by Glenn Kenny
Once Jimmy and Henry are seated, in a booth with a window facing outside, Scorsese and Ballhaus do a variation of the disorienting zoom/dolly combination that Alfred Hitchcock concocted to create a vertigo effect in guess which film. The camera dollies backward while the lens zooms forward, creating a visual tug-of-war within the shot, a move to get away that’s countered by a force that insists there’s no escape. Eventually the shot tightens in on the two as Jimmy prepares to offer Henry a job of the sort he’d never approached him for before. He puts on a different pair of glasses, wire-rimmed, to make his pitch. When he slides a piece of paper across the table, the close-up of Jimmy freezes, the only point in this sequence where the technique occurs. “Now he’s asking me to go down to Florida and do a hit with Anthony. That’s when I knew that I would never come back from Florida alive.”
The cut now is to the same view of Henry and Jimmy seated, with the camera dollying back. No zoom-in this time. The camera is making an exit. The situation is what it is.
* * *
The cops in the movie’s station house are such creepy obnoxious assholes that they might as well be criminals. By comparison, Edward McDonald, tall, buttoned-down, nicely dressed, and tough as nails in a laconic kind of way, is a law enforcement representative who doesn’t gloat at Henry and Karen. He doesn’t have to.
McDonald plays himself in the film. Although Goodfellas was shot almost ten years after McDonald got Hill and his family into witness protection, McDonald retained his youthful looks. He’s also markedly more healthy-looking than his bedraggled charges.
In real life McDonald had been an assistant federal DA, assigned to the Lufthansa heist. So in a sense Hill was in his life before he ever met the criminal. He told Pileggi: “Hill’s arrest was the first real break we’d had in the Lufthansa case in over a year. [...] Henry was one of the crew’s only survivors, and he was finally caught in a position where he might be persuaded to talk. He was facing twenty-five years to life on the Nassau County narcotics conspiracy. His girlfriend and even his wife could also be tied into the drug conspiracy and life could be made very unpleasant for him. He knew this. [...] Henry was too vulnerable.”
Henry also managed to inspire some peripheral indignation in McDonald, as has been mentioned earlier. In Wiseguy, Pileggi writes: “One day [...] while being asked about the Lufthansa robbery, Henry said he had been in Boston. It was the third or fourth time he had mentioned Boston, so McDonald finally asked what Henry was doing there. Henry answered matter-of-factly that he had been bribing Boston College basketball players in a point-shaving scheme at the time and had to keep everyone in line. ‘I played for the Boston College freshman team,’ said McDonald. ‘I had been to a few of the games Henry had fixed. It was my school. I almost went across the table at him, but then I realized that to guys like Hill it was just a part of doing business. To Henry shaving points on college basketball wasn’t even illegal. He had never even thought to mention it. I came to realize Henry didn’t have too much school spirit. He had never rooted for anything outside of a point spread in his life.’”
McDonald got the role because he asked for it. “There was a researcher who came to my office, who was working also with props and set decoration, I think,” he says. “She was looking at the photographs on my office wall and desk, asking, ‘Can I take some pictures, can I take those photographs of your children? And can I take your diplomas and, you know, other things?’ And I’m saying, ‘Sure,’ but I’m nervous about getting them back. She said, ‘No, Nick Pileggi’ll vouch for it, you don’t worry, I’ll give you a receipt.’ And she was asking a lot of questions, as well. After a while, I said, ‘Look, I’m doing all this shit for you, I’m sitting here for two hours with you, telling you all this stuff about the, you know, how things should look, so let me ask you, who’s playing me in the movie? Because in the book, I have a bigger role.’ And she mentioned the possibility of Brian Dennehy playing me. You know—big Irish guy.
“I said, ‘Holy shit, that’ll be great, Brian Dennehy’s gonna play me in the movie!’ But she said, ‘We haven’t really cast your part yet.’ And I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ As a joke. Or half joke. And then, Pileggi called me, like an hour and a half later, after she got back to the office, and said, ‘Are you interested, and Marty is sort of intrigued with the idea of making a cinema vérité move, and having you play yourself,’ and I say, ‘Yeah!’ So I went over and, you know, they gave me a script to look at. It was a day they were casting smaller roles, all of the waiters and background wiseguys, all doing their screen tests. And there were, like, you know, sixty wiseguys there, and guys who looked like wiseguys.”
