...and Lois announces, “I gotta go home.” Henry protests that they don’t have time to drive to Rockaway; they need to tape the drug packages to Lois’ legs (one presumes it’s Karen doing the manual labor here) and that takes a bit. Lois is not moved: “I need it. I gotta have it. It’s my lucky hat. I never fly without it.”
There are no bit players in Goodfellas, just as there are no bit players in Casablanca. In both pictures everyone with a speaking role has a little something extra. As Lois, Welker White is particularly vivid. It’s also, one supposes, because it’s she who puts Henry in the driver’s seat right before he has a gun pointed to his head.
“I went in to read for Ellen Lewis,” White recalls, “who’s remained a good friend since. I think it was the first movie of Marty’s that she cast, and she’s cast for him ever since. And Marty was there! Those were the days. Today, when you audition for anything, you just go on tape and you never meet anybody. In the late ’80s you met with the director, you sat down with him, you said hello, and you talked first, and you got to know each other a little bit. My recollection of my state is that I was so young, and not afraid of anything.”
White, who’d trained for the stage, auditioned specifically for Lois and had gotten her scenes in the script. Her read on the character lined up with what Scorsese was looking for, particularly in the May 11 scene. “He said to Ellen, ‘Yeah, Lois is kinda stoned—everybody else is like all wired up, and she’s kinda the other way.’ And that was sort of my take on it, was that she’s, like, a pothead.”
The actor also saw the power Lois had over Henry. “She didn’t really care what happened to these people, she wasn’t invested one way or the other, and she felt some power from them, in being this important cog in their trafficking business. And that there was something titillating about that.”
The house that was used for the Hills’ residence was in Fort Lee, New Jersey. “And the kitchen was very, very small,” White says. “We were all kind of cramped in. You might know that, famously, Catherine Scorsese made the sauce” that Henry had such concern about. “It really did smell great, but we didn’t eat it because it had to be there, visible in the various parts of the scene, which took several days to shoot.”
The components of the interactions, White recalls, were detailed and specific. She was given free rein to add little details to her characterization—the comic book was one she picked out. “I searched for weeks for the right comic book, I went to all these comic book stores all throughout the city, you know, back when they were all over the place, and I rifled through them, and I came upon that one.” While the scene is set in 1980, the Tales of the Zombie issue was published in 1973. “I brought it, and Marty loved it, he said, ‘Oh, that’s perfect, that’s so exciting.’” White says she’s still got the comic in her basement.
“Kevin Corrigan was wonderful, all the actors were wonderful, very generous. The interactions between my character and Henry’s include that key phone call, and Marty and Ray made sure that we could have Ray on the other end of the phone for the shooting of that. Which is not so common. And this was one of my first films, and I had no idea that that’s uncommon until I worked for thirty more years and discovered how little that’s accommodated.”
White has worked for Scorsese twice since, after a long interim: she plays a waitress in The Wolf of Wall Street and Jimmy Hoffa’s wife in The Irishman. “Yes, thirty years later I’m working on The Irishman with Marty, and again, there is at least one key scene with a phone call.” If you’ve seen The Irishman you know the scene to which White refers; to call it “key” is almost an understatement. “It’s funny to come back to it, but I remember that phone call very vividly, because they put him in his location. The level of detail that Marty’s fostering, and supporting and asking everybody to contribute to. I didn’t learn until much later that that’s—that’s...somewhat rare. My memory is that it was in a highly detailed environment, a highly specific environment, that allowed all of us to really just kind of play, and that was a very exciting experience.”
When Lois and Henry go outside and get into the car, Henry is confronted by the local narcs, led by a cop played by Bo Dietl, the real-life detective who had auditioned for the role of Edward McDonald, which McDonald ultimately ended up playing himself. Dietl screams at a volume just a notch or two up from what he once whipped out as a Fox News commentator. (A couple of years back I was having breakfast with a friend at New York’s very upscale Four Seasons Hotel, and coincidentally, Dietl was seated
at a nearby table; I was almost shocked to discover that he has an actual, quiet “inside voice.”) The staging and filming of the arrest was engrossing to White. “I come from a theater training background. I’d shot on sets, but I hadn’t really shot on a location like that before. To be in the car, and to have the whole thing unfold as if it was really happening—which sounds so obvious on the face of it, but until you experience that as an actor...it’s really incredible, because it’s infused with the realness of the thing.” The realness only extends so far—the gun Dietl points at Liotta’s head is a prop, after all. But it’s enough like the real thing that it can register as such, especially in the kind of charged moment White speaks of.
