For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked s--tty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again.
In the bar area, Jimmy and Henry orchestrate a heist of freight ("a half a mil comin' in, all cash") arriving over the weekend at the airport. They meet with Frenchy (Mike Starr), an Air France cargo worker, and plan a "big score" of "bags of money" coming in "from tourists and American servicemen who change their money over into French money and send it back here."
Meanwhile, Tommy exhibits the first traces of his quick-trigger, psychotic, pathological temper as he entertains other mobsters with hilarious tales of violence laced with four letter words. Henry chuckles at his jokester pal: "You're a pisser. You're really funny. You're really funny." The comedic scene immediately turns sour and the tension mounts as a seemingly-aggravated Tommy persists in asking - in a cold-blooded, fearsome, and ambiguous tone: "What do you mean, I'm funny?...You mean the way I talk?...What's funny about it?...What the f--k is so funny about me? Tell me?..." Finally, the situation is eased when Henry uses humor to defuse his potentially-dangerous friend, but Tommy identifies his friend's mortal weakness: "I wonder about you sometimes, Hendry. You may fold under questioning." Then when he is embarrassed by cafe owner Sonny for owing "seven f--king Gs," Tommy breaks a glass bottle on Sonny's forehead.
In the next scene, a scared Sonny - with a bandage on his forehead from the injury, complains to Paulie about how Tommy's behavior (he's compared to "an arch criminal") is dangerous, disruptive and volatile to the self-regulating criminal world, but Paulie responds helplessly: "You think you're the only one? I talk to them a million times. They don't listen...What could I do? If there was something I could do, don't you think I would do it?...Tommy's a bad kid. He's a bad seed. What am I supposed to do, shoot him?" Although unaware of how to run a restaurant, Paulie promises to offer protection by becoming a partner. Sonny is now committed and beholden to Paulie:
["Playboy," performed by the Marvelettes.] Now the guy's got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with a bill, he can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy, he can call Paulie. But now the guy's got to come up with Paulie's money every week. No matter what. Business bad? F--k you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? F--k you, pay me. The place got hit by lightning, huh? F--k you, pay me. Also, Paulie could do anything. Especially run up bills on the joint's credit. And why not? Nobody's gonna pay for it anyway. And as soon as the deliveries are made in the front door, you move the stuff out the back and sell it at a discount. You take a two hundred dollar case of booze and you sell it for a hundred. It doesn't matter. It's all profit. And then finally, when there's nothing left, when you can't borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out. You light a match.
Henry and Tommy make incendiary preparations to burn down the restaurant by stuffing flammable wads of paper into ceiling fixtures - a Bamboo Lounge matchbook flares into flames and is used to light the rest of the interior of the restaurant. They non-chalantly wait in a car on the curbside as the restaurant slowly smolders behind them while discussing Tommy's heated sexual frustrations. He asks Henry for a favor to help him get a date with Diane (Katherine Wallach), a "Jew broad" from the Five Towns who is "prejudiced against Italians" and won't go out with him alone. ["It's Not for Me to Say," performed by Johnny Mathis.] Reluctantly, Henry submits to a double date with Diane's girlfriend, Karen (Lorraine Bracco) at the Villa Capri restaurant - he watches impatiently as Tommy stalls over dinner. Making their first acquaintance together, Karen narrates in voice-over her impressions of her rude, insensitive date:
I couldn't stand him. I thought he was really obnoxious. He kept fidgeting around. Before it was even time to go home he was pushing me into the car and then pulling me out. It was ridiculous. But Diane and Tommy made us promise to meet them again on Friday night. We agreed. Of course when Friday night came around, Henry stood me up. We were a trio instead of a double date that night.
["I Will Follow Him" ("Chariot"), performed by Betty Curtis.] Finding him at the cabstand with a bunch of hoods on the sidewalk, Karen charges forcefully at him and accuses him of lying: "You've got some nerve standing me up. Nobody does that to me. Who the hell do you think you are, Frankie Vallie or some kind of big shot?" But her proud, feisty display of her displeasure intrigues him:
I remember, she screaming on the street and I mean loud, but she looked good. She had these great eyes. Just like Liz Taylor's. At least that's what I thought.
The camera pulls back on the gold, Catholic cross hanging around Henry's neck as the door opens on Karen's house for their next date. At the door's threshold, she covers up all evidence of the crucifix by buttoning up his shirt before her Jewish mother (Suzanne Shepherd) meets him and asks about his supposed half-Jewish heritage. Good-looking Henry answers: "Just the good half."
["Then He Kissed Me," performed by The Crystals.] As they make their way into the Copacabana club, the camera follows behind them - it is a three minute, non-stop, unedited take/tracking shot with Henry greasing the portals at each step with bills as they enter the circuitous world. The camera hovers just over their shoulders as they arrive at the front of the club, have their car attended by a valet, bypass the long line into the entrance by taking a side entryway, wind through hallways and then into the bustling kitchen area with cooks and helpers, pass other patrons waiting inside, and are set-up by the Copa Captain at a prime, front-row table (hastily resurrected out of nowhere and set up especially for them). Karen is naively wide-eyed and impressed by his endless cash supply, his familiarity with everyone and his innumerable friends (one group sends over champagne), his power, and his slick style: "You gave them twenty dollars each."
