by Glenn Kenny
Like almost all narrative movies, Goodfellas was shot out of sequence, and Douglas had a harder time with her very first scene in the film, the celebration of the Lufthansa heist, which is discussed later. But the party scene made up for her earlier confidence-shaking experience, and clinched several things for Douglas. “We just all bonded in the scene. Melissa Prophet, who plays Angie in the scene, soon left acting to form a management firm, and ended up becoming my manager. Lorraine came and took me under her wing. The part got me an agent.”
In subsequent years, Douglas would act in Scorsese’s Cape Fear; getting her cheek bitten off by De Niro is a particularly brutal sexual assault scene. Her relationship with Scorsese continued into the ’90s. When she collaborated with the director Allison Anders on the ambitious 1996 Grace of My Heart, about a female songwriter of the Brill Building ilk in the ’60s, Scorsese executive produced and Thelma Schoonmaker edited. In Douglas’ book she writes about how, despite the many fulfilling aspects of their relationship (watching her speak about movies on TCM, you can see one significant way in which they got along: they are both eloquent movie lovers with encyclopedic knowledge), she felt, as time went on, overshadowed by the director. “I loved Marty, of course, but my identity was becoming overshadowed under his, and part of me was becoming lost.” Nevertheless, when I interviewed her, she said she felt “blindsided” by the way the relationship ended.
“How so?” I asked her.
“He got married.”
She drops the line like the excellent comedic actress she is. Still.
Like several people I have spoken with who thrived in Scorsese’s orbit but are now out of it, she is slightly rueful and a bit resigned. Her current interactions with Scorsese are minimal but cordial. She herself married—“mistakenly,” she says—shortly after the breakup.
One nasty story Douglas did not tell in her book was about how the former CBS head Les Moonves sabotaged a 1997 show she was working on, and allegedly sexually assaulted her; this came out in a New Yorker story by Ronan Farrow in 2018. She confided in Scorsese at the time of the incident (they were no longer romantically involved), and he provided her with what she considered good advice: the lawyer he steered her to was able to reach a decent financial settlement for her. Nevertheless, Moonves had “torpedoed” her career with his actions.
When the New Yorker story came out, Douglas was told by some parties that she should not expect corroboration from Scorsese. “His people that I knew—agents and Hollywood people—would say to me, ‘He’s not gonna come forward.’ And I was like, ‘You don’t know Marty.’ We had retained a respect for each other. And I remember when the whole thing happened, it was so traumatic, because things had just ended with Marty, and I was a little bit like a babe in the woods in LA, going out there on my own...like a babe in the woods, out of protective custody, so to speak, and boom, this happens. One thing Marty and I were always in sync on was the importance of the work, and that’s one reason he was incensed to hear about this. And then yes, he did corroborate. Without my asking. So that was important. It confirmed the thing about him that I already knew.”
AFTER A WHILE IT ALL GOT TO BE NORMAL
Karen returns from her Mafia Girl Party in a state of panic. Telling Henry of an account of a jailed husband and his wife’s depressed/alcoholic plight at home, she asks, “God forbid, what would happen if you had to go to prison?”
“Lemme tell you something,” Henry says, applying what he doesn’t yet know to be a delusional argument. “Nobody goes to jail unless they want to. Unless they make themselves get caught.”
Henry, and his fellow wiseguys, have things organized. Karen, sitting on the bed wearing cream-orange sleepwear, buys Henry’s schtick.
“You know who goes to jail? N——r stick-up men, that’s who. You know why they get caught? Because they fall asleep in the getaway car, Karen.”
This declaration is shocking in its crassness just on the face of it. It’s even more so when remembering the way that Henry and Tommy and whatever trucker they bribed would arrange their heists, paying off the trucker who would then say his rig was stolen by, say, “two n——rs.”
Gregg Hill, Henry’s real-life son, writes in a book he coauthored with his sister, Gina: “I was never afraid of my father’s friends. If anyone ever scared me, it was my father—not because I thought he’d do anything to intentionally hurt me, but that his belligerence would get us into some kind of trouble. Like we’d be driving to visit Stacks Edwards in Harlem on a summer day with the windows rolled down. Stacks was a big black man who hung out at The Suite, a really nice guy whom I liked a lot. But on the way, my father would start talking loudly about ‘these fuckin’ n——rs.’ I’d say, ‘Dad, shut up.’ He’d just laugh. ‘Are you fucking out of your mind?’ he’d say. ‘These fucking n——rs aren’t going to touch us.’ Then if some black guys looked over, he would slow down and stare back at them. ‘Daaaad! Just go,’ I’d say. It was weird because, for all his many flaws, my father wasn’t a racist. He was just crazy.”