It was lucky for McDonald that he was three weeks into private law practice when that happened. Were he still working for the government at the time, he would have been enjoined from appearing in the movie.
For his audition, and on into the actual shooting, McDonald wasn’t asked to read lines. While McDonald had experience performing, so to speak, for juries, this was a different kind of acting. It was his sudden access to sense memory of his actual early meetings with Henry and Karen that gave him the key.
“I had a vivid memory of my reaction to Karen, my exasperation with her when she tried to portray herself as an innocent who had just gotten swept up in her husband’s misdeeds. We had wiretaps on the Hill home, and we had tapes where, in conversation after conversation, she’s talking about cocaine and the deals. There was plenty to charge her on. So I remembered saying to her not to give me a babe in the woods routine. And I pulled that back up.”
McDonald makes clear not merely that he is trying to help the Hills, but that he is their only source of salvation, their only deliverance from certain mob death. He does this with equanimity but also a barely concealed contempt, making clear that he doesn’t care about Henry or Karen’s comfort as such; he is only interested in playing Pygmalion with them and their circumstances to the extent that it will make them valuable witnesses for the feds.
“In playing out the scene with Ray and Lorraine, it did click with me: ‘I’m listening to the same bullshit that I heard from her then.’ And that was my genuine attitude at the time: ‘I don’t give a shit whether you go or not, you think I care about you?’ With the Rockefeller drug laws at the time Karen could have been facing two lifetime sentences. And they’re bothering me about wanting to live someplace warm? I didn’t have a whole lot of patience to deal with that crap. What else is he going to do? Go to jail? He’s gonna get killed in jail.”
In the years ahead, McDonald would befriend the entire Hill family. At the end of his life, in fact, Hill told McDonald that Ed was, when it came down to it, his closest friend. It’s likely that Hill made that statement to more than one person. But not too many more.
* * *
On the set McDonald got as good as he gave, if not better, from Lorraine Bracco. “She was really hostile. Which was confusing for me at the time, because we had had a couple of phone conversations prior to doing the scene in which she was so nice to me. We had spoken once while I was at my mother-in-law’s house in Boston, and my mother-in-law was so excited that a movie actress was calling! And then we are on the set and she’s giving me this death-ray stare, even between takes. After the scene wrapped, she put her arms around me and kissed me. She just needed to keep being in that mode to maintain her consistency.”
McDonald had a slight impact on the movie’s mise-en-scène. In the scene, the Hills sit on a couch opposite McDonald; on Karen’s end of the couch there’s a small table, on which is a photograph of McDonald’s children, one of the office pictures borrowed for the movie.
“Before we started, Lorraine put a coffee cup right in front of the picture, and I’m sitting across from her, and I get up, and I say a little something about my bad back, I’m stretching, you know, and I sort of walk around to the coffee table, and I get her coffee cup and I put it around behind the picture, and Lorraine’s in her hostile mod
e, total hatred, so she’s like, ‘What the fuck?’”
The film’s director understood exactly what was happening.
“Scorsese emerges from out of nowhere, and says, ‘Lorraine, Ed doesn’t want to deprive his children of their immortality!’ And here it is. Thirty years later. And they’re still there. When they were in college, they told everybody in college, ‘Hey, I was in Goodfellas.’ Their classmates would say, ‘Get the fuck out of here,’ they’re watching it in the dorm, and they point out that picture. They had a lot of fun with it growing up.”
At this point in Goodfellas the pace has slowed to the extent that McDonald’s terse laying out of witness protection protocol does play like a conventional procedural or investigative journalism drama, the two-minute expository scene of shot, reverse shot, and so on. Cutaways to Jimmy and Paulie being led, in handcuffs, by cops, provide jolts: these are the people who will kill Henry if they are able.
So Henry testifies. McDonald is doing the questioning in the courtroom, a genuine one on New York’s Centre Street. McDonald remembers being the fly in the ointment there—he kept referring to Paul Vario and Jimmy Burke rather than Paul Cicero and Jimmy Conway and hence fluffing a couple of takes. He also remembers De Niro as cold and distant—saving up his death-ray stare for Liotta as Henry Hill sings on his two former friends. Various crew members had asked him whether everything looked right, and he said yes, except the actor appearing as the judge was way too young. Scorsese put that actor in a different place—standing outside the courtroom door—and shut things down for a considerable period searching for an older African American actor to don the judge’s robes. One was found among the courtroom’s janitorial staff.