Karen: What do you do?
Henry: I'm in construction.
Karen: (She feels the softness of his hands) They don't feel like you're in construction.
Henry: Ah, I'm a union delegate.
"King of the one-liners" comedian Henny Youngman (himself) takes the stage and entertains with jokes - the camera cuts away from him to end the long, uninterrupted camera shot, although Youngman's monologue continues on the overlapping soundtrack as Henry and Tommy successfully execute their job - the Air France cargo heist at the airport: ["Look in My Eyes," performed by the Chantels.] "Air France made me. We walked out with four hundred and twenty thousand dollars without using a gun. And we did the right thing. We gave Paulie his tribute." Henry's self-satisfaction about doing "the right thing" reveals his loyalty and eagerness to please and be a rule-abiding citizen within the gangster world.
["Roses Are Red," performed by Bobby Vinton.] The relationship between Henry and Karen blossoms. At a beach club, they have lunch, during which he is educated about "signing" for tabs instead of always paying cash. Another night while ringside at the Copacabana, Bobby Vinton (himself) sends over champagne for them and Karen is also intoxicated - literally and figuratively - by all the lavish attention and the material excesses:
One night, Bobby Vinton sent us champagne. There was nothing like it. I didn't think there was anything strange in any of this. You know, a twenty-one-year-old kid with such connections. He was an exciting guy. He was really nice. He introduced me to everybody. Everybody wanted to be nice to him. And he knew how to handle it.
A crass, television promo-commercial about hair pieces ("Morrie's Wig Shop") that don't come off and will attract beautiful women plays on a television in Morrie Kessler's (Chuck Low) Queens Boulevard Wig and Beauty Salon in Queens, New York. Morrie complains to Henry about the high interest rates being demanded of him on the payoff of a loan to Jimmy. Impatient with the delay while watching the commercial in the front of the salon, Jimmy moves to the back of the store and wraps a telephone cord around Morrie's neck to strangle him: "You got money for that f--king commercial of yours." Morrie's own hair piece is dislodged during the scuffle.
Henry is called away to help defend Karen from an attempted rape assault by Bruce (Mark Evan Jacobs), a long-time friend/neighbor who lives across the street from her house. To retaliate [in one of his rare outbursts of violence in the film] for the unwelcome pass, Henry has a swift and brutal answer after driving Karen home - he grabs Bruce's hair with his left hand and repeatedly smashes him across the face with the butt of his gun in his right hand until he falls unconscious to the driveway. He marches back to Karen and hands her the blood-covered gun to hide (in her milkbox), and simply says: "Hide this." She is turned on by his chivalrous, violent defense of her, in voice-over:
I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn't. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.
The couple are married in her parents' home in a traditional Jewish wedding. ["Life is But a Dream," performed by the Harptones.] The wedding reception is a rich, catered affair held at the Chateau Bleu - an occasion for opportunistic business deals among the 'wiseguys' in attendance. Tommy's mother (Catherine Scorsese, the director's own mother) pesters her son about being single: "Why don't you be like your friend Henry, here. He's got a nice girl. He's settling down now. He's married. Pretty soon he'll have a nice family. And you're still bouncing around from girl to girl." The film comments satirically on the preponderance of similar names (the males are named after religious saints and the females after the Virgin Mary), making Karen dizzy during introductions:
It was like he had two families. The first time I was introduced to all of them at once, it was crazy. Paulie and his brothers had lots of sons and nephews. And almost all of them were named Peter or Paul. It was unbelievable. There must have been two dozen Peters and Pauls at the wedding. Plus, they were all married to girls named Marie. And they named all their daughters Marie. By the time I finished meeting everybody, I thought I was drunk.
As wedding present tributes marked "Best Wishes" are given by each of the families to Karen - now a mobster princess - Henry stashes the envelopes with $100 dollar bills into a white bag. Relations with Karen's parents are strained when the newlyweds move in with them, and Henry's recurring late night absences disturb Karen's mother - suspicious of his extra-marital activities and non-Jewish ways: "What kind of people are these?...He's not Jewish. Did you know how these people live?...You don't know where he is. You don't know who he's with...Normal people don't act like this."