Gregg is not depicted in the movie because of certain stipulations made by the production. The movie went forward while Hill and family were presumed to be still under witness protection program safeguarding. The names, ages, and genders of the Hill children had to be changed. In the movie Karen and Henry have two daughters who don’t age entirely realistically; in real life, Gregg Hill and Gina Hill were thirteen and eleven, respectively, when Hill entered witness protection.
* * *
After his racist digression, Henry further assuages Karen with lovemaking. Sex scenes are rare in Scorsese films, and he telegraphs this one with two horizontal pans down the couple’s bodies as Henry seduces his bride. “After a while it got to be all normal,” Karen says. “None of it seemed like crime. It was more like Henry was enterprising and that he and the guys were making a few bucks hustling, while the other guys were sitting on their asses waiting for handouts. Our husbands weren’t brain surgeons. They were blue-collar guys. The only way they could make extra money, real extra money, was to go out and cut a few corners.”
As if to illustrate this, the film cuts away from the lovemaking to show a particularly rough truck hijacking committed by Henry, Tommy, Jimmy (who, as we recall from Henry, likes stealing pretty much more than anything), and Frankie Carbone. As Henry puts the truck in gear, Tommy points his shotgun out the window and up in the air and blasts, whooping. Cutting corners, of course.
The contrast is there so viewers won’t buy Karen’s rationalizations. What the wiseguys do certainly doesn’t look like any kind of work. Still, many prosecutors and crime novel writers will tell you that in terms of risk versus reward, not to mention expenditure of effort, the life of a full-time thief is such that often one might as well just get a gig in the straight world. Scorsese told Mary Pat Kelly, “I’ve tried to point out in my movies that they work more hours a day than if they had a nine-to-five job.” Everyone makes their own excuses and rationalizations for whatever morally aberrant actions they’re “compelled” to carry out for the sake of a living. And these arguments conveniently ignore moral agency, which so much of the other dialogue in the movie at least hints at, as in Henry’s assertion that Jimmy “loved” to steal.
Karen lays out the ways she was magnanimous to the cops who’d occasionally show up with a search warrant. “You boys want some coffee?” she asks of two detectives she shows into her house. She says in voice-over that most of them were just looking for their own bribes, a “handout.” Their own cut corners. As the detectives look around, perfunctorily, Karen and her new daughter sit on the lounger before the TV. The Jazz Singer, widely touted as the first sound picture, is on the box.
The use of the clip from this 1928 musical melodrama, starring the biggest pop singer of the early twentieth century, Al Jolson, is a touch obscure. Yes, Jolson is singing “Toot Toot Tootsie,” which contains the lyric “Watch for the mail/I’ll nev
er fail/if you don’t get a letter then you know I’m in jail,” and yes, Henry will be just that—in jail—in not too very long. But ascribing significance to that is a bit of a stretch even so. It could just be there because Singer was a staple of local television movie programming in New York in the ’60s, something Scorsese remembers being on in that period. Whatever the reason, Scorsese cuts twice to ever-closer screen-filling shots of the television, Jolson’s manic eyes looking a little panicked as he whistles through an instrumental break. The reverse shot dollies in on Karen, looking hypnotized by the performance. (A different clip from The Jazz Singer, in which Jolson’s character explains his hopped-up music to his mother, is seen in Scorsese’s 2004 The Aviator, and shown to more direct narrative effect, as the introduction of sound movies compels its protagonist, Howard Hughes, to reshoot his film Hell’s Angels.)
“We always did everything together,” Karen says over one live-action children’s birthday party and a series of vacation-with-Jimmy-the-Gent still photos, as Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” plays on the soundtrack.
The living is very easy: Henry’s suits receive a panning shot through the closet, as do Karen’s dresses, and in front of the closet, Henry stands, pulling rubber-banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills from the waistband of his pants.