And here the film breaks out of the staid mode it has deliberately settled into. In voice-over Henry once more extols the lifestyle virtues of being a wiseguy while one of the attorneys for Conway and Vario drones, “People call them rats because a rat will do anything to survive, isn’t that right, Mr. Hill.” And soon, instead of speaking back to a lawyer, instead of looking at Paulie and Jimmy, Henry is looking at the camera and speaking to us. Addressing his gambling losses and how he would make up for them, he says, “It didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything. When I was broke I would go out and rob some more.” He practically leaps out of the witness box and strides to the camera, which backs up to make way for him as he walks down the center aisle of the courtroom. “We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers”—he’s ticking them off on is fingers now—“we paid off judges. Everybody had their hand out. Everything was for the taking.” He stops, and the camera that had been backing away approaches, with a little tentativeness, for a nicely framed medium close-up.
“And now it’s all over.”
Henry continues, after the cut to a tractor digging up dirt in a suburban housing development. A pan and dissolve resolves on Henry’s bland front stoop—a station wagon is parked outside the garage—and a bathrobe-wearing Henry comes out the front door to get the paper. Here is the famous bit about his inability to get “decent food” out in the sticks: “Right after I got here I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles with ketchup.” This is the third iteration of a joke that Nora Ephron used twice before, once in Cookie, with Peter Falk’s mob boss complaining about his inability to get good eggplant in prison, and again in My Blue Heaven, with Steve Martin’s witness protection fish out of water bemoaning the lack of arugula in his California supermarket. Here the cri de coeur returns to its originator, the gourmand Henry Hill. The camera pans up and Liotta gives a little “what are you looking at” glare, but then smiles faintly. “I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”
Cut to Pesci, in a costume he hasn’t worn in any other scene in the movie. Shiny gray jacket, white black-dotted tie, black shirt, well-blocked fedora. (In a truck hijacking scene earlier in the movie, his hat was floppier, his jacket blue.) He lowers a hand in which he holds a gun, and shoots at the camera six times as the music fades in.
This nightmare vision is a nod to The Great Train Robbery, a short Western made in 1904. There’s nothing inordinately modern or postmodern about most of it: criminals take out a telegraph office, rob a train, make a getaway, are chased. But the last shot! Gilbert Adair breaks it down in his 1995 book Flickers: “Most amazingly, it concludes with a point-of-view shot worthy of Hitchcock (who actually reemployed it in Spellbound) and of Sam Peckinpah (who would employ it yet again in one of the very best and most complex Westerns of recent years, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia)—a shot in which an outlaw draws a bead on the camera itself and fires point-blank at the spectator.[...] That, truly, is a first for The Great Train Robbery. For it was the first filmic narrative to establish what was to be the enduring link between the cinema (not only the Hollywood cinema) and the gun.”
This link, Adair eventually concludes, is “the blessing—as also the curse—of the American cinema.”
“MY WAY”
Henry turns around and walks back in the door. The song on the soundtrack is “My Way,” but not the Sinatra version. It’s a cover done in electric-guitar-drenched punk-rock style by a group still named the Sex Pistols, but missing its once-central figure, snarling front man Johnny Rotten, nee John Lydon. The singer is instead the group’s ostensible bass player, Sid Vicious. (Lydon had left the band in early 1978, at the end of a calamitous US tour; the remaining members hobbled on for some months after.) Sinatra sings, “Regrets, I’ve had a few,” in a pensive, reflective style; Vicious contemptuously drawls the words out, exaggerating his prole British accent. One may not immediately put this together as the depraved, Dorian Gray mirror image of the Tony Bennett and big band number with which the film opened, but there it is. Some on-screen texts wrap up the loose ends. The first: “Henry Hill is still in the witness protection program. In 1987 he was arrested in Seattle, Washington, for narcotics conspiracy and he received five years probation. Since 1987 he has been clean.” (Several arguable inaccuracies here. According to Gregg Hill his father gave up witness protection in 1984.) The second: “In 1989, Henry and Karen Hill separated after twenty-five years of marriage.” The third: “Paul Cicero died in 1988 in Fort Worth federal prison of respiratory illness. He was seventy-three.” The fourth: “Jimmy Conway is currently serving a twenty-years-to-life sentence for murder in a New York State prison. He will not be eligible for parole until 2004 when he will be seventy-eight years old.” Then begin the end credits proper, starting with “Director of Photography MICHAEL BALLHAUS, ASC.”
