by Glenn Kenny
When Tommy returns and he and Jimmy get to beating Batts, the song playing on the jukebox is Donovan’s “Atlantis,” a nonwiseguy, hippie-dippie tune if there ever was one, all about a lost civilization and the poet, the physician, the magician, all taking off in a boat to bless the world we know. (Scorsese has said he homed in on the song’s twilight of the gods theme, hearing a consonance between it and the fall that these characters are semi-unwittingly setting themselves up for.) “Way down/below the ocean” goes the hard-rocking chorus/outro; in a Batts POV shot the shoes of Jimmy and Tommy are stomping.
Robert De Niro, while anecdotally known to have, or have had, a temper, does not identify as a tough guy. His father, Robert De Niro, Sr., was an artist, a well-known and well-respected one among his peers, if a somewhat publicly obscure one relative to those peers, who included Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. His mother, Virginia Admiral, was also a painter and a poet. He was raised in an atmosphere of aesthetic refinement, albeit of the New York bohemian variety.
Viewers both inside and outside of the business nevertheless look at this scene and ask, “Where did De Niro learn to kick like that?” In the GQ oral history, Pileggi says, “De Niro has mastered the art of kicking people. I suspect that happened growing up. He didn’t get that from the Actors Studio.” In the next bit, De Niro is quoted: “I don’t know if I can say that. Anyway. [laughs] Whatever.” And Peter Bucossi, a stuntman, sums up: “De Niro was kicking the hell out of me that night. I had pads on, but I recall being quite bruised a few days later. I mean, he tried to hit the pads, but in the midst of their fury they’re not worried about making sure.” In an interview, De Niro said to me, “You’re doing a film. It’s not, you know, not to be taken literally, though some people do.” It could be taken as a compliment, he continued, “they think you’re doing well and so, that’s okay, you know. But it’s just part of the job.”
There is more unforgettable imagery here. The demolished revolver, bullets askew, sliding across the floor like a sputtering hockey puck. The overhead shot of the men bringing a tablecloth they will make into a winding sheet to wrap Batts in. Speaking of sputtering, Tommy continues to, his anger still unsatisfied despite killing Batts: “Fuckin’ mutt did to my shoes.” He then looks over at Henry, with tears in his eyes, and bleats, “I didn’t wanna get blood on your floor.”
De Niro laughed a little when I brought up that line. “Everybody has their moments of politesse.”
Liotta’s reaction shot, and the later reaction shots when they’re at the dining room table with Tommy’s mother, are interesting. He’s put off by Tommy’s hysteria, and he can barely believe that Tommy and Jimmy can laugh and eat while the body of a guy they’ve brutally murdered is in the trunk of a car they’ve parked in the driveway. But these aren’t so much twinges of conscience as expressions of cognitive dissonance relative to certain social mores. This is not anything Henry would leave the life over. He will only leave it to save his own skin.
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Then the burial. “We’ll pick up a shovel at my mother’s house,” Tommy says. In Wiseguy, Hill recounts: “His mother was already up and made us come in for coffee. She wouldn’t let us leave. We have to have breakfast—with a body parked outside.”
A whole scene is extrapolated from these three sentences. “Look who’s here,” Catherine Scorsese, the director’s mother, as the character known only as “Tommy’s Mother” says almost the second Tommy enters the house.
Catherine Scorsese was involved with her son’s work from very early on. In Scorsese’s 1966 short, made at NYU, It’s Not Just You, Murray!, a pretty eccentric effort by almost any student film standard, she is Murray’s mother, who feeds him spaghetti through a prison gate. In his first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, she looks severe in the opening scene, baking prosciutto bread. She is the tenement neighbor in Mean Streets who drops her groceries when Charlie’s girlfriend, Theresa, goes into an epileptic seizure on the stairs.
For It’s Not Just You, Murray! Catherine not only had a small role, she was the de facto caterer. She told Mary Pat Kelly: “Now don’t forget. I started to work with him when he was in college. Especially when we made that movie in the swamp. When we made that, I had to get up at five o’clock in the morning and make spaghetti. [...] Charlie was in bed. And it was so cold and he said to me, ‘You know, Katie, you and your son are both crazy.’