“Your head starts to spin,” White says, “because you kind of don’t know what you’re meant to do. Because you spent all this time training how to manufacture the experience, right? And all of a sudden it’s just seeming to actually happen in real time! There’s really a car here, and I’m really sitting in a seat, and this guy is really here, and he’s really holding a gun, and there is no audience, there’s no one I have to get this to, there’s a windshield and there’s nobody beyond the windshield. And I do remember having my head kind of explode with excitement about working in that form, about really just being with those two other people, and allowing the experience to come through me.”
White’s experience in acting for films has given her a profound appreciation for how that kind of work differs from stage performing. “I now do an MFA course in screen acting; my husband”—Damian Young, a wonderful actor who got started working with the independent director Hal Hartley—“and I developed a program that we take all over the world. We start with teaching actors the grammar language of film. We’ll screen movies and we take out all dialogue; we work with no dialogue, and then we start to teach the actors what camera coverage is and why the frame and the image moves, why the camera tells the story the way it does, and how the performer can use that knowledge and awareness to craft a performance that specifically addresses the camera.”
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The entirety of the May 11 scene took several days to shoot. Joseph Reidy remembers: “The interior of that house, that—the kitchen and all that, was several hours. The driving was done on a different day. The shots of the helicopter itself and that kind of stuff was second unit, which I did; that is, I directed the second unit. That didn’t take a day to shoot, it took a couple of days. I think between the driving and all that it was several days, but even so, those scenes were not the only thing done during that time. We didn’t stop everything else and shoot those scenes continually.”
THE MUSIC STOPS
The film’s final fifteen minutes constitute a grinding downshift. They encompass twelve individual scenes, and it’s not quite so schematic that each one is a little longer and a little slower than the last, but it’s close. No more pop songs—not even from a jukebox in the diner where Henry has his final sit-down with Jimmy. Only one freeze-frame. And a gradual descent into a new reality. Goodfellas deliberately becomes a relatively pedestrian film, the better to pull off two stunning pieces of formal gymnastics at the very end.
At the station house, Bo Dietl’s obnoxious arresting officer continues to needle Henry, calling him a fuckhead. A former New York City detective and another Rao’s regular, Dietl went on to play himself, from the period when he was a detective in private practice (which he still advertises himself as being), in The Wolf of Wall Street. And there he is funny and uninhibited about portraying himself as a sleazeball, more or less. In The Irishman he is very funny as an AFL/CIO crony who instructs Robert De Niro’s Frank Sheeran how to surreptitiously imbibe alcohol in the presence of the teetotaling Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). The secret is to pour a bottle of vodka into a hollowed-out watermelon, a fruit Hoffa also abjures. Again, the performance works.
No one else in the station house affords Henry any respect, either. Lois is paraded by him in cuffs, and she sticks her tongue out at him. Sandy is hustled in, petulant as usual. Another detective samples the white powder caked to one of the strainers found in Sandy’s apartment, and nods with a smirk, the camera closing in on his face. “Bye bye, dickhead,” Dietl’s cop taunts.
Stuck in jail for a bit, Henry has been doing the math. “Don’t make a jerk of me,” Paulie had said to him earlier. Now he’s gone and done just that. In the wake of Tommy’s fate, Henry’s got an even clearer picture of what happens to people who make a jerk out of Paulie. His reaction when Karen tells him, “I spoke to Jimmy,” is rightfully panicky. As he leaves the jail—his mother-in-law has put up her house to get cash for his bail—Henry in voice-over sketches out scenarios. “Paulie would whack Jimmy before he would whack me,” he calculates matter-of-factly. “This is the bad time.”
It gets worse when Henry is home and discovers Karen has flushed all the cocaine. Despite being busted seven ways to Sunday on a narcotics charge (albeit a local, not a federal, one), Henry had planned to raise cash by selling the rest of the drugs he had in stock. Karen had considered them insufficiently hidden, and so disposed of them (in the montage prior, featuring the starkly memorable shot of her stashing a revolver in her panties). Here Henry once again comes close to hitting Karen, and they scream at each other and collapse into hopelessness, Henry half sleeping with a gun in his hand.
