by Glenn Kenny
“Crazy Joe” was Joseph “Joey” Gallo, a mob hit man who (with future boss Carmine Persico) assassinated family head Albert Anastasia in the barbershop of the Sheraton Hotel in 1957, a couple of weeks before Joseph Barbara’s abortive conference. Gallo and Persico’s acts were never proven in a court of law, but Persico himself privately bragged of them in subsequent years. Gallo’s nickname derived from his brazenness, which only increased over the years. In 1972, having been suspected by some of arranging a hit on Joseph Colombo at a rally for Colombo’s Italian American Civil Rights Association (a group formed to, among other things, combat cinematic depictions of Mafia mobsters) the year before, Gallo was shot to death at Little Italy’s Umberto’s Clam House. This event is chronicled in Scorsese’s 2019 The Irishman, in which the assassination is carried out by that film’s narrator, the considerably less flamboyant (than Gallo or Henry Hill for that matter) killer Frank Sheeran. By bringing the criminal organizations further into the light, Hill’s narration implies, Apalachin and Gallo helped destroy what was sometimes referred to as “our thing,” that is, “Cosa Nostra.”
Handing out sandwiches at a makeshift casino, Henry is thrilled by the grown-ups drinking and throwing around large wads of cash. “It was when I met the world. It was when I first met Jimmy Conway.” Robert De Niro, made up to look in his late twenties perhaps, walks in. The first sentence you clearly hear from him is “The Irishman is here to take all you guineas’ money.”
When Christopher Serrone played young Henry he was a thirteen-year-old child model—one of the agency Wilhelmina’s “Wee Willies”—when the casting director Ellen Lewis (who had worked in the storied Juliet Taylor’s office and was casting a movie solo for the first time) called Serrone’s agent, while Serrone was in that agent’s office.
“Apparently they’d been looking to cast young Henry for months and were getting nowhere. As she explains on the phone what they’re looking for my agent says, ‘I think I’m looking at him.’” Serrone did not get more specifics about the movie beyond its crime themes. “I was thinking about movies with tough kids in them and the only thing I could go off of was The Outsiders,” he said. “My exposure to film at the time was limited. I ripped the sleeves off of one of my T-shirts, slicked my hair back, picked up some sides [script portions] for a cold read. I go in the room, I do the little spiel. And I get the ‘Thank you!’ Which I took for, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ I thought I had bombed. But then my beeper’s going off—I thought I was in trouble!” Serrone had heard that thousands had been turned down for the part, so he felt especially fortunate.
“The casting people gave me Wiseguy to read, said that would be a great resource. I also went back to my dad’s old ’hood, went to Corona. I used to go to Gotti’s Fourth of July party as a kid. And not to sound cliché but I was always a people watcher. And now I watched any gangster films my parents let me watch. My father, who was a working guy who liked movies, he wanted me to be aware of the magnitude of what was going on, who I would be working with. De Niro was the focus. We watched—without my mom’s knowledge—Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, The Untouchables, Once Upon a Time in America.”
Although Serrone would have no scenes with Joe Pesci—young Henry only interacts with young Tommy, who was played by Joseph D’Onofrio—they spent time on the set together, where Pesci invariably referred to him as “the kid.”
“That’s why when Paulie introduces me to Jimmy, he says, ‘I want you to meet the kid, Henry.’”
Serrone recalls spending almost three months on the film; as almost all commercial pictures are, Goodfellas was shot out of sequence, and scenes were dictated by the availability and condition of locations. He remembers his first day of shooting as “devastating” for reasons having nothing to do with the movie. “My pet parakeet died! There it was, dead at the bottom of the cage. My mom and dad had contemplated not telling me, but my dad said, ‘Well, he should know. It’s his pet.’” The first scenes he shot were the first shots of Henry we see in the movie, the character looking wistfully at the cabstand and pizza parlor where Tuddy and company congregate.
