Warner Bros.
If you go see the Whitey Bulger biopic Black Mass this weekend, chances are you’re going to want to revisit Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed, which features a main character loosely based on Bulger. And then you’re going to want to re-watch Goodfellas, which is appropriate at this time anyway because Monday is the 25th anniversary of that movie’s theatrical release. But where to go from there?
As influential as Goodfellas has been in the last two and a half decades, the true-story gangster flick, co-scripted by Nicholas Pileggi based on his nonfiction book “Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family,” is also heavily influenced by other works. And Scorsese, in typical fashion, has no problem revealing most of them. Where possible, I quote him on the link between the older movie and his own.
Not all 25 titles below are certain influences, but each has some significance to the making of Goodfellas. Presented in chronological order, they span 87 years of film history, including Scorsese’s own contributions, leading to the September 21, 1990, bow of one of the landmark works of American cinema.
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
The next to last shot of Goodfellas features Joe Pesci shooting a gun towards the camera that is a clear homage to this early Western by Edwin S. Porter. “That’s a reference right to the end of The Great Train Robbery,” Scorsese confirmed in an interview with Mark Cousins (among other places), “that’s the way that ends, that film, and basically the plot of this picture is very similar to The Great Train Robbery. It hasn’t changed, 90 years later. It’s the same story. The gunshots will always be there. He’s always going to look behind his back, he’s gotta have eyes behind his back, because they’re gonna get him someday.”
The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912)
This 17-minute short by D.W. Griffith is credited as being the first gangster film, meaning it’s an ancestor to Scorsese’s own organized-crime films (though he does put the genre’s beginning back even further to the outlaws of The Great Train Robbery). He’s admitted this film’s inspiration, and in 2005 he selected it to be screened as part of a tribute in his honor at the Beaubourg Centre d’Art et de Culture in Paris, France. “It’s a great Lower East Side New York street film,” he said in a lecture highlighting its early editing magic. You can find the rest of that appreciation transcribed here.
The Public Enemy (1931)
This is the first gangster movie he ever saw, on a double bill with Little Caesar, which he likes less. He found William A. Wellman‘s The Public Enemy more truthful. The final scene with its “striking use of popular music” (“I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”) is also considered clearly a source of inspiration for what Scorsese does with music in Goodfellas, ironically putting popular tunes against violent scenes. “This picture led the way for all of us,” he wrote in a list of his favorite gangster movies for The Daily Beast.
Scarface (1932)
There’s more direct reference to this Howard Hawks gangster film in The Departed (notably the x’s), but it first led to Goodfellas. “In Scarface, you have an interesting situation where these characters who are really despicable are presented in a way that you like them,” he said during a talk on his earlier effort. “That was the key.”
The Oklahoma Kid (1939)
Scorsese again linked gangsters and outlaws, crime films and Westerns, by alluding to this Lloyd Bacon feature within the narrative. Pesci’s Tommy DeVito asks what that one Western is starring Humphrey Bogart then pretends to be the eponymous antihero (played by gangster film icon James Cagney) as he shoots at the feet (and shoots one foot) of “Spider” (Michael Imperioli. The genre trope of characters shooting at the feet of another actually goes back at least as far as The Great Train Robbery.
The Roaring Twenties (1939)
“In 1939, Raoul Walsh and Mark Hellinger’s classic was seen as a sendoff to the gangster genre, which seemed to have run its course,” Scorsese wrote in The Daily Beast list. “But it’s more than that. Much more. It plays like a journal of the life of a typical gangster of the period, and it covers so much ground, from the battlefields of France to the beer halls to the nightclubs, the boats that brought in the liquor, the aftermath of Prohibition, the whole rise and fall of ‘20s gangsterdom, that it achieves a very special epic scale—really, it was the template for GoodFellas and Casino.”
Force of Evil (1948)
In an introduction to this Abraham Polonsky film noir, Scorsese credits it as one of the major influences on Mean Streets, Raging Bull and Goodfellas. “Force of Evil was the first film I remember seeing that applied directly to the world I knew and saw,” he continued. See him further discuss it fondly here.
0 comments:
Post a Comment