Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  Scorsese’s follow-up to Goodfellas, another collaboration with De Niro, Cape Fear, materialized quickly. It was released in November of 1991, barely a year after Goodfellas. Funnily enough, the sprawling remake of a semiclassic thriller directed in 1962 by J. Lee Thompson (and featuring several members of its original cast, including Gregory Peck, Martin Balsam, and Robert Mitchum in supporting roles) did make people angry, at least some media people.

  Terrence Rafferty, then the film critic of the New Yorker, called the picture “a disgrace,” while the political commentator George F. Will appeared on an ABC News program to condemn the movie’s violence, which he considered a symptom of Hollywood depravity. Will, seething with fresh-off-the-Mayflower WASP-patrician indignation, pronounced the director’s name “Scor-seeze.”

  Speaking to Schickel, Scorsese said, “Sometimes I try to make a picture for purely entertainment reasons, like Cape Fear.” One imagines the emphasis here was on “try.” The movie had originated out of Steven Spielberg’s production company, Amblin, and as credited screenwriter Wesley Strick said, “I wrote it as an Amblin thriller,” that is, “big-budget and conventional.” De Niro was eager to throw himself into the role of vengeful convict Max Cady, but Spielberg was obliged to defer the project—he was too busy—so De Niro wrangled Scorsese in. As with Raging Bull and The King of Comedy, it wasn’t a project the director was too keen on. He found his way into it by introducing a lot of dysfunction into the family menaced by Cady (played by Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, and Juliette Lewis; Nolte had worked with Scorsese on 1988’s Life Lessons). The galvanic violence, including a scene in which Cady not only rapes Lori Davis, a professional colleague of Nolte’s character and also his side love interest, but bites a chunk out of her cheek and spits it out (that’s the bit that really bugged George Will), was more typical of Scorsese—and De Niro—than of Spielberg or Amblin. (In her memoir, Illeana Douglas writes, “A lot of folks thought the [rape] scene was gratuitously violent. I can only say, sadly, that it was based on actual events Bob had researched. To make it truthful, I also spent time with a criminal attorney in Florida’s Broward County Courthouse doing my own research to prepare for the scene and its aftermath.”)

  For all that, the picture was a hit. Scorsese then presented a passion project, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, to Touchstone, where he retained a production deal; they passed on the period piece. The picture was made at Columbia. (Innocence is one of the movies that many contemporary Scorsese detractors pretend doesn’t exist when they try to point out that he only makes gangster pictures; but it exists, and it is a superb piece of work.)

  In 1994 Scorsese had a role in the Robert Redford–directed Quiz Show. The movie, derived from a real-life 1950s scandal about a rigged television game show, was Redford’s impassioned “media corrupts” statement. Scorsese’s role was as the show’s sponsor, who in one of the early scenes is seen balking at a contestant he doesn’t believe is telegenic enough. “I don’t think he works anymore,” the sponsor tells a producer over the phone, in Scorsese’s brisk, staccato delivery. When the producer says the contestant is a credible representative of New York, the character, deemed Martin Rittenhome in the picture’s IMDb entry but only called “Sponsor” in the end credits, says, “Queens is not New York.” (A sentiment that continues to resonate, sort of, when you think about it.) Like his nightclub owner character in Round Midnight, this man is ruthless; in a climactic confrontation with a lawyer trying to expose the corruption (played by Rob Morrow), Scorsese plays the character as the cat who swallowed the canary. He reels off how many bottles of twentieth-century snake oil Geritol he has been able to sell, then repeats, for emphasis, “Of Geritol.” He continues: “That’s the kind of businessman I am.” He concludes his conversation with “You’re a bright young kid with a bright future. Watch yourself out there.”

  Quiz Show was shot by Michael Ballhaus, and features Illeana Douglas in a bit part. That Scorsese appeared in it demonstrated, if anyone noticed, that he had no hard feelings about Redford winning those Oscars in the year after Raging Bull.