Five
ALL THE SONGS
“For me, it’s very, very serious,” Scorsese said in a 2019 interview with the New York Times. “Probably the most enjoyable part of making movies is to select these songs.”
As well-versed as Scorsese is in conventional film music—that is, the composed score, most frequently orchestral, that accompanies and heightens the on-screen action—the practice in his own films for which he is most cited is to score with songs, mostly pop and rock songs.
He’s acknowledged that his primary influence in this respect is the Kenneth Anger underground movie Scorpio Rising. Anger’s early-’60s-shot picture is an impressionistic, homoerotic, not infrequently threatening portrait of motorcycle gangs the filmmaker hung out with in Brooklyn. Over lovingly lingering shots of, say, a biker’s dresser drawer and its various photos and emblems and totemic objects, montages of drunken revels, and interpolated clips from old silent pictures, Anger laid rock ’n’ roll songs. Most pointedly, he intercut clips from the by-this-time cheesy Cecil B. DeMille silent film King of Kings with shots of his bikers; in a particularly faux-sacrilegious segment, he accompanied views of H. B. Warner’s Jesus leading his apostles with the Crystals’ song “He’s a Rebel.” (“See the way he walks down the street/watch the way he shuffles his feet” and more of the lyrics have a markedly sarcastic if not deeply ironic resonance.) Later, as one of the biker parties turns explicit
ly S&M-ish, and one of the bikers is pantsed, the lugubrious Kris Jensen song “Torture” plays.
In Scorsese’s 1967 short The Big Shave, a violent metaphor for not just the Vietnam War but what would become a near-compulsive theme for Scorsese’s subsequent work, that of the man who cannot stop hurting himself, the accompaniment to the nameless protagonist’s endless unintended self-laceration by safety razor is the 1937 recording of Bunny Berigan performing “I Can’t Get Started.”
Scorsese exercised the Anger influence more expansively in 1973’s Mean Streets, Goodfellas’ most explicit and significant precursor in the director’s filmography. The story of four male friends in Little Italy in the early ’70s, much of the action takes place in a bar owned by one of the group. It’s a place where the jukebox is always on. The Rolling Stones’ “Tell Me” plays as one of the bar’s go-go dancers, Diane, puts Harvey Keitel’s Charlie in a semitrance. “She is real good-looking,” he muses in voice-over. (In this film the voice-over conveys this character’s thoughts in the present moment, unlike Goodfellas’ recollected storytelling. Sometimes Scorsese himself dubs in the character’s inner voice.) “But she’s black. I don’t need to tell you that.” The movie’s Scorsese surrogate, Charlie is something of a coward. It’s worth laying out his situation again here: he can’t stand up to his uncle about the girlfriend he already has, Theresa. She has epilepsy, which Charlie’s low-level gangster relative takes to mean she’s “not right in the head,” and Charlie keeps the relationship on the down-low to tamp down his kin’s disapprobation. As for Diane, Charlie will make a date with her later on in the picture, and stand her up. In the meantime, he’s got baby loan shark Michael all over him about the debts owed by De Niro’s largely crazed Johnny Boy.
As the jukebox music continues—Derek and the Dominoes’ “I Looked Away”—Charlie deals with this and that, and soon Johnny Boy himself makes an entrance, flanked by two young women; he entertains them by clownishly trying to check his pants at the bar’s coat check. “Thanks a lot, Lord, for opening my eyes,” says Scorsese as Charlie in voice-over, and then the Stones’ 1967 hit single “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” begins. As Johnny Boy strolls down the bar in slow motion, the music goes outside the diegesis. The volume goes up, and it’s no longer a jukebox song, it’s a soundtrack song. It leaps outside of its function as bar music and serves as a processional theme for Johnny Boy, whose arrogance—he’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash, he’s a gas gas gas—makes him a ruler of this environment, at least in this moment, at least in his own mind. But the movie doesn’t disagree, hence the song’s new place in the sound mix. Once Johnny Boy lands, with his strange new girls, at the end of the bar where Charlie stands, the music comes down in the mix again.