“My name is Catherine, they call me Katie, I don’t know why,” Mrs. Scorsese says in Italianamerican, the documentary Scorsese made about his parents in 1974. By all available accounts beloved by all who met her, Catherine sparkles in Italianamerican just as she does in Goodfellas. Teasing her reticent husband, Charles, to sit closer to her on the sofa in its opening minutes, she says, “They say as you get older, your love grows stronger...he’s bashful.”
When talking of Scorsese’s mother, Barbara De Fina, at the time of the movie Catherine’s daughter-in-law, still refers to her as Katie, and invariably speaks of her with both respect and affection. “She was what you would now call a ‘Tiger Mom,’ in a way,” De Fina says. “Throughout my association with Marty people would ask me, ‘Oh, but how do you get along with Katie?’ but I never had any problem with her. I spent some time with her in the kitchen and picked up a lot of things. The person you see in Italianamerican and in Goodfellas, that really is who she was.”
Over the years, even as Scorsese brought his parents more and more into the filmmaker fold (Charles would make his on-screen debut in Raging Bull, as a confederate of mobster Tommy Como), he maintained a protective attitude. Larry McConkey first worked with Scorsese on the 1985 black comedy After Hours, filming the Steadicam shot of Paul Hackett’s office that runs under the end credits. He says that Scorsese’s parents were on set that day to witness the filming—because that was the only scene in the movie he felt comfortable having them watch.
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For this scene, Nick Pileggi provided a painting from his mother, and Scorsese explained to his mom what he needed. To Mary Pat Kelly, Catherine explained: “In my scene, Tommy brings his friends home and his mother cooks for them. I play his mother, so I said to Marty, ‘What am I going to make for them?’ And he said, ‘Make pasta and beans, just like you used to make for me—or scrambled eggs.’ If he’d come home late from a date or from being over at NYU, I’d get up and make him something to eat, and then I’d go back to sleep. And, you know, it was the middle of the night so I’d make him something like scrambled eggs or pasta and beans. He said, ‘If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for them.’”
From the looks of the scene, it’s pasta and beans, which Jimmy the sacrilegious Irishman, in his most unforgivable act in the movie, slathers with Heinz’s ketchup as Tommy tells his mom that he’s been “working nights.” The mordant comedy here is kind of irresistible, as Tommy concocts a cock-and-bull story about hitting a deer and needing one of the kitchen knives to remove its “hoof” from the car’s grille, or something. “It’s a sin,” Tommy says. It’s funny enough one doesn’t necessarily think to shudder, especially with De Niro pointing his cutlery at the dish and saying, “Delicious, delicious.”
The hilarity and the creepiness run about neck-and-neck, as Tommy’s mother picks up the thread from Henry’s wedding and asks why her son doesn’t settle down, and he ends his answer with, “I wanna be with you, Ma.”
Tommy’s mom tracks Henry’s alienation and asks why he’s so quiet.
“I’m just listening,” Henry responds. The Quiet Italian joke Tommy’s mother tells, with the punchline, “What do you want me to say? That my wife two-times me?” is another bit that emerged out of recorded improvisations; Mrs. Scorsese could just as well have told it in Italianamerican. Mrs. Scorsese and Pesci do some back-and-forth in Italian, and at the end Tommy delivers an indirect insult to Henry: “It means he’s content to be a jerk.”
Henry lets it slide. He’s got heavier things on his mi
nd. “Did Tommy ever tell you about my painting?” the mother asks, and then seems to pick up the canvas from the floor. (Such is the current cult of the movie that Pileggi’s mother’s work, an image of a man with white hair and beard sitting in a small boat with two dogs, is now both an internet meme and a T-shirt. The image, incidentally, is not original: Pileggi’s mother painted it from a photograph in the November 1978 issue of National Geographic magazine, illustrating a story about Ireland’s River Shannon.) Tommy’s befuddled account of its allegorical content—“I like this one. One dog goes one way, and the other dog goes the other way. And this guy’s saying, ‘Whaddya want from me?’”—is funny, and then Jimmy chimes in saying, “Looks like somebody we know.” The man in the painting doesn’t really look like Batts, but Tommy cracks up, anyway, and Henry gives a tight-lipped, tolerant smile. The camera pushes past a laughing Tommy to gaze at the back of the car, considering the faint sound of the still-alive Batts kicking at the inside of the trunk.