["Leader of the Pack," performed by The Shangri-Las.] At a party hosted by Jimmy's wife Mickey (Julie Garfield), Karen grasps how different and exclusive is the world she has married and entered into. At a party attended only by crude, tasteless mobster wives, the priorities are all cosmetic and superficial - hair-brushing, hand lotion-spreading, and the application of facial masks. Insulated from the real world within another society where accepted standards of right and wrong are upside down, Jewish outsider Karen comes to defend their corrupt lifestyle and its economic freedoms:
Well, we weren't married to nine-to-five guys, but the first time I realized how different was when Mickey had a hostess party. They had bad skin and wore too much make-up. I mean, they didn't look very good. They looked beat-up. And the stuff they wore was thrown together and cheap. A lot of pant suits and double knits. And they talked about how rotten their kids were and about beating them with broom handles and leather belts. But that the kids still didn't pay any attention...After a while, it got to be all normal. None of it seemed like crimes. It was more like Henry was enterprising and that he and the guys were making a few bucks hustling, while the other guys were sitting on their asses waiting for hand-outs. Our husbands weren't brain surgeons. They were blue-collar guys. The only way they could make extra money, real extra money, was to go out and cut a few corners...We were all so very close. I mean, there were never any outsiders around. Absolutely never. And being together all the time made everything seem all the more normal.
Life within the amoral, social circles of the inbred gangster world "got to be all normal" with familiarity, but the criminal community also exacts a price - imprisonment within their claustrophobic society and loss of perspective. Cutting corners means robbing truck drivers, and having detectives show up at the house on a routine basis to search the premises. Non-chalantly and politely, Karen offers coffee and casually watches television - , with Al Jolson singing "Toot, Toot, Tootsie," as the men "go through everything."
There was always a little harrassment. They always wanted to talk to Henry about this or that. They'd come in with their subpoenas and warrants and make me sign. But mostly they were just looking for a handout, a few bucks to keep things quiet, no matter what they found.
In a photograph montage of wiseguy family life, they would congregate for every rite of passage, Jesse James Conway's (Little Jimmy) ninth birthday for example ["Happy Birthday to You."], or for card games, baby births, or island vacations ["Ain't That a Kick In the Head," performed by Dean Martin] - without any outsiders:
We always did everything together and we always were in the same crowd. Anniversaries, christenings. We only went to each other's houses. The women played cards, and when the kids were born, Mickey and Jimmy were always the first at the hospital. And when we went to the Islands or Vegas to vacation, we always went together. No outsiders, ever. It got to be normal. It got to where I was even proud that I had the kind of husband who was willing to go out and risk his neck just to get us the little extras.
The camera pans across Henry's and Karen's bedroom closets to shamelessly show "the little extras" of the good life - rows of suits, shoes, dresses, and coats. She describes for Henry how much money she needs for shopping by holding her fingers a few inches apart, and rewards him with impromptu oral sex in the kitchen for giving her a wad of bills.
["He's Sure the Boy I Love," performed by The Crystals.] In the Suite Lounge in Queens on a day in June 1970 - the beginning of the sequence which opens the film, a celebration is being held for the release of Mafia member Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) after six years of prison. A long-standing hatred between the marginal, non-full-blooded Italian outsiders and Batts erupts when Tommy arrives and they spar at each other, first with friendly kidding about Tommy's youth as a shoe-shine boy, and then with retaliatory, eruptive violence:
Tommy: Just don't go busting my balls, Billy, okay?
Billy: Hey Tommy, if I was gonna break your balls, I'd tell you to go home and get your shine box. (To his friends) Now this kid, this kid was great. They, they used to call him Spitshine Tommy..
Henry, trying to diffuse the ill-will, makes a half-hearted attempt to quell the tension following the insult. ["Atlantis," performed by Donovan.] As the party breaks up later in the evening, Jimmy and Tommy gang up on Batts and brutally stomp and beat him with a gun into bloody submission. Jimmy is disgusted by the damage to his shoes: "F--king mutt dented my shoes." Since "his whole crew's gonna be looking for him," they wrap his body in white tablecloths to transport him "upstate" in the trunk of Henry's car to a place where he won't ever be found. While at the house of Tommy's mother to pick up a shovel, she serves them a full pasta dinner at around midnight, and questions her son about getting a "nice girl." (He responds: "I get a nice one almost every night, Ma.") The blood on Tommy's shirt is easily accounted for when he explains: "We took a ride out to the country and we hit one of those deers...Ma, I need this knife...I just need it for a little while...We hit the deer and his paw - What do you call it?...the hoof got caught in that grill. I got to, I got to hack it off."
The film's opening scene is repeated and they bury the body in some remote Connecticut woods, as Henry narrates, in voice-over, about how violence has become an accepted part of life in the 1970s. Murder is one of the expected "rules" of their society - but a depraved Tommy has breached convention, weakened their invincibility, and overstepped boundaries by not obtaining special permission to "whack" Batts, an associate member of the legitimate Mafioso:
For most of the guys, killings got to be accepted. Murder was the only way that everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules. But sometimes, even if people didn't get out of line, they got whacked. I mean, hits just became a habit for some of the guys. Guys would get into arguments over nothing and before you knew it, one of them was dead. And they were shooting each other all the time. Shooting people was a normal thing. It was no big deal. We had a, we had a serious problem with Billy Batts. This was really a touchy thing. Tommy'd killed a made guy. Batts was part of the Gambino crew and was considered untouchable. Before you could touch a made guy, you had to have a good reason. You had to have a sitdown, and you better get an okay, or you'd be the one who got whacked. [A freeze-frame holds on Henry's face as the screen turns red and the noise of sizzling rises on the soundtrack.]