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The final minutes of the sequence after Jimmy meets “the kid” show Jimmy tutoring Henry and Tommy in selling bootlegged cigarettes from the trunk of a car, later the back of a truck. A typically fleet set of shots shows Jimmy tucking a bribe into a Pall Mall carton going to a couple of cops, one of whom responds to a how’s-it-going query with “Jimmy, I’d complain but who’d listen.” We break away briefly from Henry’s POV to see how Jimmy—“What he loved to do was steal,” Henry says—managed a truck hijacking. The comedian Margaret Smith shows up as a post office worker getting some cigs. Then on the rise at New York’s comedy clubs, she was one of many up-and-coming performers who leaped at a shot at appearing in a Scorsese picture.
After a couple of plainclothesmen take Henry in while he’s selling smokes, Henry looks pretty rattled in front of the judge. He doesn’t notice his lawyer’s broad wink to “His Honor” or even register his nonsentence. He’s bummed at getting caught. But heartened when he leaves the courtroom and sees Paulie, Tuddy, Jimmy, and a bunch of other wiseguys there to celebrate him. Paul Sorvino smiles for the first and very nearly last time in the movie, and delivers his only truly exuberant line reading as he opens his arms: “Oh ho, you broke your cherry!”
To this day Serrone, who lives in Denver with his wife and their child, has warm feelings about the crew he ran with as a thirteen-year-old. Scorsese encouraged him to improvise and try new things just as he did with the adult members of the cast. “He’s the first guy to say: ‘make it your own.’ If the way it’s worded in the script would never come out of your mouth, don’t do it.” The taxi lot explosion scene was an enjoyable bit of mischief and movie illusion. “What kid wouldn’t want to do that, you know?” But the crew ensured Serrone’s safety. “Everything about the explosion was very carefully calculated, and of course they cheated the camera to the nth degree. I was about ninety feet from the actual blast,” he says. “But you’ll notice when the movie goes to freeze-frame and the top part of my body is leaning forward? Then, at that moment, I could feel the heat from the explosion.”
At the end of young Henry’s education, he tells Jimmy, his new father figure, that he was afraid the older guy would be mad at him for getting pinched. No, Jimmy says, “I’m proud of you.” Henry is happy but confused. Jimmy fills him in.
“You took your first pinch like a man, and you learned the two greatest things in life.”
“What?”
“Look at me. Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.”
Subsequently we’ll see Tommy telling an elaborate story of getting beaten by cops and refusing to talk: “Are you still here? I thought I told you to go fuck your mother.” But eventually Henry talks. Partially on account of how he’s afraid he’ll be killed. By Jimmy, or by Paulie.
But here we are still in Eden. The frame freezes on the exuberant men surrounding an exuberant boy, and a panoramic doo-wop version of the standard “Stardust” plays on the soundtrack.
IDLEWILD
The attraction/repulsion dynamic of the movie’s perspective is at work all the time. The opening scene of Hill and company stabbing and shooting an already gravely wounded man to death should raise an eyebrow at least. But the look on Hill’s face and the irony of the “wanted to be a gangster” line in contrast with it suggests extenuating circumstances for the character who is to serve as the audience’s surrogate.
That said, the viewer gets asked to look the other way pretty frequently, despite how much Henry/Liotta’s ingratiating narration lures them into an “a way of life, like any other” tolerance. Put it this way: the corrupt good times are very good times, provided you’re in with the corrupt, where the movie puts you.
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After the freeze-frame of mobsters celebrating young Henry, the movie
cuts to a view of a passenger jet descending to its landing place. That place, a title says, is Idlewild Airport, in 1963, before the assassination of John F. Kennedy precipitated its rechristening as Kennedy Airport. The airport, tucked into a corner separating the New York boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, was constructed in the 1940s to relieve congestion at LaGuardia Airport, then called LaGuardia Field, located in Queens proper.
The adult Henry, and the adult Tommy, are hanging out in the parking lot of the Airline Diner. The camera tilts up from Henry’s tasseled brown loafers up his not-too-shiny sharkskin trousers and jacket, black sport shirt with white pinstripes, wide collar worn outside the jacket, two buttons unbuttoned showing the neck of a T-shirt later tastelessly dubbed a “wifebeater” in some colloquial usage, up to Henry’s head; he’s dragging on a cigarette. (While Scorsese is known for being a stickler about geographical accuracy in his New York–set films in particular, for period authenticity and logistical reasons, Goodfellas “cheats” a lot; the Airline Diner, still extant albeit converted to a Jackson Hole burger joint, is in the vicinity of LaGuardia, not Kennedy.)