The burial of Batts is bathed in red, from the back lights of the car; the image could be from Mario Bava’s Hercules and the Haunted World, if that haunted world contained cars. In voice-over, Henry, for really the first time, weighs in on the downside of gangsterdom:
“Murder was the only way everybody stayed in line [...] shooting people was a normal thing. It was no big deal.” Unless you shot the wrong guy.
“We had a serious problem with Billy Batts. This was really a touchy thing.” Batts was, in Italian mob parlance, a made man. “Considered untouchable.”
This is where the movie first hints at it—that the rules, the supposed ethos or code of the wiseguys, weren’t worth the paper they were, well, never actually printed on. Billy Batts, the untouchable, got whacked. Ultimately, this aggression would not stand, as we will see. But the eventual avenging of Batts is of small value to Batts himself. Dead is dead.
FRIDAY NIGHT AT THE COPA
As grim as the culmination of the Batts business will prove to be, it won’t hit our gang for some time yet. After Henry’s account of what it means to be a made man, accompanied by a snapshot and slow-motion reprise of Batts’ homicide highlights, we see another airborne Copacabana table making a furious transit, in slow motion.
“Saturday night was for wives, but Friday night at the Copa was always for girlfriends.” Gina Mastrogiacomo plays Janice, Henry’s girlfriend. Janice is younger, looser, more vulgar than Karen—she’s a smoker but you get the impression that she’d just as soon be chewing gum—with a big bouffant hairdo. Mastrogiacomo is vivid and immediate in the role. The reason she does not turn up in retrospectives or oral histories of the movie is terribly sad: she died in 2001 of a bacterial heart infection.
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There’s something pro forma about Henry keeping a mistress. The movie depicts his sex life with Karen as more than merely satisfactory. As with several other aspects of the wiseguy lifestyle, Henry seems to be following his friends’ leads. Girlfriends are the done thing. Part of the social conformity/unofficial regimentation of mob life. Pileggi states as much in Wiseguy: “For most wiseguys, having a steady girl was not unusual. Almost all of [Hill’s] friends had them. You didn’t leave a wife or abandon a family for one, but you did swank them around, rent them apartments, lease them cars, and feed them regularly with racks of swag clothes and paper bags of stolen jewelry. Having a steady girl was considered a sign of success, like a thoroughbred or a powerboat but better: a girlfriend was the ultimate luxury purchase.”
* * *
Janice’s rhapsodizing over Sammy Davis, Jr.’s talent gets the other girlfriends in Henry’s party going, and soon Tommy’s hackles are mildly raised, which still represents pretty thin ice for others, by Tommy standards. “You could see how a white girl can fall for him,” Tommy’s date says. “Wha?” Tommy asks. The date alludes to Mae Britt, Davis’ Swedish wife, and Tommy says, “In other words you condone that stuff.”
“EASY!” Henry exclaims, cackling a little, cocktail straw in his mouth, the same impish look on his face that he had on when he semitaunted Tommy after the “How am I funny?” confrontation. “I just wanna make sure I don’t wind up kissing fucking Nat King Cole over here,” Tommy spits.
This makes zero sense. He is just, as many racists do, being racist for the sake of being racist. (In real life, Joe Pesci’s singing testifies to his reverence for black artists; on the Joey DeFrancesco “featuring Joe Doggs” album Falling in Love Again, Pesci’s timbre and idiosyncratic but thoughtful phrasing often bring to mind, believe it or not, Nina Simone. There are also hints of Little Jimmy Scott, to whom Pesci pays explicit homage on the more recent record Still Singing.)
A horizontal tracking shot sees Henry, Janice, Tommy and his date, and Frankie Carbone and his date gazing, rapt, at the Copa stage. We finally learn the one thing that can make Tommy shut the fuck up: Jerry Vale singing “Pretend You Don’t See Her.”
“Pretend you don’t love her,” Vale sings in a plaintive tenor, instructing his heart.
The segue, as the song plays out, is to a shot of Janice’s apartment building with Henry’s car parked outside it. Night turns to morning in a dissolve. The inauthenticity of the relationship notwithstanding, this is an odd, short submersion into a kind of lyricism, a pause from the frenetic and increasingly reckless and amoral action. While Henry has not asked for this moment of respite, it’s possible that the viewer could use it.
