by Glenn Kenny
As the Ronettes’ classic “And Then He Kissed Me” plays on the soundtrack, the three-minute shot begins with a close-up of Henry’s hand, giving his car keys to a valet. Film buffs will remember the epic crane shot in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, which begins from the top of a staircase and swoops down to a close-up of Ingrid Bergman’s hand, clutching a key she is not supposed to have. This beginning is an homage in reverse, so to speak. As Henry leads Karen away from the line at the front entrance of the club, he says, “I like going in this way. It’s better than waiting in line.”
* * *
Scorsese’s conception of the shot was not quite as elaborate as the vision that ended up in the film. He had seen a straight line—across the street, down into the rear entrance corridor, straight into the club where the table would be rushed out to almost the lip of the stage and put in front of the couple. Kristi Zea recalls that cinematographer Michael Ballhaus was captivated by the dim lighting of the hallway’s contrast with the harsh bright fluorescents of the kitchen, and felt he could make something of it. Scorsese himself, via his office, says that this opinion wasn’t presented to him in his recollection, and that the reasons for the shot’s expansion were multiple. In any case, Barbara De Fina’s observation holds here: “Michael was one of those cinematographers who was always engaged, always excited, always ready to try new things. He was very good at keeping Marty engaged, too. He had this way of convincing a director that yes, the shot had been gotten, or that the shot was gettable, even when the director was skeptical. And he always had fresh ideas.”
So they would go through the kitchen. Which created two challenges: what Henry and Karen would do in the kitchen, and how to camouflage the fact that they had no real reason to go through the kitchen at all—the ballroom was at their right at the end of the corridor, the kitchen entrance to the left. They’d be coming out of it the same way they came in.
Steadicam operator Larry McConkey mapped out the specifics with the help of first assistant director Joseph Reidy and with Ray Liotta. One of only a handful of skilled Steadicam operators in the US at the time, he had, and has, a philosophy of how a good Steadicam shot should work. “When you’re doing a take that’s this long in duration, you have to make edits within the shot to keep it interesting. If you just have a shot following Henry and Karen and nothing’s happening, it’s not very dynamic. So you pick points where a little bit of business occurs and the action has to be just so. For instance, we begin on a close-up of Henry’s hand giving the ‘valet’ a tip, and then the camera recedes, and lets Henry and Karen get some distance away as they cross the street. Once that action is completed, you want to get the camera closer to them, so you contrive a reason to make them stop. In this case, it’s a doorman at the back door, who Henry stops to give a tip to. This came out of talking to Ray, and of his understanding of what Henry would do in this situation.
“Whenever I needed a ‘cut,’ we would engineer something new to look at. We decided to have a couple making out, and Henry sassing them a little. There were so many extras around that Joe was just able to grab a couple. When you’re constructing shots on this level, that’s when it feels most like directing. When we come into the kitchen, there was a tight turn where the cooks were; I had one of the cooks look at Henry. We gave him a line, but I think for the last take Joe told him not to say it, because the extra would have had to have gotten a pay raise and we didn’t want to have the shot go over budget.”
As for the potential leaving-through-the-same-way-as-they-came-in problem, McConkey wasn’t too worried. “One of the basic things about film is that it’s a two-dimensional medium. The camera moves, but the screen does not. The difference in turning 360 degrees in the actual world, and the effect of watching a 360 movement shot on film, is therefore considerable. The flattening of the 2D image means that you will reach a full 360 degrees in a shot well before the audience’s eye expects it. So in the restaurant kitchen, the audience would not think the camera had actually panned a full 360. It will only look like a 180, or less, under most circumstances.” Nevertheless, the production design team was tasked to enhance the illusion that the couple was going from point A to point B rather than from A back to A.
“It was quite a feat,” says production designer Zea. “We had to assemble a wall, place it in front of the opening of the ballroom, and then as Ray and Karen were going through the kitchen we had to move the wall out of the way.” It’s most likely the curtained wall had rollers at its bottom, which you don’t see in the shot. To add to the illusion, prop placers put stacks of empty plastic crates against the wall that was bare when the actors first entered the kitchen.
