Goodfellas-One Of The Great Gangster Movies
To “normal” people, well I would class myself as a “normal”person, the world of gangsters and their “normal” activities of random murders, organised crime, intimidation and so much more is not just hard to comprehend, it is almost impossible to comprehend. There have been many great gangster movies over the years, but one that would make my list of most popular movies of all time is the Martin Scorcese classic, Goodfellas.
Quite how the wide scale, organised crime continued unabated for so many years is incredible to perceive. Mind you, having said that the movie JFK and the soon to be released heavily imply that the Mafia were at the center of the assassination of John F Kennedy, so if they can be so involved at that level I suppose organising drugs, alcohol and tobacco rackets is a bit more believable. Some of the scenes of violence are quite gruesome and hard to understand that such violence is a part of every day life for the mobsters. And no doubt they all sleep well at night.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099685/
In a documentary entitled The Real Goodfella, which aired in the UK, Henry Hill claimed that Robert De Niro would phone him seven to eight times a day to discuss certain things about Jimmy’s character, such as how Jimmy would hold his cigarette, etc. Reflected in the window while Karen tries to find the stolen dresses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodfellas
Goodfellas (stylized as GoodFellas ) is a 1990 American crime film directed by Martin Scorsese. It is a film adaptation of the 1986 non-fiction book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scorsese.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1032176-goodfellas/
Opening this week. Who’s In Theaters This Weekend. What’s Hot on Rotten Tomatoes. Also available on. Hard-hitting and stylish, GoodFellas is a gangster classic — and arguably the high point of Martin Scorsese’s career.
This review is well worth checking out…..
Goodfellas review – Rodomista | Newman Film Criticism
http://newmanfilmcriticism.wordpress.com/
Goodfellas is perhaps the quintessential gangster movie of the 20th century. It tells the story of a man named Henry Hill, and his journey through the ranks of the Italian mafia. Henry’s story is centered around him and his two …
The Director Movie Club debates whether it is the best mob movie of all time. For me, it is still The Godfather. What about you?
Director Movie Club: “Goodfellas” – Screened
http://www.screened.com/
People say it’s the greatest mob picture of all time, and Martin Scorsese’s best film. Are they right?
We can’t not show a quick clip can we.…..
Goodfellas – Trailer – (1990) – HQ
Trailer for Martin Scorsese’s film starring Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, Frank Sivero, Tony Darrow, Mike Starr, Fran…
No doubt one of the best gangster movies of all time and a definite entry on my list of most popular movies of all time. Of course some of the great acting performances from some truly great actors meant that we would see these stars appear in a variety of other movies over the years. The main characters, Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci have been seen regularly in other blockbuster movies over the years. Great actors one and all.
Check Out Some Other Great Gangster Movies
Other Than Goodfellas Below
THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931) A taut, realistic time capsule of the Prohibition Era, showcasing James Cagney's powerhouse breakthrough as a streetwise tough guy who rises high in the bootleg racket. THE ROARING TWENTIES (1939) Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino star in this soulful study of a gangster whose hard-boiled persona finds itself at war with his compassionate side – a side that will ultimately be his downfall. LITTLE CAESAR (1930) Loosely based on Al Capone! Edward G. Robinson rocketed to stardom as a pugnacious hoodlum who murderously rises to the top ranks of the underworld. SMART MONEY (1931) In their only screen teaming, Little Caesar's Edward G. Robinson leads the way and The Public Enemy's James Cagney rides shotgun in this brisk tale of barbers who go from cutting hair to cutting in on the gambling racket.
Oscar®-winning icons, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Sean Penn and Academy Award® nominee Johnny Depp are at their best in this essential five-film anthology of the most notorious gangster classics of all time: Scarface, Carlito’s Way, Casino, American Gangster and Public Enemies. Violence, drugs, beautiful women and millions of dollars are at stake as visionary directors Michael Mann, Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma each bring their own masterful storytelling to life in these epic sagas of the American underworld.
The Public Enemy showcases James Cagney's powerful 1931 breakthrough performance as streetwise tough guy Tom Powers. When shooting began, Cagney had a secondary role but Zanuck soon spotted Cagney's screen dominance and gave him the star part. From that moment, an indelible genre classic and an enduring star career were both born.
