What could be the best of these? Raiders Of The Lost Ark, with its peak-Spielberg action-adventure stylings? Airplane!, a riotous and unfailingly quotable comedy that spawned a thousand imitators? Could even one as recent as acid-tinged carmageddoner Mad Max: Fury Road, already considered one of the greatest action movies ever made, lay legitimate claim to being the finest example? These are films that, through some divine formula, can seemingly never cease to entertain: Friday night movies for the ages. What, possibly, could top such feats of filmic engineering? In part that’s down to the acting talent – Ray Liotta, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, an Oscar-winning Joe Pesci, all doing their finest work, as well as Scorsese’s muse Robert De Niro operating at full volume – and the way they’re allowed to flourish in a loose, lightly improvisational environment. The actors jabber over one another and make scenes up on the fly, the most famous example being Pesci as sociopathic mafioso Tommy DeVito putting a visibly unnerved Liotta – playing our gangster ‘hero’, Henry Hill – on the spot with his notorious “Funny how?” diatribe. The style of performing gives Goodfellas a kinetic, unpredictable feel. You remain on edge, even if you’ve seen the film so many times you can quote it line for line, because the players perpetually seem to be too. The film’s craft, addictive like a drug, similarly keeps us alert. Goodfellas is the product of an unparalleled filmmaker and editor team (editor Thelma Schoonmaker is at least as important to Scorsese’s filmography as De Niro) taking all the technique they ever learned and applying it to one feature. There’s voiceover, flashbacks, handheld and POV shots, freeze frames, slo-mo, and some still unbeatable tracking shots, while the film closes with Liotta talking directly to the audience and Pesci firing into camera with a pistol, replicating a shot from 1903’s The Great Train Robbery. It’s a history of cinematic technique in one picture – and it’s all set to what might be the greatest assemblage of non-score music in any movie. It could almost be exhausting. In less than two-and-a-half hours, we fly through three decades of a life of organized crime. Yet the film is edited with such a feel for rhythm, Schoonmaker always careful with the ebb and flow of the story, that it never induces feelings of fatigue. Thanks to Scorsese, none of the flashy direction ever feels indulgent or hollow, either. Goodfellas inspired plenty of directors to attempt to replicate its fast-paced pop style, but all too many failed to realise that the film is never just surface, is never art for art’s sake. Ultimately, Goodfellas rewards repeated watches because there’s real substance woven into its style. Here, the style has a purpose. Scorsese’s movies tend to be designed in such a way that they reflect the experience of the protagonist. Taxi Driver has a woozy, nocturnal daydream feel, mirroring Travis Bickle’s insomnia and increasing disconnect from reality, while Scorsese’s latest, Silence, is slow, minimal and unsettlingly quiet, demonstrating both the purity of Father Rodriguez and the sense of discomfort he feels in closed 17th-century Japan. The more high-energy films of Scorsese’s that are made in what casual fans might consider his signature style, like The Wolf Of Wall Street, Casino, and Goodfellas, perform the same function. They are extravagant, darkly comic and whiplash fast, not simply because that’s entertaining, but because such a style conveys the rush felt by a protagonist living a glitzy, morality-free existence.
