GOODFELLAS
by Martin Scorsese
with Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, Frank Sivero, Tony Darrow, Mike Starr, Catherine Scorsese, Charles Scorsese
USA, 1990, 146’
Restored by Warner Bros. Entertainment
The film is in the original language version with Italian subtitles.
«“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster”. This is the dry, lucid and already famous opening lines of Henry Hill’s story of his life […]. Goodfellas is first and foremost a very interesting essay on mafia anthropology, which analyses the habits, behaviour, mentality and material life of a special ethnicity, the Italian-American criminality in Manhattan. […] It overtly borrows from Hollywood gangster films, and after all, the base structure is classic: the rise and fall, power and dust […] What Scorsese had in mind were, rather than classics such as Little Caesar or Scarface, the little “neo-Realist” gangster movies of the 1940s, such as Hathaway’s Kiss of Death. Or, not considering the genre, Rossellini’s The Taking of Power by Louis XIV […]. Scorsese edits the tempo of Goodfellas with clockwork precision and the freedom he loved in nouvelle vague filmmakers, in “the first two minutes of Jules et Jim”». (Alberto Farassino)
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“De Seta’s sense of rhythm, his use of the camera, his extraordinary ability to blend characters with the location, were a complete revelation to me. He was an anthropologist who expressed himself with the voice of a poet”. (Martin Scorsese)