“I rehearsed every little bit once I knew what mattered and what didn’t,” McConkey says. “Prerehearsed everyone in front of the lens; I dealt with every single person on matters of just how fast to move, just how high to hold the tray.” The crew did a test shot with a Video 8 assist.
“We showed Marty the take and I was a little nervous. He was liking it fine and then at a certain point he said, ‘No, no, no.’” It was the movement of the waiter who brings Henry and Karen their table. Scorsese remembered seeing how this was done from when he went to the Copa as a teenager, and he wanted it reproduced exactly. He said to McConkey, “You have to understand when the table comes, it should fly into the lens and you should fly after it.” They rehearsed the adjustment and were ready. McConkey remembers Scorsese’s agitation. “He had asthma, and there was smoke in the air on the set, and I was a little scared for him because he was feeling it.”
Once the shot was finished, though, there was enough time in the day to do more setups. And as memorable as the Copa shot is, McConkey is even fonder of the Bamboo Lounge introduction. “That’s an even better shot for me. It’s more precise and complicated in terms of timing. It’s a real Steadicam shot. Marty would read what would end up being voice-over as we walked through it. It was all about the rhythm. Whatever visual ideas I had, I don’t know if he ever disagreed.”
* * *
Once seated, the dazzled Karen asks Henry, “What do you do?” and without batting an eye he responds, “I’m in construction.” Almost as quickly Karen, no dummy, observes that Henry doesn’t have the hands of a construction worker. And Henry has a fast comeback there, too. “I’m a union delegate.”
* * *
In Hollywood crime films in which cops infiltrate the mob, the undercover cop wife is almost invariably a whiny worrywart, a thankless role even when entrusted to the most talented actor (see Anne Heche in Donnie Brasco for a paradigmatic version). In Goodfellas, the wiseguy wife has more fun, at least for a while. She still lives under the thumb of three distinct patriarchies: that of society itself, that of her husband, and that of the organization. As we’ll see, the organization will come down on her side, for pragmatism’s sake, when one of Henry’s affairs gets a little too semipublicly messy. The portions of the movie that give themselves over to Karen’s perspective depict her making the best of each discrete alienating situation she finds herself in.
Karen has several opportunities to walk away but she chooses to follow her particular bliss, so to speak. As we’ll see, she found Henry’s renegade side a turn-on. In real life, after going into witness protection, the thrill was gone. (Aside from getting a verbal reprimand from a prosecutor in the final twenty minutes, Karen doesn’t figure heavily in the film’s post-arrest aftermath.) In addition to having to live like “schnooks,” Henry’s alcoholism accelerated, as did his abuse of Karen. The movie plays down Henry’s physical abuse of Karen (although its extent during his years as a wiseguy is not as well-documented as it is in the witness protection period). He slaps her around after she has trained a loaded revolver at him while straddling him, and he shakes her violently after learning she’s dumped all the cocaine he had in the house after his bust—his idea was that it was insurance, to be sold to secure his bail.
* * *
In Scorses
e’s early features Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) and Mean Streets (1973), we have Italian American male protagonists of differing religious convictions who are both confounded by women. In Knocking, Harvey Keitel’s J.R. can’t handle the revelation that his “nice” girlfriend played by Zina Bethune (her character is sufficiently archetypal that she’s not even given a name) is a rape victim. But he has trouble even before he finds out; he cuts off a makeout session with the woman for no real reason, possibly due to a fear of impotence. J.R. ultimately attempts a reconciliation in which he verbally brutalizes her, and that is the end of that, but not before J.R. imagines them reunited in a room with a crucifix above the bed and the sound of church bells ringing. In Mean Streets, Charlie, also played by Keitel, is dating Amy Robinson’s Theresa, a cousin of his lunatic hellion pal Johnny Boy (De Niro). Charlie tries to keep the relationship under wraps, but he’s in Little Italy, everybody knows everybody, and his mobster uncle disapproves of her because she’s got epilepsy and is therefore wrong in the head. All this gets mixed in with his roiling Catholic guilt and confusion, his attraction to the black go-go dancer Diane (Jeannie Bell), and more. A shooting leaves their lives and fates in awful suspension at the end.