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  Casino (1995) reunited Scorsese with Nicholas Pileggi, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, a smattering of Goodfellas players, and more. (Barbara De Fina had been with him all along, no longer Scorsese’s wife, but a producer, and she receives the sole producer credit here; Alain Goldman was the executive producer and Joseph Reidy, in addition to being first AD, is also an associate producer here.) Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, the Chicago gambler who was able to oversee the business of several Las Vegas casinos in the late ’60s despite his ties to organized crime, was not quite the next Henry Hill. But Hollywood saw so much potential in Rosenthal’s story that Pileggi was compelled to work on the screenplay for Casino prior to finishing what would be the book of that name. Scorsese told Schickel: “That was kind of a commission. I had a deal at Universal. We did Cape Fear there and they wanted another film. Tom Pollock and Casey Silver were there. And Nick Pileggi brought this newspaper article to me about the car blowing up in Las Vegas with Lefty Rosenthal in it.”

  Rosenthal, whose name was changed to Sam “Ace” Rothstein for the movie—almost all the names of the real-life central characters were altered, and the Chicago mob became the Kansas City mob—was not a violent criminal himself, but he knew an awful lot of them. In the film the most troubling one is Pesci’s Nicky Santoro, who impulsively stabs a guy near to death with an unusually sturdy fountain pen, pops out another guy’s eye by increasing tension on a vise into which he’s placed the guy’s head, and so on. The ostensible story is how a golden opportunity for wiseguys is blown by their own greed and filthy habits. For the taciturn Rothstein (De Niro), another contributing factor is his blind love for the dazzling hustler Ginger (Sharon Stone), who proves an untrustworthy mate and an almost fatal distraction.

  But the movie’s other stresses, in their way, try to summon the kind of indignation that Scorsese told Schickel he was aiming for in Goodfellas. The affinities between legalized vice and the ordinary rapaciousness of American capitalism are laid out in galvanic detail in the film’s first fifty minutes or so, in which almost-documentary-style scenes of casino action (including a lot of money counting) are accompanied by Ace’s voice-over narration explaining How It All Works. People speak of Vegas as a gambling mecca, and Ace invokes both Lourdes and the “holiest of holies” in his descriptions, at one point concluding, “It’s all been arranged just for us to get your money.” Casino is not Scorsese’s most Godard-ian film just because it uses large swatches of Georges Delarue’s score for Godard’s 1963 Contempt on its soundtrack. It’s in the mode of analysis; while Scorsese’s style is far more dynamic, his aim, like Godard’s in many of his post-1968 pictures, is pedagogic. (See the “how the sausage is made” sequences in Godard’s 1972 Tout va bien for a pertinent example.) Sometimes the lesson is terrifying, as when Ace outlines how his casino dealt with would-be cheaters (the one who gets away with his hands intact is played by Reidy, in a spectacular character turn).

  Once the movie’s personal story lines start getting more attention, there’s a nagging sourness that’s different from the notes of exhilaration Goodfellas sometimes hits. With respect to Ginger and her endless compulsive treacheries, Ace is the dog who returns to his own vomit, not to put too fine a point on it. These are not glamorous people doing glamorous things, their expensive clothes notwithstanding. The looks of contempt Stone conjures for her character are almost literally withering. “I’m not a john, you understand?” Ace says to Ginger at one point. But of course he is. You can’t blame Stone’s character for taking the opportunity, for taking the mark for all she can get. But the movie offers up no rooting interest, and doesn’t want to.

  The scene in which Ace and Ginger scream at each other on the front lawn of their house, while their daughter, Amy, looks out silently from a bay window in a neighbor’s house, anticipates the stares of Peggy, the daughter of Fra
nk Sheeran in the 2019 The Irishman. All the personal upheaval, and the increasingly brutal violence, culminating in the live burial of the übersadist Nicky, are so shudder-worthy and engrossing that the viewer is apt to be less up in arms about the depredations of capitalism than they had been earlier, but in the movie’s coda Ace has an observation to set us all straight, as he laments the theme-park, family-friendly Vegas that was the city’s identity as of the mid-’90s: “Where did the money come from to rebuild the pyramids?” Ace asks over a shot of the Egypt-themed MGM Luxor. “Junk bonds.”