“By the time I grew up there was thirty billion a year in cargo moving through Idlewild Airport, and believe me, we tried to steal every bit of it,” Henry says. The airport was practically in East New York’s backyard, so it “belonged to Paulie,” Henry says. “We had friends and relatives who worked all over the place and they would tip us off about what was coming in and what was moving out.” Henry and Tommy aren’t just standing in the parking lot looking cool for no reason. A truck pulls in the lot, they exchange nods with the driver. “It was beautiful,” Henry says of the arrangement. “Whenever we needed money, we’d rob the airport. To us it was better than Citibank.” Henry and Tommy pay off the driver, hop in the truck, and drive away.
This is all very roguish and charming up to a point. But the spell may be broken when the driver rushes into the diner in fake indignation. “Did you see that? Two n——rs just stole my truck. Do you believe that?” A whole minihistory of New York City race relations is laid out in those sentences. Institutionalized racism against blacks was capable of doing sufficient damage without this sort of scapegoating, which fed, and feeds, into an endless blacks-as-criminals narrative.
In Goodfellas, the main characters spout off all kinds of bigoted language, against blacks, homosexuals, women, and so on. Italian Americans may have, in the early part of the twentieth century, seen themselves as up one or two mere rungs above blacks on the social hierarchy ladder (never considering, of course, that blacks had been literal slaves); for many individuals, that provided a pretext for kicking or punching down as hard as they were able, if not institutionally, then personally.
Scorsese’s films have treated the situation frankly over the years. In Mean Streets, the protagonist, Charlie, a guy who’s not as slick as he’d like to be but is often more glib than he ought to be, is attracted to one of the go-go dancers at his friend Tony’s bar. “She is real good-looking,” he notes in his interior monologue. “But she’s black. Well, you can see that, right?” Forbidden fruit, to be sure. When he finally gets the nerve to ask her out—on a bullshit pretext, telling her he, too, might be opening a club and he’d like to maybe hire her—he stands her up.
The 1976 Taxi Driver is most often cited as being especially provocative. Travis Bickle, its protagonist, who makes a pretty short journey from neurotic to psychotic in the course of the movie, is not Italian American. But the idea of him as such tends to stick on account of his being portrayed by Robert De Niro. (If one is keeping score, not that one should, De Niro’s lineage is not predominantly Italian; his mother, Virginia Admiral, was of Irish descent, while his father, the artist Robert De Niro, Sr., was of Irish and Italian ancestry.) The movie’s “racial politics in particular remain problematic,” Geoffrey Macnab wrote in the British newspaper the Guardian in 2006. While, exasperatingly, hardly anyone today seems to believe that depiction does not equal endorsement, just what the movie’s “racial politics” are is not a question to be answered without some deliberation. Yes, Paul Schrader’s early draft of the screenplay had all of the victims of Bickle’s rampages as persons of color. The screenplay was rewritten to change that, but not to drain all the racial hostility out of Bickle.
Bickle’s racism is depicted in what prose writers might call the “close third person.” The character is seen getting particularly uptight in the presence of black men; he stares down a presumed pimp in the Belmore Cafeteria who he thinks is looking at him. He seems genuinely perturbed when his fellow cabbie, Charlie T., a black man to whom he’s just paid five bucks he had borrowed off of him, makes a gunshot gesture. His bigotry is mostly communicated in silent exchanges, glares. The only piece of racist language he uses is “spook.” As in his voice-over pronouncement, “I go all over. I take people to the Bronx, Brooklyn. I take ’em to Harlem, I don’t care. Don’t make no difference to me. It does to some. Some won’t even take spooks. Don’t make no difference to me.” This could be an excerpt from his journal. But like a lot of other white racists, he feels compelled to explain, even if only to himself, that he’s not motivated by bigotry even though he is. (Beyond that, he tries to befriend—let’s say—a woman of color, played by Diahnne Abbot, De Niro’s real-life wife between 1976 and 1988, who works at the candy stand at the porn theater he visits early in the movie.)
