GoodFellas 4K (1990)

Director: Martin Scorsese
Writers: Martin Scorsese, Nicholas Pileggi
Starring: Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, Frank Sivero

Goodfellas retells, and somewhat fictionalizes, the life of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), the son of an Italian mother and an Irish father, who grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn in the 1940s idolizing local members of the Lucchese crime family. The screenplay by Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi, based on Pileggi's book Wiseguy, is shaped as a memoir, with Henry narrating the story in voiceover and, near the end, addressing the audience directly on camera. His tone ranges from matter-of-fact to wistful, even nostalgic, as he relates his history of violence and crime. (Ray Liotta listened to hours of Pileggi's interviews with the real Henry Hill, and he has said that he was struck by how casually Hill munched on potato chips even when discussing brutal murders.)

The film's structure as a memoir works with Scorsese's stylistic goal, which is to convey the feel of Henry Hill's life as a gangster, or, as Scorsese puts it in the letter accompanying this new Blu-ray release, of a life that might "spin out of control at any moment". Despite its meticulous attention to detail in costume and production design, Goodfellas is anything but naturalistic. Its narrative flows in the expressive fashion of memory, sometimes jumping back, occasionally lingering on a moment, usually racing forward. The film is full of freeze-frames, odd shifts in perspective, abrupt camera moves, even an occasional switch in the narrator after Henry's future wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), enters the story. Sometimes the camera mimics Henry's point of view, but other times it goes places where Henry never was but must have imagined. At pivotal moments, the narrative is interrupted by brief flashes of Henry's friend, Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci, in an Oscar-winning performance), and he's always firing a gun, because it's Tommy who serves as the story's gangster "id": an unadulterated brute force that answers to no one, not even the "made" men and bosses who constitute the underworld's social hierarchy. Boss Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino) calls Tommy "a bad seed", and Tommy's inability to exercise even the smallest restraint on his violent impulses ultimately destroys him.

Unlike The Godfather, which was set among mob aristocracy, Goodfellas focuses on the Joe Sixpacks of crime, "blue collar guys", as Karen Hill calls them. Henry is an outsider from the moment we meet him as a kid (played by Christopher Serrone) pressing his face against the bedroom window, entranced by the preening hoodlums greeting each other at the cab stand across the street. He remains an outsider, even when he's adopted as a go-for by the cab stand crowd and given an apprenticeship in crime under the Irish thief, Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro), which is where he and Tommy meet and become friends. It's no accident that Henry is sent to Jimmy; the youngster has already been "tracked", because neither of these two Irish outsiders can ever be part of the inner circle of an Italian crime family, even though Jimmy is respected as "a good earner". Henry doesn't yet see the limits on his life, because daily existence is so exciting. "We were treated like movie stars", he says, and the only requirement is the willingness to live outside the law and stick together. The rewards are immense: money, booze, women, drugs and "respect" (born of fear). Even after Henry weds Karen, the party continues.

But the celebration comes to an abrupt halt when one of Henry's jobs for Jimmy draws him an arrest and a prison sentence, which is as much an occupational hazard for wiseguys as getting "whacked" by one of their own. Now that he is no longer contributing to the bottom line, Henry suffers the fate of many a blue collar worker in the legitimate world—he's disposable. With Paulie and the organization doing nothing to help Henry's wife and children, Henry organizes a profitable drug trade from his jail cell. After his release, he sees no reason to abandon it, even though the boss, Paulie, orders him to do so. Drug trafficking, and Henry's personal indulgence in his own product, become his downfall.

In Goodfellas' final act, Scorsese draws a memorable portrait of Henry as a man now hooked on cocaine as both a means of subsistence and a personal fuel. With Liotta's voiceover narration breathlessly speeding along and the musical soundtrack leaping from one selection to another, like someone impatiently punching buttons on a playlist, Scorsese follows an increasingly paranoid Henry as he drives around town, scanning the skies for a surveillance helicopter he's sure is following him. His drug addiction mirrors his addiction to the gangster life. It has made him feel more vital and alive, but it has also isolated him, disconnecting him from the rest of the world, invading every aspect of his life, requiring him to take increasingly greater risks, and sacrifice even more of himself and those close to him, to maintain the high. This road only has two destinations, death or prison (or Witness Protection, which, as Henry describes it at the film's end, feels like a living death). The unnerving achievement of Goodfellas is how thoroughly it demonstrates the no-win consequences of the gangster life and yet still makes that life seem so tempting. No wonder David Chase, whose hit show The Sopranos descends directly from Goodfellas, has called it his "Koran".


BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD: Please make sure by searching the Internet that you have minimum system requirements to play H265/HEVC 4K video files. I've tested all my compressed files in a 3rd Gen Intel Core i3 @ 3.4 GHz machine with 8GB of RAM and 1GB DDR3 AMD Graphics card. All played just fine.

Please Note: Playback of this H.265/HEVC encoded video file in VLC media player may cause problem (like Green Screen). A fresh install of the player or a new version can solve this problem. I strongly suggest you to download and install "K-Lite Codec Pack (Full or Mega version; totally free with WMP Classic)" on your system first and then try to play the file in VLC. Or, you can just install PotPlayer, and no codecs will be needed. I use this player for playing all sorts of media… from MP3 audio files to 4K UHD video files.

Mac users please get help from the Internet and YouTube.MS-4K