In the male-dominated world of the wiseguys, "Saturday night was for wives, but Friday night at the Copa was always for the girlfriends." Secrecy allows Henry to begin a 'lawful,' Friday-night affair with his buddies - he womanizes a mistress named Janice Rossi (Gina Mastrogiacomo). ["Pretend You Don't See Her," performed by Jerry Vale onstage.] Meanwhile, a search by the Mafia is on for Batts. When Paulie questions Henry about his knowledge of the man's whereabouts: "Keep your eyes open, 'cause they're busting my balls about this bastard, all right?," he lies. ["Remember (Walkin' in the Sand)," performed by The Shangri-Las.] Six months after killing Batts, the location of his body emerges as a "problem." It rests in a section of land sold to construct condominiums - the trio must return one night to the Connecticut woodlands and in the blood-red light of the car's headlights, they dig up the foul-smelling body. During the grisly unearthing of Batts' body, Tommy and Jimmy mercilessly tease Henry as he vomits from the stench: "Here's an arm...Hey, here's a leg. Here's a wing. Hey, what do you like, the leg or the wing, Henry? Or do you still go for the old hearts and lungs?"
To take advantage of his lifestyle, Henry's girlfriend Janice, a bridal shop employee, is "set up...in an apartment around the corner from the Suite. That way, I was able to stay over a couple nights a week. Karen was home with the kids and she never asked any questions, anyway. Janice and I were having so much fun, she started screwing up at work and I had to straighten out her boss a little bit." ["Baby I Love You," performed by Aretha Franklin.] The bridal shop owner is strangled into submission.
One night while playing a friendly card game in the basement of the Suite, the guys are being served drinks by Spider (Michael Imperioli), a young apprentice hood who stutters. Tommy delights in intimidating Spider and causing him to make verbal mistakes. Pretending that he is "The Oklahoma Kid" in a Bogart movie [Humphrey Bogart often played gangster roles in films, although he appeared in The Oklahoma Kid (1939) as a western villain], Tommy belligerently waves his gun in the air and shoots toward Spider, yelling: "Dance! Yahoo, you motherf--ker...Round up those f--king wagons!" In his wild enthusiasm, he accidentally hits Spider in the foot. In Henry's home after an absence of two weeks, Henry's feisty wife accuses him of marital infidelities: "Something's going on!...I look in your face and I know that you're lying...Get out of my life!...You're a lousy bastard...Go to your ready-made whores. That's all you're good for. Get out of my life. I can't stand you."
During the next card game, Spider limps with a big bandage on his foot as he serves drinks and is derisively called "F--kin' Drop-along Cassidy." The boy talks back at Tommy: "Why don't you go f--k yourself, Tommy?" While everyone bursts in laughter, Jimmy teases Tommy about being soft: "Tommy, you gonna let him get away with that? What's the matter with you? What's the world comin' to?" Without warning, the short-fused wiseguy fires six shots into Spider's chest and kills him. After the sick, unexpected killing, Jimmy diffuses the toxic atmosphere by explaining his jest:
Jimmy: What, are you stupid or what? Tommy. Tommy. I'm kidding with you. What the f--k are you doing? Are you a f--king sick maniac?
Tommy: Well, who the f--k? How do I know if you're kidding? What do you mean, you're kidding? You're breaking my f--king balls!
Jimmy: I'm, I'm f--king kidding with you! You f--king shoot the guy?
With her two children in tow at her side, Karen uses the apartment building's intercom to publicize to the superintendent that "a whore (is) living in 2-R," and to threaten Janice: "You keep away from my husband, you hear me?...He's my husband! Get your own god-damn man!" Crazed with hurt and feeling unloved, she sits astride Henry's torso in bed with a gun pistol pointed at his face as he awakens [the gun is in focus and in the center of the frame aimed at the camera - and at the viewing audience]. Karen tries to scare him to come back: "But still I couldn't hurt him. How could I hurt him? I couldn't even bring myself to leave him. The truth was that no matter how bad I felt I was still very attracted to him. Why should I give him to someone else? Why should she win?" Violence from the streets permeates their bedroom. In a conference about his hysterical, excitable wife, Paulie counsels Henry to restore their marriage to monogamy: "...You gotta go back. I mean, it's the only way. You got to keep up appearances...Please, there's no other way. You're not gonna get a divorce. We're not animali."
During a brief hiatus with Jimmy in Tampa, Florida before returning to his wife, the two are picked up for beating up a bookie and threatening to throw him into the lion's den in the Tampa City Zoo. "It took the jury six hours to bring us in guilty. The judge gave Jimmy and me ten years like he was giving away candy." In the same federal prison in Lewisburg, Paulie "was doing a year for contempt." ["Beyond the Sea," performed by Bobby Darin.] Treated with respect by bribed guards and given special privileges under luxurious conditions, they prepare Italian pasta dinner meals with prime ingredients smuggled in (garlic, "veal, beef and pork," even lobsters, peppers, onions, salami, prosciutto, a lot of cheese, Scotch, red and white wine, and Italian bread):
See, you know when you think of prison, you get pictures in your mind of all those old movies with rows and rows of guys behind bars...But it wasn't like that for wiseguys. It really wasn't that bad. Excepting that I missed Jimmy. He was doing his time in Atlanta...I mean, everybody else in the joint was doing real time, all mixed together, living like pigs. But we lived alone. And we owned the joint.