As a psychotic thug devoted to his hard-boiled ma, James Cagney - older, scarier and just as elctrifying - gives a performance to match his work in The Public Enemy as White Heat's cold-blooded Cody Jarrett. Bracingly directed by Raoul Walsh, this fast-paced thriller tracing Jarrett's violent life in and out of jail is also a harrowing character study. Jarrett is a psychological time bomb ruled by impulse. It is among the most vivid screen performances of Cagney's career, and the excitement it generates will put you on top of the world!
In Angels with Dirty Faces, Cagney's Rocky Sullivan is a charismatic ghetto tough whose underworld rise makes him a hero to a gang of slum punks. The 1938 New York Film Critics Best Actor Award came Cagney's way, as well as one of the film's three Oscar nominations. Watch the chilling death-row finale and you'll know why.
"R-I-C-O, Little Caesar, that's who!" Edward G. Robinson bellowed into the phone. And Hollywood got the message: 37-year-old Robinson, not gifted with matinee-idol looks, was nonetheless a first-class star and moviegoers hailed the hard-hitting social consciousness dramas that became the Depression-era mainstay of Warner Bros.
Little Caesar is the tale of pugnacious Caesar Enrico Bandello, a hoodlum with a Chicago-sized chip on his shoulder, few attachments, fewer friends and no sense of underworld diplomacy. And Robinson - a genteel art collector who disdained guns (in the movie, his eyelids were taped to keep them from blinking when he fired a pistol) - was forever associated with the screen's archetypal gangster.
A rundown diner bakes in the Arizona heat. Inside, fugitive killer Duke Mantee sweats out a manhunt, holding disillusioned writer Alan Squier, young Gabby Maple and a handful of others hostage.
The Petrified Forest, Robert E. Sherwood's 1935 Broadway success about survival of the fittest, hit the screen a year later with Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart magnificently recreating their stage roles and Bette Davis ably reteaming with her Of Human Bondage co-star Howard. Sherwood first wanted Bogart for a smaller role. "I thought Sherwood was right," Bogart said. "I couldn't picture myself playing a gangster. So what happened? I made a hit as the gangster." So right was he that Howard refused to make the film without him...and helped launch Bogie's brilliant movie career.
In The Roaring Twenties, the speakeasy era never roared louder than in this gangland chronicle that packs a wallop under action master Raoul Walsh's direction. Against a backdrop of newsreel-like montages and narration, it follows the life of jobless war veteran Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney) who turns bootlegger, dealing in "bottles instead of battles." Battles await Eddie within and without his growing empire. Outside are territorial feuds and gangland bloodlettings. Inside is the treachery of his double-dealing associate (Humphrey Bogart). It would be 10 years before Cagney played another gangster (in White Heat), a time in which gangster movies themselves became rare. "He used to be a big shot," Panama Smith (Gladys George) says at the finale, marking Bartlett's demise...and signaling the end of Hollywood's focus on the gangster era.
Say "Warner Bros. in the '30s" and you're talking, first and foremost, about the tough, gritty, urban, street-smart movies that help define that American decade for us. Which means you're talking about James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart: unpretty but charismatic guys with lived-in faces, and bodies that always seemed cocked, ready to spring. When one of them entered a room, he owned it, no matter how many people were there already. Their most celebrated habitat was the gangster picture. The genre didn't originate with them, but they, more than anybody else, defined it, gave it a face and a silhouette and a heartbeat.
The films in this set were produced half a decade and more after Little Caesar and The Public Enemy made stars of Robinson and Cagney, respectively, and after repeal had begun to lend Prohibition the patina of nostalgia. The studio's gangster franchise was evolving, and so were the careers of its top stars. When it came to toughness, the boys could still dish it out, and take it, too. But increasingly they were doing it on the other side of the law-and-order divide.
Cagney was first to reform. In 1935's "G" Men he plays a lawyer put through college by the avuncular neighborhood crimelord. After a law-school pal turned F.B.I. agent is murdered, Cagney abandons his (resolutely legit) one-man practice and joins the Bureau. The film memorializes several big moments in F.B.I. legend, but what's grabbiest is the personal drama growing out of Cagney's lingering underworld friendships. William Keighley directs the murders and shootouts with jolting ferocity, Barton MacLane and Edward Pawley supply flavorful villainy, and there are times when Sol Polito's cinematography literally glows (all these films have been restored, but "G" Men looks especially terrific). One gripe: The movie should have been presented without the F.B.I.-classroom intro tacked on for 1949 reissue (which belongs under "Special Features").
