Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990): Everyman Screen on the Green, 10am
This 35mm presentation is part of the Martin Scorsese season at Everyman Screen on the Green cinema and can also be seen on September 23rd. Details here.
Observer review:
The gangster movie began in the silent era with DW Griffith’s primitive The Musketeers of Pig Alley
(1912), but it was the talkies and their vibrant soundtracks of
chattering machine guns, screeching tyres, hardboiled dialogue and
thudding fists on yielding flesh that ushered in the first great cycle
of gangster flicks. The enforcement of the Hays Office Production Code
in 1934 tamed this first wave, but the gradual relaxation of censorship
in the 1960s led to a grand revival of the genre focusing on the
celebration of crime waves in the past (Bonnie and Clyde) and the criminal underworld of the present (The Godfather). From the beginning of his film career, Martin Scorsese has been at home with crime both period and contemporary, starting with Boxcar Bertha (1972), a true story of outlaws in the depression, and Mean Streets (1973), which
drew on his personal knowledge of Italian-Americans embarking on a life
of crime in New York’s Little Italy. I predicted in my 1990 review that
GoodFellas
“will take its place among the great gangster pictures”, a judgment
confirmed by a special two-disc Blu-ray version published to mark its
25th anniversary. Neither glamorising nor moralising, the film is
closely based on Nicholas Pileggi’s chilling biography of career
criminal Henry Hill (a compelling performance by Ray Liotta). In 1980,
to save his neck, Hill gave evidence that convicted several dozen
mafiosi and then went into hiding under the federal witness protection
programme. A peculiarly brutal pre-credit sequence of a 1970 underworld
murder strips the euphemistic shroud off the phrase “taken for a ride”.
It’s followed by Hill’s unrepentant declaration: “As far back as I can
remember I always wanted to be a gangster.” The picture observes his
progress over some 25 years in a New York mafia family that has taken
him under its wing, and twice he goes to jail without betraying his
lethal comrades Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, but finally, after getting
involved with drugs and sniffing too much of his own merchandise, he
cracks. The film is accompanied by a series of excellent documentaries in
which his collaborators explain how Scorsese made crucial decisions
about freeze-frames, long takes, voiceovers, the evocative use of
popular music and so on to create the film’s elaborate texture. GoodFellas is a great auteur’s masterpiece.
Philip French
Here (and above) is the 2017 BFI trailer for the film.
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