As he goes to leave, Karen tells him, from the kitchen, that she’d like to do some shopping today. Henry asks, “How much do you need,” and she gestures with her fingers the height of the wad she requires. (This detail comes from the book.) “How much?” he asks again, approaching her, and she answers, “That much.” There’s a playful flatness in the delivery that suggests this is a game they regularly play, as they kiss and he hands her half of one of the banded group of bills, and she goes to her knees. “Oh, all right,” he says, handing her the rest of the cash and no longer in such a rush.
Frisky newlyweds still hot for each other; you love to see it. With this kind of money and these kinds of good looks, the pornography of everyday life is not a fantasy. A more expansive/expensive iteration of this theme is seen in Scorsese’s 2014 The Wolf of Wall Street, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie as the even more monied and movie-star attractive couple.
A SERIOUS PROBLEM WITH BILLY BATTS
“June 11, 1970/Queens, New York” reads the on-screen title over the establishing shot—which holds just long enough to show that the diner-like structure we’ll occupy on this night is called “The Suite Lounge.” The movie doesn’t delve into it, but this is the bar Henry Hill bought and was advised by Paul Vario to keep “clean.” And he did make an effort. This incident could be seen to undercut that to an extent.
The bouncy, infectious song is “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” a Phil Spector–produced girl-group classic from 1962. There are balloons on the walls of the bar inside and the men at the bar are middle-aged. It’s a wiseguy celebration and the music fits. To a superficial extent at least. Its use here subtly underlines the implied self-delusion of “And Then He Kissed Me” in the Copa scene, its innocent exhilaration being just a mask over the corruption enabling Henry’s ability to sweep Karen off her feet.
“Hey, Batts,” exclaims a guy in a leisure suit and turtleneck as he approaches the bar.
Batts, a guy with stiff hair, a raspy voice, and a dark mustache, orders more booze, saying, “Give those Irish hoodlums a drink down there,” indicating the far side of the bar where two men stand.
“There’s only one Irishman here,” Jimmy Burke, drinking with Henry, says.
“It’s a celebration, fellas. Salud.”
* * *
Joe Pesci wasn’t the only actor in The Death Collector who impressed Robert De Niro. Frank Vincent is also in that picture, in the role of Bernie Feldshuh, a deadbeat “businessman” whose refusal to pay a debt results in heavy consequences for him but heavier ones for the obstreperous “collector” played by Joseph Cortese. Much is made of Bernie’s Jewishness in the dialogue, but Vincent, his ostentatious large hair (sometimes referred to as, if you’ll excuse the term, a “Jewfro”) notwithstanding, mainly plays him as Extreme Jersey, expectorating lots of couldn’t-give-a-fuck “ay”s.
Born Frank Vincent Galluso, Jr., in 1938, Vincent played trumpet, piano, and drums; in a latter-day interview he claimed to have drummed on sessions with pop great Del Shannon, Vegas staples Paul Anka and Trini Lopez, and jazz bandleader Don Costa. He cited argumentative jazz drummer Buddy Rich and soul/R&B innovator Bernard Purdie as influences. Did he actually play on Shannon’s classic “Runaway” as he claims? The song was originally cut in New York in January 1961; Vincent was twenty-three at the time. The credited drummer was a “Joe Marshall.” Shannon recut the song in 1967 and released it again as a single; if Vincent recorded with Shannon, this seems the more plausible session.
Prior to landing their roles in Collector, he and Pesci were in the trio Vincent, Pesci, and Capri. After Capri bailed, they cropped their publicity shot and billed themselves as Vincent and Pesci. Under this handle they recorded a novelty Christmas single about a kid who wants Santa to make him stop stuttering, with Pesci doing a tape-speed-enhanced Porky Pig impression. (One thinks, unavoidably, of Tommy’s epithet “ya stuttering prick ya” in the Bamboo Lounge scene.) They also cut an instrumental side, “Little People Blues.” There’s 1990 footage on YouTube of Pesci, with saxist “Muzzy” and singer Arlene Carol, performing “This Can’t Be Love” with Vincent laying a steady carpet on drums behind them, in an unnamed nightclub.