In Each Dawn I Die (also Keighley, 1939), Cagney teams with George Raft making his Warners debut. It's mostly a prison picture, with muckraking reporter Cagney behind bars after being framed by crooked politicos. Career felon Raft has little sympathy for him till Cagney proves to be a stand-up guy, whereupon the two bond in mutual loathing of sadistic guards, rat-fink convicts, and the endlessly malleable system. The movie boasts one indelible scene (involving a movie screening for the cons), some evocative prison workhouse detailing, and a fine Cagney performance as always. But it's undone by a script cluttered with melodrama and contrivance.
Bullets or Ballots (Keighley yet again, 1936) is much more satisfying. Again we get two icons for the price of one, with Robinson as a tough but square-shooting police detective and Bogart as the ambitious number-two man to a big-time racketeer. Bogart's effectively the co-star, albeit fourth-billed behind Robinson, Joan Blondell, and Barton MacLane. But it's Eddie G.'s movie, and he walks the line beautifully as an honest cop who, unjustly jettisoned from the force, signs on with the mobster he's long pursued. Despite a rhetorical reference to "ballots" as the public's means of combatting crime, it's bullets that get the job done. Bullets and fists: the movie makes clear that Robinson has beaten confessions out of people plenty of times, just as it has no illusions about the empty symbolism of crime commissions and grand juries.
The only other Bogart vehicle in the set is San Quentin (Lloyd Bacon, 1937), a scrap-work effort below the standards of everybody involved. Bogart's a small-time crook whose arrest at a nightclub occasions a meet-cute for his big sister Ann Sheridan and Army training officer Pat O'Brien--who's on his way to become yard captain at the penitentiary where Bogart will be interred! O'Brien tries to reform the lad, but with corrupt/sadistic guard Barton MacLane on one side and sociopathic con Joe Sawyer on the other, Bogart never has a chance. Neither does the viewer.
Lloyd Bacon, normally one of Warners' zippiest directors, is back on his game with A Slight Case of Murder (1938), a delicious gangster comedy. Robinson plays beer baron Remy Marco, who craves respectability as a legitimate businessman once beer is legal again. Problem is, nobody has ever had the heart to tell him his product tastes like varnish, and soon the bank is out to foreclose on his brewery. At which point Remy learns that his summer home upstate is full of fresh gangland corpses.... Based on a play by Damon Runyon and Howard Lindsay, the picture gives a trio of glorious goons--Allen Jenkins, Edward Brophy, and Harold Huber--a rare chance to shine as Marco's house staff.
City for Conquest (1940) ought to be the showpiece here. It's the longest and most ambitious entry, with prestige-picture scale and production values (including Polito and James Wong Howe as cameramen) and a cast including Cagney, Ann Sheridan, Arthur Kennedy, Frank McHugh, Donald Crisp, Anthony Quinn, Jerome Cowan, and--in his first of only two film performances--future directorial giant Elia Kazan. Working-stiff Cagney loves his gifted musician brother (Kennedy) and childhood sweetheart (Sheridan), a dancer with her own aspirations for the limelight; he becomes a boxer in order to pay for the brother's musical education. Triumph and tragedy ensue. The film's avowed aim, and Kennedy's, is to create an urban symphony of New York and the many little people striving against all odds to rise; there's even a one-man Greek chorus--Frank Craven, the Stage Manager of the recent Our Town--to hammer the theme periodically. But over the previous decade Warners' honest, hard-charging, small-scale movies had collectively achieved that "symphony," without the pompous flourishes Anatole Litvak's direction brings to the project. Here's hoping DVD showcases more of them. --Richard T. Jameson
Get ready for intense excitement when four of Hollywood's most notorious motion pictures come together in Gangsters: The Ultimate Film Collection! The powerful hit American Gangster joins the timeless epics Scarface, Casino and Carlito's Way in this definitive 9-disc anthology. Featuring powerhouse talent including Academy Award® winners Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe and Sean Penn, and visionary directors Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Ridley Scott, this highly collectible set is the ultimate way to experience the sagas of motion picture's most notorious criminals.