It’s a brief respite. Henry’s double life reveals itself as increasingly unmanageable. The Hills pay a visit to “Uncle Paulie.” Tuddy is there, as is the mysterious Vinnie, played by Charles Scorsese, Marty’s father. As befitted his reserved personality, the onetime garment district worker Charles Scorsese did not relish performing in his son’s films, and tended to feel more comfortable in roles that had a more or less contemporary setting, as this one did. “He did not like getting into costume for The Age of Innocence,” Barbara De Fina recalls. The whole gathering has an undercurrent of unease.
Paulie pulls Henry aside and asks him if he knows anything about Billy Batts, a made man who has vanished. Associates of Batts’ crime family have inquiring minds. “These people are driving everybody crazy,” Paulie says. Henry tells Paulie he knows nothing about it.
This is the first time Henry lies to Paulie, and it seems to come easily to him. There won’t be any immediate, direct consequences for this. When Tommy is ultimately dealt with, his accomplices in Batts’ death won’t figure at all. But Hill’s subsequent lies to Paulie will cost him.
Another horizontal track from behind the bar of a hangout that is not The Suite shows a more raucous evening. The loudest voice is Morrie’s; he’s relating an anecdote in which someone is repeating, “I want my money.” Henry and Janice are sharing a semitender moment when Jimmy calls to him. Wearing the most vivid plaid in which he’ll be seen, Jimmy pulls Henry over and tells him they’ve got to relocate Batts’ body—the ground in which he is laid is soon to be dug up for condo-building. In a cut they are back in the red-lit haunted world, shovels blazing. Henry can’t stand the stench, he’s about to puke, and Tommy and Jimmy bust his balls. “My mother’s gonna make some fresh peppers and sausage,” Tommy yells. “Hey, Henry, here’s an arm, here’s a leg!” says Jimmy. “You go for the hearts and lungs,” Tommy asks, and Henry finally loses whatever he last ate.
* * *
Say what you will about “those goody-goody people who worked shit jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day and worried about bills,” they generally don’t have to deal with stuff like this. Henry finds that he can’t hose the Batts-corpse stench out of his trunk; Karen is repelled but not curious.
And Henry rolls with it all. Nothing is catching up with him yet. He procures a new apartment for Janice (“all Maurice Vallencia,” she brags of her furniture, mispronouncing Maurice Villency, a popular Manhattan-based designer), brings Tommy and Jimmy on a little ass-kicking job when Janice’s bo
ss at a dress shop hassles her about showing up late, and even flirts with one of Janice’s friends, Sandy (Debi Mazar, the New York actor then known outside of work for her hip retro stylings and friendship with Madonna). Sandy digs how Henry’s keeping Janice: taking a whiff from a bottle on Janice’s perfume table, she says, “French,” and raises approving eyebrows.
First assistant director Joseph Reidy recalls the shooting of this scene as being a little tough on Liotta, as were the confrontation scenes between Henry and Karen. “Everybody was at a different rhythm; each character was playing it differently,” referring to the differences in emotional temperature between the killers Jimmy and Tommy and the less homicidally experienced Henry. “I felt that the most emotional scenes or the hardest scenes were the scenes between Henry and Karen in the house when they’re battling, those were hard for all concerned. People were unhappy, they brought a lot of anger into the room. And the scenes among the wiseguys, you know, they were still having some fun, you know, but always with an edge. Joe Pesci was always wound up, and he was both fun and difficult to be around. He didn’t want to mess with anybody, or be messed with. The scene where they’re burying Billy Batts, that may have been a little tough for Ray. But I think his toughest scenes were with Karen, and those moments when he was coke-addled toward the end there. That was rough stuff.”
THE KILLING OF SPIDER
The seductiveness of the gangster lifestyle is shown as dubious throughout Goodfellas, but for most viewers of moral sentience there’s a specific point at which the penny drops and you’re obliged to see these fun-loving criminals as the largely irredeemable thugs they are. For many it’s the especially senseless killing of Billy Batts. But even this murder will be let slide by ride-or-die romanticizers of criminality. After all, Batts was busting Tommy’s balls a little bit, as Jimmy notes before helping Tommy kick Billy’s skull in.