The protagonist of 1976’s Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle, has no religion. And, despite his addiction to pornographic movies, he has seemingly little in the way of a sex drive. In 1980’s Raging Bull Jake LaMotta is a devout, or at least churchgoing, Catholic, driven into insanity by sexual jealousy once he marries his erotic ideal, Vicky.
Henry Hill is not an obsessive; sex, like everything else in his world, is there for the taking, and when he’s not taking it he’s got other business to look after. In this respect the prior Scorsese character he most resembles (although the resemblance can’t be said to be inordinately pronounced) is Jimmy Doyle, the musician played by De Niro in 1977’s New York, New York. At first avid in his pursuit of Liza Minnelli’s Francine (he did just get out of the army; the movie opens at the end of World War II), he loses a good deal of interest upon their marriage. He cheats without compunction, and the further the singer Francine drifts from Jimmy’s own realm of creativity, the worse things get. At a certain point Henry is fine with being a “family man,” and until confronted by Paulie and Jimmy about it, barely considers how his extracurricular activities have any impact on that. He gives up his girlfriend—who one suspects he only cultivated because it was the thing that wiseguys do—but picks up another, one who can help with his drug business. Pursuit of the opposite sex is never even near the top of his mind, one infers.
AIR FRANCE MADE ME
Henny Youngman’s Copa schtick continues on the soundtrack after a hard cut to Henry and Tommy purposefully striding across shiny wet tarmac toward a storage warehouse at Idlewild. (“Dr. Welser was here. Wonderful doctor. Gave a guy six months to live, couldn’t pay his bill, so he gave him another six months.”)
The robbery goes very smoothly. In and out, brisk, no winks to Frenchy. Professional. (In Wiseguy Hill relates a very picaresque episode about getting the back room key, which was under the jurisdiction of one of Frenchy’s coworkers, copied: Frenchy and Hill set the key keeper up with a call girl of their acquaintance, and while she kept him occupied, Hill absconded with his key ring and had almost every key on it copied at a hardware store. He repeats the tale in The Lufthansa Heist, a post-Goodfellas book he authored with Daniel Simone.)
“We walked out with four hundred and twenty thousand dollars without using a gun,” Liotta/Henry says with pride in the voice-over. “And we did the right thing. We gave Paulie his tribute.” Just so we understand what it means to “do the right thing” in this world.
The fellows are seen counting out $60,000 for Cicero, a seventh of their total. “It’s gonna be a good summer,” Jimmy says. Paulie advises Henry to tell those curious about his new cash flow that he won big in Vegas.
The next few bits show Henry’s naivete, and his power. Taking Karen out to what’s presumably a country club where her family is known, he attempts to settle a check with cash, and Karen tells him he has to “sign” for it, which briefly flummoxes him. Here we meet Bruce, in tennis whites. This immediately smarmy across-the-street neighbor arouses suspicion in Henry right away. Actor Mark Jacobs resourcefully imbues the young man with the entitled softness of a guy who knows he’s so protected within his class that he’ll never need to defend himself. He doesn’t walk away from their table so much as he oozes.
Another night at the Copa features Bobby Vinton, Jr., playing his ’50s heartthrob ballad-singer father (still alive when the film was made; alas, digital de-aging technology was not available at the time), singing “Roses Are Red,” and Karen’s recollection, “One night Bobby Vinton sent us champagne. There was nothing like it.” Henry “was an exciting guy.”
The introduction of Morris, who’s mostly referred to as “Morrie” (really, only his wife calls him by his proper name), is another bit of clever narrative cross-hatching from Scorsese and Pileggi. Morris, the wig man and degenerate gambler who will put together the Lufthansa heist, is first seen in one of the cheesy TV commercials he runs on local channels late at night, and on the set in his store nonstop. “Don’t buy wigs that come off at the wrong time!” he announces ebulliently. He is then shown jumping into a swimming pool with one of his stay-put toupees on. Scorsese wanted a piece of film as goofy as the real thing, and one night he came upon an ad for a window replacement company that had the feel he was looking for. First assistant director Joseph Reidy and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus worked with the man, the actual head of the window company, on putting it together. And of course Chuck Low, as Morrie, added his own accents. Initially it’s kind of amusing that the spot was shot two weeks prior to principal photography of Goodfellas itself. But, of course, it would have to be ready to roll for this scene.