Behind everyone's back, Henry resourcefully (and recklessly) begins to deal in drugs and supply other inmates in the prison. Even Karen is allowed to smuggle in booze, bread and salami, and drugs in her over-sized coat during visitations without being checked by security. From her point of view as she suspiciously inspects the prison's visitors book, she focuses in on the signature of Janice Rossi and becomes disgruntled: "Nobody's helping me. I am all alone...Even Paulie, since he got out, I never see him. I never see anybody anymore." Cut off, deserted, and without support from his wiseguy friends while in prison, Henry trafficks in drugs through a Pittsburgh connection to help support his family. After four years, Henry is released.
["The Boulevard of Broken Dreams," performed by Tony Bennett.] Their life is restored back to the supportive environment of the wiseguys at a dinner party at Paulie's, although Henry is sternly warned about drug dealing and cocaine trafficking (even though it was considered an acceptable enterprise on the inside):
Just stay away from the garbage, you know what I mean...I'm not talking about what you did inside. You did what you had to do. I'm talking about now. From now, here and now...Don't make a jerk out'a me. Just don't do it.
Henry ignores Paulie's warning about the "heat" that superiors face when underlings are caught "sneakin'" behind their backs "selling junk."
["Gimme Shelter," performed by The Rolling Stones.] On a reflective table, cocaine is being cut with playing cards by Sandy (Debi Mazar), Janice's junkie friend who has started an affair with Henry. And Henry has teamed up again with "wild" Jimmy and "crazy" Tommy. While Jimmy waits to meet with his parole officer in the Department of Probation lobby, Henry shows Tommy and Jimmy a shopping bag full of cash from his lucrative drug deals:
It took me about a week of sneaking around before I could unload the Pittsburgh stuff, but when I did, it was a real score. I started using Sandy's place to mix the stuff and even with Sandy snorting more than she mixed, I could see that this was a really good business. I made twelve thousand dollars in my second week. I had a down payment on my house and things were really rolling. All I had to do was every once in a while was tell Sandy that I loved her. But it was perfect, I'm telling ya. As long as I kept getting the stuff from Pittsburgh, I knew Paulie would never find out. Within a couple of weeks, it got to be so big I needed some help. So I got Jimmy and Tommy to come in with me.
["Wives and Lovers," performed by Jack Jones.] Karen reaps some of the benefits of Henry's windfall. To Morrie Kessler and his wife Belle (Margo Winkler), she shows off her grotesquely-decorated living room with garish wall paper and tasteless furnishings, a white, custom-made leather sofa, and an electronically-operated, modish rock wall that opens up into an entertainment center with TV, hi-fi and bar. An imported, inlaid black table adorns the dining room.
The wiseguys begin masterminding, under Jimmy's guidance, another heist at the airport that "will make the Air France haul look like god-damn peanuts." It "turned out to be the biggest heist in American history - the Lufthansa heist." Wiseguys involved in the haul include Frankie Carbone, Air France cargo worker Frenchy, Joe Buddha (Clem Caserta), Johnny Roastbeef (John Williams), and Stacks Edwards (Samuel L. Jackson) "was supposed to steal the panel truck and afterwards compact it by a friend of ours out in Jersey." Morrie pesters Jimmy, 'busting his balls' in wiseguy terms, "for an advance on the money we were gonna steal."
["Monkey Man," performed by The Rolling Stones, with the lyrics: "I'm a flea-bit peanut monkey, all my friends are junkies."] Even the Hill's family babysitter Lois Byrd (Welker White) is "working for" Henry by acting as his drug courier, smuggling drugs in from his Pittsburgh, out-of-town connection in a pink baby bag while toting a real baby. From the infant's point of view as it lies on a pink blanket on a bed, the camera looks up at the smiling faces of Karen, Henry, and Lois. Later, Sandy and Henry snort lines of cocaine in her messy apartment where they mix, weigh, and prepare the white powder.
WINS radio in New York reports that the pre-dawn raid at the Lufthansa cargo terminal at Kennedy Airport nets two million dollars according to the FBI, four million according to the Port Authority police, and five million according to the city cops. ["Frosty the Snow Man," performed by the Ronettes.] A Christmas-time party at Robert's Lounge celebrates the recent theft. But things quickly start unraveling when Johnny Roastbeef arrives with his wife (Fran McGee) in a new, hot pink "gorgeous" Cadillac convertible, and Frankie Carbone shows up accompanied by his wife (Marie Michaels) in a pricey, full-length white mink coat. Jimmy, who has instructed everyone to not attract attention and act normal, is tense about their ostentatious, flashy spending without his approval: "Don't buy anything. Don't get anything. Nothing big. Didn't you hear what I said?...you're going to get us all f--kin' pinched, that's why. What are you, stupid?" And Morrie can't stop bothering Jimmy for an advance of five hundred grand. More favored than Morrie, Henry receives "a little taste" of his share for Christmas money - a stack of bills.
["Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," performed by Darlene Love.] For his own family's Christmas festivities, Henry purchases "the most expensive tree they had," a huge white artificial tree. Like old times, Karen receives a fat wad of bills to buy herself "something nice." A close-up of a purple Christmas ornament on the tree ends the scene, as Henry narrates: "Lufthansa should have been our ultimate score." ["The Bells of St. Mary's," performed by The Drifters.]
The success of the heist goes further awry because Stacks Edwards was careless and didn't dispose of the getaway truck properly. To silence the irresponsible Stacks, Tommy casually executes Stacks as he is putting on his shoes by shooting him in the back of the head. After they leave the apartment, the scene is replayed a second time in slow-motion - from an angle which reveals Tommy's dispassionate and business-like manner during the murder:
Stacks was always crazy. Instead of getting rid of the truck like he was supposed to do, he got stoned, went to his girlfriend's and by the time he woke up the cops had found the truck. It was all over the television. They even said they came up with prints off the wheel. It was just a matter of time before they got to Stacks.
["Unchained Melody," performed by Vito and The Salutations.] Tommy is honored in his gangster's career when told that he is to become an insider by being formally made part of the mob: "They're gonna make him...They opened up the books. Paulie got the okay. Can you believe that? This little guinea bastard...He's gonna get made. We're gonna work for this guy one day. He's gonna be a boss." At the end of his patience, Morrie demands his money from Jimmy - "that cheap cigarette hijacking mick!" ["Danny Boy," written by Frederick E. Weatherly.] And then sings a few lines of an Irish song to half-Irish Henry. ["Sunshine of Your Love," performed by Cream.] Paranoid and a "nervous wreck" with "his mind...going in eight different directions at once," Jimmy decides to "whack" Morrie because he "talks too much" - the frame freezes when Henry realizes the die has been cast: "That's how it happens. That's how fast it takes for a guy to get whacked." That night after a card game, as the wiseguys get in Carbone's car to go to a diner, Tommy jabs an ice pick into the back of Morrie's neck, adding: "I thought he'd never shut the f--k up."
After Morrie, other accomplices involved in the heist are ordered killed by a greedy Jimmy to sever the links between him and the Lufthansa robbery: "Jimmy was cutting every link between himself and the robbery, but it had nothing to do with me. I gave Jimmy the tip and he gave me some Christmas money. From then on, I kept my mouth shut. And I knew Jimmy. He had the cash. It was his. I know he kicked some money upstairs to Paulie, but that was it." ["Layla," performed by Derek and the Dominoes.] Johnny Roastbeef and his wife (wearing her fur coat) are left slumped and bloody in the front seat of their new pink Cadillac convertible. A large garbage truck deposits the bodies of Frenchy and Buddha, filmed in slow motion as they tumble into a dumpster. Frankie Carbone's frozen-stiff body is discovered hanging like a slab of meat on a hook in a refrigerated meat truck:
It made him sick to have to turn money over to the guys who stole it. He'd rather whack 'em. Anyway, what did I care? I wasn't asking for anything and besides, Jimmy was making nice money with me through my Pittsburgh connections. But still, months after the robbery they were finding bodies all over. When they found Carbone in the meat truck, he was frozen so stiff it took them two days to thaw him out for the autopsy.
On the day of the ceremony to "make" Tommy, Jimmy was "so happy." And Tommy, who eagerly anticipates the occasion, is dressed up to "look good." From the sidelines, both Henry and Jimmy realize that they could never accept the highest honor of being accepted into the Mafia because of their mixed heritage:
You know, we always called each other good fellas. Like you said to, uh, somebody, 'You're gonna like this guy. He's all right. He's a good fella. He's one of us.' You understand? We were good fellas. Wiseguys. But Jimmy and I could never be made because we had Irish blood. It didn't even matter that my mother was Sicilian. To become a member of a crew you've got to be one hundred per cent Italian so they can trace all your relatives back to the old country. See, it's the highest honor they can give you. It means you belong to a family and crew. It means that nobody can f--k around with you. It also means you could f--k around with anybody just as long as they aren't also a member. It's like a license to steal. It's a license to do anything. As far as Jimmy was concerned with Tommy being made, it was like we were all being made. We would now have one of our own as a member.
But when Tommy is ushered into an empty room to take a blood oath into the upper echelons of the family, and the camera takes his point of view, he is suddenly shocked and senses his days are over - he is shot in the back of the head as he speaks his last words. An overhead shot captures his body falling to the floor with blood oozing out. The cohesiveness and stature of their 'goodfellas' world crumbles with Tommy's execution, retaliation for whacking Batts without the syndicate's permission - Jimmy reacts with frustration, little-boy sobs, and displaced anger as he kicks over the diner's outdoor phone booth after hearing the news:
It was revenge for Billy Batts, and a lot of other things. And there was nothing that we could do about it. Batts was a made man and Tommy wasn't. And we had to sit still and take it. It was among the Italians. It was real greaseball s--t. They even shot Tommy in the face so his mother couldn't give him an open coffin at the funeral.