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  After the Goodfellas shoot, Ray Liotta sent De Niro a thank-you card, which was inscribed “With sincere thanks and appreciation.” Liotta’s handwritten note in the card reads, “Bob, Now I can tell you how much of a trip it was to work with you. You’re the Best. And I hope we can do it again. But I really mean Do it! Thanks for your help and support in getting me a shot at this.” Liotta and De Niro subsequently worked together in Cop Land, a 1997 police drama written and directed by James Mangold and featuring Scorsese alums including Harvey Keitel, Cathy Moriarty (Vicky in Raging Bull), and Frank Vincent, with wild card Sylvester Stallone in the lead.

  Surveying Scorsese’s career up to the turn of the century, Schickel said to Scorsese, “So even though you made Gangs of New York and it’s historical, I mean, this in a certain sense completes... You have the criminal element of, let’s say, Mean Streets as it’s perceived by quite a young guy. Then you move on to Goodfellas and then [Casino].” And Scorsese responds, “Definitely Casino is the final one.”

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  Like The Last Temptation of Christ, Gangs of New York had been a longtime dream project for Scorsese. In its way, Goodfellas had accomplished one of Scorsese’s ambitions: it made him “a player.” But even with that status, the sprawling period piece, based on a 1927 nonfiction account by Herbert Asbury and scripted by Scorsese with his old friend Jay Cocks, along with Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan, was difficult to make.

  The film industry is such that to get even the most modest picture made, someone involved has to strike a Faustian bargain. For Gangs Scorsese needed to make an alliance with monster mogul Harvey Weinstein. “That’s where I got off the bus,” we have seen Barbara De Fina recall.

  For years Weinstein announced himself as a booster of great directors, a real man of cinema. In practice this meant coopting filmmakers and then telling them that he knew best. To make a long story short (the creation of this film would make a very juicy book, were one able to worm all of its secrets out of the participants, which is unlikely at this juncture), that’s why Gangs is the often impressive but more than slightly compromised picture it is. (Scorsese’s vision did not include a romance subplot, for instance.) The movie was also the first time Scorsese worked with Leonardo DiCaprio, who was in his late twenties at the time. While “stuff the author heard personally at the time” suggests that the personality of the actor and that of the director did not mesh perfectly on this shoot, DiCaprio was sufficiently impressed with Scorsese that he wanted to work with the director again, and again, and again. And DiCaprio had, and still has, such movie star clout that he can get some very expensive and ambitious projects funded.

  It was in working with DiCaprio, arguably, that Scorsese catapulted from a player to a megaplayer. Scorsese did not become a mogul as his contemporary Steven Spielberg did, but he doesn’t have to go around with hat in hand like Brian De Palma, or found a profitable wine concern like Francis Ford Coppola. He oversees a production office with a high overhead and has not looked at a movie with the equivalent of a Mean Streets or After Hours budget in decades.

  Around the time Scorsese made the inventive and involving Howard Hughes chronicle The Aviator in 2004, one did not have to be an entirely cynical observer of his career to note that it was starting to resemble that of another maverick American filmmaker in his later years, that is, Nicholas Ray’s. The director, a man who had not been able to curb his epic tendency to self-destruction the way Scorsese managed, made some staggering personal films in the late ’40s and the 1950s, including They Live by Night, In a Lonely Place, The Lusty Men, and Bigger Than Life. Interspersed among these were genre pictures that he imbued with an idiosyncratic perspective, like the female-driven Western Johnny Guitar and the rawer-than-usual Youth Crisis melodrama Rebel Without a Cause. By the early ’60s, after a series of setbacks both personal and professional, he found himself allied with producer Samuel Bronston, making the large-scale epics King of Kings and 55 Days at Peking, pictures that, while not necessarily showing the director’s disconnect, were not so immediately aligned with what one inferred Ray’s interests were at the time. In interviews Scorsese often spoke of “finding” his way into the projects that DiCaprio brought to his table.

  One reason that 2006’s The Departed wasn’t considered by either Schickel or Scorsese to be part of the director’s personal gangster “cycle” is because the movie, a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong picture Infernal Affairs, was, almost up until the point that it got into preproduction, one Scorsese did not feel he was “right for.”