As Jimmy glares at the set in the front of the shop, Henry tries to reason with Morrie about a debt. The voluble Morrie, who likes to show off his vocabulary, refers to Jimmy as an “unconscionable ball-breaker.” He further complains that he “didn’t agree to three points above the vig,” that is, three percent more interest on the money he owes Jimmy. Soon Jimmy is so fed up he comes back, wraps a phone cord around Morrie’s neck (knocking the man’s own wig back, showing the double-sided tape on his forehead that held it in place), and bellows, “He’s got money for the fucking commercial!”
The specifics of this interaction are all based on not unamusing fact. The real-life Morris, Marty Krugman, did own a wig store called For Men Only and did have a commercial that ran on late-night local TV. Jimmy Burke suspected that Marty “was booking out of his store and paying nothing in tribute or protection,” according to Pileggi. “The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Jimmy was a part-time insomniac, and when he couldn’t sleep he turned on the television. Whenever he saw Marty’s wig commercial at four in the morning he felt duped. ‘That fuck has the money to go on television,’ he complained to Henry. ‘But no money for anybody else?’ Eventually, Jimmy had Tommy DeSimone and Danny Rizzo work over one of Marty’s employees as a warning, but instead of giving in, Marty threatened to call the DEA.” According to Hill, “Jimmy never trusted Marty after that.”
Henry laughs at Jimmy’s anger but his amusement is short-lived. Morrie’s phone rings; it’s Karen, calling from a booth. Bruce, that across-the-street neighbor, has tried to sexually assault her. (The moment is so charged that one never thinks to ask how it is that Karen knows the location where Henry is doing a shakedown; it’s like she’s calling him at the office or something.) Henry rushes to her rescue and deposits her at her house, where she lives with her parents. Across the street, Bruce and his buddies are working on a car.
Henry sits in the car and considers his move. He tucks a revolver into the front waistband of his pants.
His action is seen in an unbroken handheld camera shot, brief (forty seconds) but dense and shudder-worthy and s
hamefully rousing all at once. He crosses the street, his face drained of color, a white kabuki mask of cold rage. Still smarmy, but now defiant, Bruce says, as two of his friends look on, “What do you want, fucko, you want something?”
Here the staging of the action uses an old trick from the theater. As Henry bangs the butt of his revolver into Bruce’s forehead, seemingly very hard, Jacobs raises his left hand to his forehead, and releases some fake blood onto his forehead and around his nose. It’s a very effective trick, even if latter-day know-something-ish film “buffs” characterize it as a “gaffe.” Henry continues hammering until he gets his point across, sputtering about how “if you ever touch her again so help me God,” and when he gets up from the crouch he’s in now that Bruce is on the ground, he just randomly points the revolver at one of Bruce’s friends, who puts his hands up and begs, “Don’t shoot.” You are a better person than most if you don’t feel, at least a little bit, that Bruce had it coming; here, more than anywhere else in the picture, Goodfellas is wishing you to cheer Henry on.
Breathless, Henry walks back to Karen’s house; there’s a close-up of his bloody hand placing the gun in Karen’s hand: “Here, hide this.”
And so Karen’s heart is definitively won: “I know there are women like my best friends who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I gotta admit the truth: it turned me on.”
THE WEDDING AND MARRIED LIFE
Henry and Karen’s wedding and subsequent reception are the only sequences in which almost the entire ensemble appears. It was practically overwhelming for Kevin Corrigan, the then twenty-year-old actor who played the adult incarnation of Henry’s wheelchair-bound younger brother Michael. Corrigan, whose agent had done some back-and-forth with Ellen Lewis, first met Scorsese in the Brill Building. He did not know what part he was auditioning for. “I had a scene prepared, Ellen gave me the pages, it was Henry and Paulie, when he gets out of prison. Later I read that Paul Sorvino improvised the slap in the scene, it wasn’t in the pages I had. I rehearsed the scene with my father.