Henry then visits Paulie at what looks like a small restaurant where Paulie is cooking sausages. Here is a more or less standard two-minute scene of reversed medium close-ups and dialogue. It’s still dynamic, because Scorsese and Ballhaus are constitutionally incapable of creating nondynamic shots. But the quality of the scene is in its culmination of a years-long association crumbling in betrayal, and it’s carried by the acting. “I’m really sorry” is the best Henry has to offer Paulie. Paulie’s silences add to his enigma. Is there a way he didn’t know this was going on, or that he genuinely expected that it wouldn’t? It ultimately doesn’t matter, because he’s still in charge. He hands Henry a wad of cash and says, “Now I gotta turn my back.” Paulie meant it when he told Henry, “I don’t need that.”
Henry is bitter nevertheless. “Thirty-two hundred bucks for a lifetime.” What did he expect? Besides a bullet in the back of his head.
Back at home Henry and Karen continue their “We’re dead/You’re paranoid” dispute. This will be resolved when Karen goes to meet Jimmy in Brooklyn. In a small warehouse, holding a clipboard and wearing tortoiseshell glasses, Jimmy looks like a bland manager type. He needles Karen with questions and demands (“Tell him he’s gotta call me, okay?”), gives her some cash, and then directs her up the street; there’s a storefront where he’s got some “beautiful Dior dresses,” she should go pick some out. Moving down the street (Scorsese and Schoonmaker toggle between two tracking shots, one focused on Karen, the other on the buildings she’s looking at, resolving with a slow-motion shot of Karen looking back at Jimmy), Jimmy directing her from behind, she arrives at a storefront. There’s a shot of Jimmy himself looking behind, down the street. Inside, two men, shadowed so their features are not visible, speak, one’s moving a crate; seeing Karen in the doorway, they stop what they’re doing and wait. Panicked, she backs off, over to her car, and drives away.
I still encounter people who ask peculiar questions about this scene. “What are those two silhouetted men doing in there? Are they supposed to kill Karen?” Well, I doubt they’re supposed to make her a flat white. But what about the illogic of Jimmy having Karen killed before killing Henry? Why would Jimmy kill Karen now? As if Jimmy has only ever acted logically. The fact that the cops haven’t yet caught up with his murders does not mean he’s a mastermind of homicide. And it is peculiar that people are so invested in the competence of these fact-based but nevertheless fictional criminals.
In any event: yes, it is highly likely that those men would have killed Karen had she entered the storefront. As Karen rushes away yelling to Jimmy that her mom’s watching the kids and she doesn’t wan
t to keep her waiting, the camera rises to show the cross-signs of the streets: Smith and Ninth, Brooklyn, the southern edge of the Italian American neighborhood Carroll Gardens, near the area now referred to as Gowanus because of its proximity to the ecologically messy Gowanus Canal. There used to be a bar on Court Street, which runs parallel to Smith, a few blocks north of Ninth, where whenever someone would bring up Goodfellas, one of the regulars would say, “Hey, you know Billy Batts used to live around the block.” It was only in March of 2019 that Carmine Persico, the mob boss whose territory included Carroll Gardens, died at age eighty-five after having spent much of his adult life in prison. Carroll Gardens is a pleasant neighborhood. Don’t move here, please.
“If you’re part of a crew”—Liotta’s pause here is exquisite—“nobody ever tells you that they’re going to kill you.” Another diner, a tracking shot in the counter area moves toward a booth in the back where Jimmy sits, his nervous enquiring head visible through a window in the right part of the frame. “There weren’t any arguments or curses like in the movies,” Hill continues. The voice-over is perfectly synchronized, emotionally, to the camera movement that ends on Jimmy, getting up to give Henry a hug. Your murderers “come with smiles, they come as your friends. The people who have cared for you all of your life.” The steer into Jimmy comes on the words “a time when you’re at your weakest and most in need of their help.” The reverse shot of Henry in the hug shows he still looks like hell, pale and hollow-cheeked and coated in a thin veil of sweat.