Warner Bros.' GoodFellas (1990) is director Martin Scorsese's stylistic masterpiece - a follow-up film to his own Mean Streets (1973), released in the year of Francis Ford Coppola's third installment of his gangster epic - The Godfather, Part III (1990).

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Coursework Essay Goodfellas

Warner Bros.' GoodFellas (1990) is director Martin Scorsese's stylistic masterpiece - a follow-up film to his own Mean Streets (1973), released in the year of Francis Ford Coppola's third installment of his gangster epic - The Godfather, Part III (1990). It is a nitty-gritty, unflinching treatment of a true mobster story about three violent "wiseguys," [Mafia slang for 'gangsters'] enhanced by the Italian-American director's own experience of his upbringing in Little Italy. The film's factual, semi-documentary account was adapted from both Nicholas Pileggi's and Martin Scorsese's screenplay - based upon Pileggi's 1985 non-fictional book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. Film posters were subtitled: "Three Decades of Life in the Mafia." The real-life story concerned a low-level, marginalized gangster of mixed ethnic roots (half-Irish, half-Sicilian) - Henry Hill, who ultimately turned informant for the FBI and entered the Federal Witness Protection Program to save his life by disappearing from view.

The fast-moving, energizing, episodic story, with forceful editorial cuts and visuals is told with voice-over narrative commentary by Henry Hill, including about thirty years in his life, from his teen years to maturity as an adult gangster. The additional voice-over of his wife's point-of-view provides