PICTURE SNATCHER (1933): An admirably tough B-picture enlivened by an energetic James Cagney performance, Picture Snatcher stars Cagney as Danny Kean, a former gangster who has decided to go straight after a stretch in the big house. Danny has fallen for Patricia (Patricia Ellis), the daughter of the cop who put him away (Robert Emmett O'Connor). Dad isn't convinced that Danny has left his life of crime behind him, and he isn't too impressed with his new career taking pictures for a sleazy tabloid newspaper. Between getting a lurid photo of a fireman in front of a burning building (where his wife and her lover met their fate) and a daring shot of a woman being executed (based an actual incident when a New York Daily News photographer got a photo of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair), Danny's work is selling papers but hardly making Officer O'Connor think his daughter is in good hands (especially since he was in charge of press security for the execution). Short, sweet and sassy, Picture Snatcher is the sort of gutsy fare Warner Bros. did best in the 1930's; Ralph Bellamy turns in a great supporting performance as Danny's boozy editor LADY KILLER (1933): Based on the novel by Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter stars Alan Arkin as John Singer, who is deaf. Singer moves from a small town in order to be close to his institutionalized deaf and mentally impaired friend Antonapoulos (Chuck McCann). Singer rents a room with a family whose father, Mr. Kelly (Biff McGuire), is unable to earn a living due to a serious injury. His teen-aged daughter Mick (Sondra Locke, in her film debut) is at first resentful of Singer's presence, but he ingratiates himself by introducing her to classical music (which he can "feel," if not hear). Singer likewise tries to brighten the lives of such unfortunates as alcoholic Blount (Stacy Keach Jr., also making his first film appearance), dying black doctor Copeland (Percy Rodriguez), and Copeland's poverty-stricken daughter (Cicely Tyson). SMART MONEY (1931):Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney were teamed for the only time in their careers in Smart Money. Robinson has the larger part as a small-town barber who fancies himself a big-time gambler. He travels to the Big City in the company of his younger brother Cagney, who wants to make sure that Robinson isn't fleeced by the high-rollers. Unfortunately Robinson has a weakness for beautiful blondes, most of whom take him for all his money or betray him in some other manner. The cops aren't keen on Robinson's gambling activities, but they can pin nothing on him until he accidentally kills Cagney in a fight. The incident results in a jail term for manslaughter, and a more sober-sided outlook on life for the formerly flamboyant Robinson. Watch closely in the first reel of Smart Money for an unbilled appearance by Boris Karloffas a dope pusher. BLACK LEGION (1937): Factory worker Frank Taylor believes that he has missed out on a deserved promotion when it is instead given to a Polish immigrant. Angry and looking for a scapegoat, he is an ideal mark for the Black Legion, an underground group who want to get rid of immigrants and racial minorities through violent means. Frank joins the Legion, and with his new friends, he dons black robes and drives the Polish family from their home. His aim achieved, Frank gets his job, but soon the Legion begins to take up more of his time and money, and turns his character darker and darker. He leaves his wife, begins to drink heavily, and soon is on a downward spiral. MAYOR OF HELL (1933): Five members of a teen-age gang, including leader Jimmy Smith, are sent to the State Reformatory, presided over by the melodramatically callous Thompson. Soon, Patsy Gargan, a former gangster appointed Deputy Commissioner as a political favor, arrives complete with hip flask and blonde. Gargan falls for activist nurse Dorothy and, inspired by her, takes over the administration to run the place on radical principles.
Includes the films The Little Giant, Bullets Or Ballots, Kid Galahad and Larceny, Inc.
Includes the films The Petrified Forest, High Sierra, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse and All Through The Night.
WHITE HEAT (1949) "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!" Cagney's Cody Jarrett--a psychotic thug devoted to his tough-as-nails mother--is the searing centerpiece of this blazing, fast-paced thriller. CITY FOR CONQUEST (1940) Club fighter Cagney turns pro to bankroll his composer brother's dream of writing the great New York City symphony. But life pulls the sidewalk out from under them in an intensely moving saga co-starring Ann Sheridan. EACH DAWN I DIE (1939) Two of the screen's famed tough guys--Cagney as a reporter framed for manslaughter and George Raft as a big-house racketeer--headline this prison movie that casts a reform-minded eye on the brutalizing effects of life in the slammer. "G" MEN (1935) Four years after starring in The Public Enemy, Cagney waged on-screen war against the nation's public enemies as a zealous FBI agent in a movie "fast, gutsy, as simplistic and powerful as a tabloid headline" (Time Out Film Guide).
Goodfellas
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