["Jump Into the Fire," performed by Harry Nilsson.] Sunday, May 11th, 1980, 6:55 am. In the film's last major sequence, the only one that is precisely timed, it is a frenetic, increasingly sped-up, exhilarating sequence in which a coked-up, messed-up, paranoid, red-eyed Henry must juggle equally-intense, multiple responsibilities and commitments on one particularly feverish day, while helicopter surveillance circles above and watches his every move. In the early morning, he leaves his driveway with a delivery of ill-fitting gun silencers to Jimmy's place - the guns are rejected and he is berated: "And stop with the f--king drugs. They're making your mind into mush." ["Memo from Turner," performed by The Rolling Stones.] 8:05 am. A highway accident and traffic jam delay Henry on the way to the hospital. ["Magic Bus," performed by The Who.] He narrowly avoids having a rear-end collision in a heavy traffic jam. 8:45 am. After a late arrival, he dutifully shuttles his crippled brother Michael back to his house where he plans to pick up Karen. 11:30 am. In the kitchen of his house, family members are recruited to help chop ingredients for the lavish dinner, as Henry obsessively watches the clock:
I had to start braising the beef, pork butt and veal shanks for the tomato sauce. It was Michael's favorite. I was making ziti with the meat gravy and I'm planning to roast some peppers over the flames and I was gonna put on some string beans with some olive oil and garlic, and I had some beautiful cutlets that were cut just right, that I was going to fry up before dinner just as an appetizer. So I was home for about an hour. Now my plan was to start the dinner early so Karen and I could unload the guns that Jimmy didn't want, and then get the package for Lois to take to Atlanta for her trip later that night.
Michael has to keep stirring the sauce on the stove as Henry also prepares for a drug pick-up and delivery to customers through babysitter Lois. ["Monkey Man," (reprise), performed by The Rolling Stones.] Karen and Henry drive to her mother's house, where they stash the guns in the garage's garbage cans. 12:30 pm. ["What is Life," performed by George Harrison.] Suspicious that they are being followed, Henry and Karen hide out at a shopping mall on Long Island to divert the helicopter. 1:30 pm. They leave the mall, return to her mother's place, pick up the guns and at 3:30 pm, deal the guns and score drugs at a motel apartment:
My plan was I had to get home and get the package ready for Lois to take on her trip. Also, I had to get to Sandy's house to give the package a whack with quinine. Plus I knew Sandy was gonna get on my ass. Then I had the cooking to finish at home, and I had to get Lois ready for her trip.
Henry is obsessed that his phone may be tapped. But instead of calling from a phone outside of the house, Lois carelessly calls from the house - the frame freezes on the act which ultimately dooms the drug-abusing Henry: "Now if anybody was listening they'd know everything. They'd know that a package was leaving from my house, and they'd even have the time and the flight number thanks to her."
6:30 pm. "As soon as I got home I started cooking. I had a few hours until Lois' flight. I told my brother to keep an eye on the stove. All day long the poor guy's been watching helicopters and tomato sauce. You see I had to drive over to Sandy's place, mix the stuff once and then get back to the gravy." 8:30 pm. ["Mannish Boy," performed by Muddy Waters.] In Sandy's apartment that evening, after mixing the heroin with quinine and taking a few snorts, he quickly appeases her, and rushes home to a Hill family dinner which finishes at 10:45 pm. Lois insists that she must be driven to her home in Rockaway to get her "lucky hat" before leaving for the airport. Henry stashes the heroin in the kitchen cupboard, and as he begins pulling out of the driveway, he is arrested by narcotics cops:
For a second I thought I was dead, but when I heard all the noise I knew they were cops. Only cops talk that way. If they had been wiseguys, I wouldn't have heard a thing. I would've been dead.
Panicking with cops about to enter the house, Karen seizes the heroin in the cupboard, runs frantically into an upstairs bathroom, and flushes it down the toilet. And then she jams a gun into her panties.
The Aftermath: Henry is questioned in an FBI Office: "They'd been on me a month. Phone taps. Surveillance. Everything." Lois, Sandy, and his drug contacts are also arrested, and Henry is threatened with "twenty-five-to-life." Henry's major concern in jail is to "straighten everything with Paulie or else I'm dead...They're all afraid I'm gonna rat them out. People are already walking away from me. I'm dead in here." He is released on bail when Karen's mother puts her house up. His main fear is treachery from Paulie, now that he has become a dangerous liability to the other criminal wiseguys:
I knew Paulie was still pissed at me and he's such a hot head. And I was worried about Jimmy. See, Jimmy knew if Paulie found out he was in the drug deals with me, Paulie would have Jimmy whacked even before me. This is the bad time...So now my plan was to stay alive long enough to sell off the dope that the cops never found and then disappear for a while until I can get things straightened out.