* * *
Their characters in Scorsese films consistently antagonize each other, to say the least. (In The Death Collector they have no scenes together.) The scenes hit home for the actors personally. In their nightclub days, scraping to survive, as close as they were, there were disagreements, feelings of rivalry, genuine enmity. “It is the supreme irony of Mr. Vincent’s life that he owes his film career to Mr. Pesci but that it is the tension between them that makes their performances work. The two can conjure up a feeling of bad blood that is palpable,” wrote Edward Lewine in a 1996 profile of Vincent for the New York Times. “‘It’s a friendship,’ said Mr. Pesci. ‘And when you know someone that well you know where all the buttons are. It’s easy for him to drive me crazy.’” In Raging Bull Vincent plays Salvy, a mobbed-up friend of Jake LaMotta’s firecracker brother, Joey. Their banter is typically mookish. “Hey, Salvy,” Joey says as they part ways on the block. “What?” Salvy says. Joey silently mouths, “GO FUCK YOURSELF.” When relations sour for real, Joey attacks the much larger Salvy, crushing the upper half of his body repeatedly with a car door. Later, compelled by mob boss Tommy (the great Nick Colasanto) to make up, Joey hugs Salvy just a little too ardently, hurting Salvy’s broken arm. In this Goodfellas scene, Pesci’s Tommy pistol-whips, beats, kicks, and eventually stabs Vincent’s Batts. Vincent got a bit of payback in 2004’s Casino, in which his character, Frank Marino, brutalizes Pesci’s freewheeling sadist Nicky with an aluminum baseball bat before burying his bloodied body alive.
After going the tough-guy-player-journeyman route through the ’80s and ’90s, Vincent settled into a primo gig on The Sopranos for a few years in the early ’00s. Unlike Pesci, Vincent seemed to enjoy fame as a screen actor. While not as ubiquitous as the actress Sylvia Miles, whose omnipresence in New York’s showbiz social whirl earned her the reputation as someone who would show up for the opening of an envelope, Vincent became a genial, approachable figure at various and sundry premieres and semiexclusive after-parties, always happy to say hello and/or tell you about the line of cigars he was putting his name on. (He was regularly featured in Cigar Aficionado magazine.) With Stephen Priggé, in 2007, he penned a jocular advice book called A Guy’s Guide to Being a Man’s Man. Vincent died in September 2017 after suffering a heart attack; he was eighty.
* * *
“Good to be home,” his Billy Batts says during the glass-raising. That feeling won’t last. Vincent’s big line here, aft
er some squirrely back-and-forth and a feint at smoothing things over, is “Now go home and get your fucking shine box.” In many accounts of the shooting of the film, the actors and crew have said that the words spoken by the actors in this film were almost never their lines as scripted. This is not entirely true, and indeed, you can’t make a narrative film such as this one using that method; the scene’s beginning, middle, and end, its ability to be properly “cut into” the larger work, depends on the actors following the specific scripted action, which is often spurred by dialogue. As is the case here, when Batts’ harping on Tommy’s childhood career in shoeshining—“busting [his] balls”—culminates in Tommy’s murderous rage.
What Scorsese does, in this scene and with almost all his actors, is give them their way with the dialogue. In Pileggi and Scorsese’s script, Batts’ line is “Now get the hell home and get your shine box.” A good line, yes. But Vincent polished it with a certain authentic street vehemence. “Get the hell home” expends more syllables than it needs to say to Tommy: get out. “Go home” is even more direct. And of course “fucking shine box”: Vincent makes the four syllables ring like pistol shots. The rhythm there, missing from the scripted line, is crucial, and lands just in the right place for Pesci to scream back, “MOTHERFUCKING MUTT!!!”
The volley of words is matched in cutting and camera movement; Scorsese never does a static shot-reverse-shot pattern when he can be dollying in on a character before they land a verbal death blow. When Batts beckons, “Come on, you feel strong,” to Tommy, the viewer feels the camera responding to the goading. “Keep him here,” Tommy yells. Batts pays that no mind, and he should have. Jimmy, after mildly scolding Batts—“Nah nah nah nah nah, you insulted him a little bit” is a comedic high point of his work as Jimmy—is the one that keeps him there. (In actual life, Batts insulted Tommy at Robert’s Lounge, and Tommy took his revenge several weeks after, coming upon Batts drinking in The Suite.)