  It became the movie for which he wound up winning his only Best Director Academy Award, ironic because he almost always speaks of it as a movie that he felt disconnected from even as he was making it. Which is not to say he slacked off. The movie is one of his most formally daring, its editing style the most breakneck of any of his pictures, slicing and dicing sound and image to the point of abstraction. All this while retaining a homage to Howard Hawks’ Scarface by placing large X’s in the architecture or shadows in certain scenes. It is also the picture in which he definitively overplayed his “Gimme Shelter” hand.

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  As big as the pictures got, Scorsese evolved in ways that one might not expect from someone involved in endeavors of this scale. Bob Griffon, the property master on Goodfellas, has gone on to work with Scorsese on several other projects. “Over the years I’ve noticed him more willing to get input from crew members. On The Departed, at the end, the DiCaprio character, Costigan, gets this huge police funeral, full gun salute, all that. Which I, and a couple of other crew members, noticed made no sense given what was said in the script about his file and his whole identity having been wiped before his death. And I pointed this out to Marty, and he thought about it, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ And he concocted with a couple of actors in suits, and co-lead Matt Damon, the scene in which Damon’s treacherous character gives a statement in which he says, ‘I just wanna go on record. I’m recommending William Costigan for the medal of merit.’” The scene was shot in a van on the same day as the funeral scene, Griffon says.

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  2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, another DiCaprio-driven project that located the lifestyle excess and criminal-mindedness of Goodfellas in the ostensibly legal world of high finance, managed to irritate members of a whole new generation of film writers. In a piece in The Atlantic headlined “The Wolf of Wall Street Is a Douchebag’s Handbook,” Esther Zuckerman wrote, “Call me a prude, but I had a hard time seeing any indictment of Belfort’s lifestyle and boiler room culture in the movie.”

  She states later in the review, “I felt that the filmmakers weren’t put off enough. Scorsese and DiCaprio want to have their cake and eat it, too.” One can appreciate (without agreeing with) her perspective, especially with respect to DiCaprio, a movie star whose advocacy for environmental issues still has not erased from the media’s mind the fact that his post-teen Gang of Boys referred to itself as “the Pussy Posse.” His current penchant for dating women half his age, or maybe less, arouses much disapprobation in social media. The conclusion of Zuckerman’s notice, “I guess, at the tender age of twenty-three, I’m just an old fogey,” suggests a resistance to further investigation of the movie, which is Zuckerman’s prerogative, and anyone’s.

  The particular giddiness of the characters in the picture, and the movie’s whiplash style, make the o
ccasional instances of horror and tedium Scorsese injects—the Weegee-like photo of the dead body in a bathtub full of blood, the FBI agent’s dismal ride home on the F train—more difficult to register, maybe. But these shots/scenes are not not there.

  Oh, well. Back in 1992, Scorsese said to the critic David Ehrenstein, “My attitude as a film director has always been...provocation. I want to provoke the audience. Like in Goodfellas. What these people do is morally wrong, but the film doesn’t say that. These guys are really just working stiffs. They understand that if you cross a certain line it’s death. But that’s ‘business.’ And it is business. In that world it’s normal behavior.”

  * * *

  During this interim, the reputation of Goodfellas has both grown and been diminished along lines slightly suggested by Zuckerman’s review. As cultural discourse splinters into (sometimes valuable) arguments about who ought to tell which stories, and who certain movies are and are not “for,” reactionary pieces like Kyle Smith’s New York Post article of June 10, 2015, headlined “Women Are Not Capable of Understanding Goodfellas” become more probable. Which is unfortunate in and of itself. (Variations on this theme hark back to the past critical arguments about ’50s melodramas, “women’s pictures,” and “male weepies,” many of which considerations were in their way tinged by some form of sexist condescension.)

  After an anecdote in which a Smith paramour (now erstwhile, of course) dismisses Goodfellas as a “boy movie,” Smith avers that, well, of course it is. “Way down deep in the reptile brain, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), Jimmy the Gent (Robert De Niro) and Tommy (Joe Pesci) are exactly what guys want to be: lazy but powerful, deadly but funny, tough, unsentimental, and devoted above all to their brothers—a small group of guys who will always have your back” is Smith’s thesis. “Women sense that they are irrelevant to this fantasy, and it bothers them.”