In the scene in which Bickle shops for weapons, the ever-more-manic black market salesman Easy Andy (played by Stephen Prince, the future subject of the Scorsese documentary American Boy), raves to Travis: “I could sell those guns to some jungle bunny in Harlem. For 500 bucks. But I just deal high quality goods to the right people.”
But the most provocative racial epithet in the book is spoken only once in the movie, by the director, in the role of a lunatic fare who’s in a jealous rage concerning his wife, and aims to end it with a .44 Magnum, a gun model Bickle himself later purchases. (Scorsese was filling in for the actor George Memmoli, the “that guy is a mook” fellow in Mean Streets, who could not make it to the set on account of a back injury. De Niro encouraged Scorsese to take the role, which he plays with the staccato verbal rhythms of an insult comic while wearing a stiff suit. It’s still an incredibly disturbing scene. As is the scene in which Bickle shoots a black would-be bodega robber, and the bodega’s enraged owner, played by Puerto Rican actor Victor Argo, takes a club to the felled man.)
But there’s nothing in Taxi Driver that programmatically encourages racism or bigotry. These characters of Scorsese’s are deeply disturbed, and while their racial attitudes are symptoms of that, the movie doesn’t ask that they be excused on those grounds. What’s “problematic” with Scorsese’s portrayals, one supposes, is that there’s never a character who comes along and gives anyone a talking-to about how racism is bad. While Bickle gets uptight around people of color, the movie doesn’t come close to making a statement that the viewer ought to be, too. (To give one contrasting example, the 1973 cop picture Badge 373 comes off as pretty heavily invested in the idea that Puerto Ricans are generally bad news.) Neither, though, does it condescend to present a pleasant black character to counter Bickle’s discomfort, although Charlie T. seems pretty chill. (In the follow-up to Taxi Driver, the musical New York, New York, De Niro’s character, Jimmy Doyle, is a jazz saxophonist eager to play with African American musicians in Harlem. One of whom is played by Clarence Clemons, Bruce Springsteen’s longtime sax player—here mimicking a trumpeter.)
In 1980’s Raging Bull the Italian American characters routinely refer to blacks as “moulies” or “moulignans,” meaning “eggplants.” Boxer Jake LaMotta’s grudge against his black opponent Sugar Ray Robinson is multifaceted and certainly contains a strong racist element. Which does not prevent Jake from calling Joe Louis, the heavyweight he can never fight, “the best there is.” He’s a very confused person.
Scorsese shows a noteworthy awareness to changing mores pertaining to wha
t contemporary audiences will accept in his 2019 movie The Irishman, without making a big deal out of it. In that film, protagonist Frank Sheeran is called upon by his mob bosses to take out Joey Gallo after the shooting of Joseph Costello. Sheeran’s boss, Russell Buffalino, discusses the matter with Sheeran. The characters are played by Pesci and De Niro. They discuss Gallo’s associations with African Americans and never once drop a racial epithet, referring only to “blacks.” One might not believe that an authentic conversation between these characters would go like that. By the same token, there’s no real sacrifice of verisimilitude in the scene, and the attitudes are clearly the same, regardless of the words.
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The brisk depiction of Henry and Tommy’s repellent practice in thievery is not given much time to sink in. The shock of hearing the truck driver’s word is like a slap to the face that, depending on where you sit—depending on who you are—fades fast. From Henry’s perspective, these are the good times, and they’re rolling, and you’re invited along for the ride.
MEET THE GANG
The exterior of the Bamboo Lounge, the short-lived hangout for Henry and his crew (replaced, but not seen for long in the film, by The Suite, Hill’s own club, which figures more prominently in Wiseguy than it does in this movie), was a dressed front, covering up the facade of what was then an Italian restaurant on Brooklyn’s Coney Island Boulevard. (The website Movie-Locations says it’s now a Nissan dealership.) Most of the interior shots were made at Hawaii Kai, a theme restaurant (guess the theme) that was inside Broadway’s Winter Garden theater, a longtime home to the shows Cats (which was playing there at the time of shooting), Mamma Mia, School of Rock, and so on.
