Opening Shots: Goodfellas

Periods of unemployment seem like the best time to catch up on the movies you've been meaning to watch, or watch again, or watch for the 30th time...

Yesterday I watched "Goodfellas" for probably the 30th or 32nd time and it never ceases to amaze me, the details you pick up on after repeated viewings. One of the new little details I spotted this time around was a line in the airport diner the truck driver walks into after leaving his truck for Henry and Tommy to steal. "I need a small fry," you can hear the waitress saying. Just like Henry and Tommy needed the "small fry" driver to park his truck and then pretend it was stolen by a couple black guys. In the hands of your average film director I guess that could be a total throwaway line -- but with Scorcese? I'm guessing NOT.

(Another thing I noticed: the doctor "takes mercy" on Henry and gives him a valium when he shows up at the hospital all wrecked to pick up his brother Michael? Sheeeeeeeeeit, that's the actor Isiah Whitlock Jr. (or "Senator Clay Davis" to any fan of The Wire.)

And here's another detail I noticed several years/viewings ago: check out the very first shot of the movie. The Cadillac driven by Henry, with Jimmy and Tommy as passengers (and a bloodied but breathing Billy Batts in the trunk) abruptly swerves from the left lane into the right. Then the camera pans across and "passes" the car until it's out of frame. Moments later the three wiseguys hear a kicking noise -- and, assuming they had killed Batts dead already, initially think it's a flat tire. Then they pull over and finish the job.

For me, that's the entire story arc of the film right there, in the opening scene: three gangsters barreling down the turnpike in the fast lane, then abruptly swerving into the right (slow) lane, and then the Caddy slipping out of frame. Keep that in mind and watch the rest of the movie unfold: it's that Billy Batts hit that ultimately dooms Tommy and the rest of his crew. Some months or years later when Tommy is finally about to get "made," he instead gets a bullet in the brain. (As Henry comments, it was "for Billy Batts... and a lot of other things." Batts was a made guy and Tommy wasn't, so Tommy had to be whacked in return. "It was among the Italians -- real greaseball shit. And there was nothing we could do about it. We had to sit there and take it.")

In the next scene (Sunday, May 11, 1980, 6:55 a.m.) we see Henry hoovering up a couple lines of blow and then scurrying around suburbia like a rat, trying to sell a grocery sack full of guns and then pick up a load of cocaine at a motel all while a helicopter is apparently birddogging him from overhead. In other words, as Tommy was about to be made, the trio of partners in crime were seemingly at their peak (listen to the beautiful piano of Derek and the Dominoes' "Layla" playing on the soundtrack) -- once Tommy was made, nobody could mess with them. But it's from this anticipated height they fall hard. Without the made guy in their crew Jimmy and Henry are left to do whatever they can do to stay in business...which leads to the ultimate downfall of the "goodfellas" ring once Henry gets busted with the cocaine and then rats out the rest of his crew before heading into the life of bland obscurity as a federally protected witness.

So there you have it. Fast lane, kicking noise, slow lane, and aftermath. There's your whole film right there, right in the opening seconds.

L