#13 Goodfellas

FILMS FOR THOUGHT

By: Alex Holzum

    The theme of organized crime continues!  Goodfellas is a story told through the perspective of Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta).  Henry starts out as your ordinary teenage boy growing up in an urban area.  From his family's front window he can see a pizza shop across the street that is owned by a bunch of Italian guys who he knows are in the gangster business; Henry knows that he wants to break into that business from a very early age.

    Henry is eventually able to break into that business and is assigned to perform various "little" tasks for the main guys.  He is essentially a messenger boy in the beginning.  In the first part of the movie we see how Henry goes through the transition of living an ordinary life with his family to becoming a full-on gangster.

                                                 

    The movie jumps forward about ten or fifteen years to when Henry is higher up in the gangster world.  We get to see him in action: making deals, beating people up, stealing things, etc.  The movie goes through a few big schemes that the gang puts together in order to rake in a lot of money.  Eventually Henry meets his wife and we get to see the social life of the gangsters.

    This movie is similar to The Godfather because both have to do with organized crime but they are very different because Goodfellas is much more lighthearted and goes into more detail of how everything works within this business/lifestyle.  Also, Goodfellas sticks with one group of people from beginning to end, so we get to see how their actions affected them later in life.  In Henry Hill's case, he ended up going from living the gangster dream life with lots of money and power to hiding away in witness protection.  These organized crime movies are fascinating to me because it is like being at the zoo: you get to look into the life of a being that is very different from yourself yet the similarities are still there.