Because Karen had flushed the dope worth sixty thousand dollars down the toilet - ("that's all the money that we had"), the beleaguered couple break down exhausted and beaten in each other's arms in the corner of their dining room. In his final meeting with Paulie as the mobster cooks sizzling sausages in a frying pan, Henry is given - for the last time - "thirty-two hundred bucks for a lifetime. It wasn't even enough to pay for the coffin." To help ease their predicament, Karen visits with Jimmy in his jukebox/pinball machine warehouse and is graciously given some money. Then, he encourages her to walk down the sidewalk to another storefront on the streetcorner to pick out some stolen Dior dresses for herself. In the tense, discomforting, suspense-laden scene, when she reaches the entrance, she anxiously looks inside. Suddenly, she is scared off by her uncertainty, paranoid distrust, the sight of dark figures, and the thought that she is being set up. [Was she set up? The film remains ambiguous on that question.] She shouts some excuses to Jimmy about being in a hurry, and flees back to Henry for refuge.
In the end, Henry meets one last time in the window booth at the diner to talk about his options with Jimmy. Again, Jimmy is calm, friendly, and gracious, but Henry is now untrusting and reads through his friend's cold-blooded, duplicitous, deceitfully-ruthless demeanor:
If you're part of a crew, nobody ever tells you that they're going to kill you. It doesn't happen that way. There weren't any arguments or curses like in the movies. So your murderers come with smiles. They come as your friends, the people who have cared for you all of your life, and they always seem to come at a time when you're at your weakest and most in need of their help. So I met Jimmy in a crowded place we both knew. I got there fifteen minutes early, and I saw that Jimmy was already there...I had the feeling Jimmy was trying to sense whether I was gonna rat him out to save my neck.
When Jimmy proposes that Henry travel to Florida to "do a hit with Anthony," the frame freezes: "Jimmy had never asked me to whack somebody before. But now he's asking me to go down to Florida and do a hit with Anthony. That's when I knew I would never have come back from Florida alive."
In an FBI office, agent Edward McDonald (himself) interviews Henry and Karen about their options in the federal witness protection program. Henry negotiates: "I don't want to go any place that's cold." Parental contact is forbidden except under "some extraordinary set of circumstances." The agent convinces Karen that she has no other option than to enter the program and join her husband: "They're not gonna be able to get to him. The only way they can get to him is by getting to you. Or getting to your kids...Karen, I've listened to those wiretaps. And I've heard you on the telephone. You're talking about cocaine. Conversation after conversation you're talking to Henry on the phone. You're facing a lengthy prison sentence."
The interrogation/interview scene is cross-cut with arrest scenes as the spineless Henry ultimately decides to rat on his lifelong associates and goodfellas and breaks the sacred code of honor that he was taught by Jimmy in his youth - he is convinced that the government will now protect his survival: "We're basically your only salvation. We're gonna save your life." Jimmy and Paulie are arrested by FBI agents in a big gangland sweep and Henry testifies against them in a courtroom. He reflects, somewhat regretfully, on the circumstances which have brought him to this point of exile and his fall. He doesn't agonize over betraying his buddies, but mourns over his imprisonment in the anonymous, mainstream culture:
See, the hardest thing for me was leaving the life. I still love the life. And we were treated like movie stars with muscle. We had it all, just for the asking. Our wives, mothers, kids, everybody rode along. I had paper bags filled with jewelry stashed in the kitchen. I had a sugar bowl full of coke next to the bed. Anything I wanted was a phone call away. Free cars. The keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the city. I bet twenty, thirty grand over a weekend and then I'd either blow the winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the bookies. (Henry leaves the witness stand and speaks directly into the camera) Didn't matter. It didn't mean anything. When I was broke I would go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking. And now it's all over. That's the hardest part.
After being inducted into the protection program and losing his high-rolling lifestyle, Henry is banished and placed in a suburban, midwestern town in a new tract home development. His law-abiding life is suburbanized, homogenized, and normalized:
Today, everything is different. There's no action. I have to wait around like everyone else. Can't even get decent food. Right after I got here I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles and ketchup. I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.
["My Way," performed by Sid Vicious.] As he appears at his front door in a blue bathrobe and bends down to pick up the morning paper, Tommy (in a rhetorical flashback to the criminal life) fires his gun six times point-blank at the camera [homage to a scene in the silent film ] - and at Henry.
- Henry Hill is still in the Witness Protection Program. In 1987 he was arrested in Seattle, Washington for narcotics conspiracy and he received 5 years probation. Since 1987 he has been clean.
- In 1989, Henry and Karen Hill separated after 25 years of marriage.
- Paul Cicero died in 1988 in Fort Worth Federal Prison of respiratory illness. He was 73.
- Jimmy Conway is currently serving a 20-years-to life sentence for murder in a New York State prison. He will not be eligible for parole until 2004 when he will be 78 years old.
