Siskel, Gene (September 21, 1990). "Scorsese's 'Goodfellas' One of the Year's Best". Chicago Tribune. Archived from the original on October 28, 2014 . Retrieved October 18, 2014.

What amazed me most is how closely the movie aligns with the book, because let’s be honest people, Hollywood screenwriters have butchered many a book. A lot of Ray Liotta’s, um, I mean Henry Hill’s classic one liners and pithy monologues are straight from the book. Much of the praise for the movie belongs to Pileggi; like the film, Wiseguy is entertaining from start to finish. It’s nonstop. A thriller and absolute banger right to the very end. Oh how I loved it. FIVE STARS! Peter Travers' Top Ten Lists 1989–2005". caltech.edu. Archived from the original on February 6, 2015 . Retrieved August 14, 2014. Henry Hill spends some of the time in this book talking about how bad he feels, emphasizing and re-emphasizing that he doesn't want to encourage anyone to become a criminal. He also bellyaches with even greater frequency about how much money he blew, particularly how much money he blew on drugs. I know the feeling -- when one needs money, it's easy to feel extreme remorse about the money one spent unwisely in the past. Hill did a six year stretch with Burke for beating John Ciaccio for skipping a bet. A month later, Hill was busted because Ciaccio’s sister worked for the FBI. A judge found Hill and Burke guilty of extortion on November 3, 1972 and was housed at United States Penitentiary, Lewisburg, along with Paul Vario. Most of John Gotti’s crew was there at the time too.The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time". Premiere. Archived from the original on March 17, 2008 . Retrieved March 26, 2008.

Slater, Dan (May 21, 2008). "A Q&A With "Goodfellas" Actor (and Dechert Lawyer) Ed McDonald". The Wall Street Journal . Retrieved June 26, 2021. Despite Hill's protestations, this book glorifies not only "the life," but the general idea of out-of-control male irresponsibility. I do believe on some level he feels bad about the violence. He may even feel bad about some of the theft. But I don't get the sense from this book that Henry really gives a damn about the pain he caused his family. Maybe he does care; maybe he thinks he does care; but I don't see that intimate regret represented here, and that's disturbing given how much Greg and Gina's later memoir affected me.In the years that followed, he began working for both the Lucchese and Colombo crime families. The fact that he was Irish American made it impossible for him to be a full member or rise up the ranks in either group — only Italians could earn that privilege — but he commanded his own squad of loyal soldiers. He too got in on the drug game over time, though stealing was his true favorite past time. The heist was an inside job, engineered by Brooklyn gangsters Berardinelli, James (2014). "Berardinelli's All Time Top 100". Reelviews.net. Archived from the original on April 10, 2017 . Retrieved April 20, 2017. So, if like me, you’ve seen the film multiple times, is it worth reading the book? Probably not. It’s good but the overwhelming sense of familiarity makes it all feel very recognisable. That said, if you really love the film then you will inevitably still get quite a lot out of reading the book including quite a lot of interesting detail about what the authorities did leading up to Henry Hill's arrest, and the aftermath of his entry into the Federal Witness Program. Once Robert De Niro agreed to play Jimmy Conway, Scorsese was able to secure the money needed to make the film. [11] Ray Liotta, who played Henry Hill, had read Pileggi's book when it came out and was fascinated by it. A couple of years afterward, his agent told him Scorsese was going to direct a film adaptation. In 1988, Liotta met Scorsese over a period of a couple of months and auditioned for the film. [12] He campaigned aggressively for a role, though Warner Bros. Pictures wanted a well-known actor; he later said, "I think they would've rather had Eddie Murphy than me." [18] Scorsese cast Liotta after De Niro saw him in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild (1986); Scorsese was surprised by "his explosive energy" in that film. [16] Al Pacino [19] and John Malkovich were considered for the role of Conway, and Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, Val Kilmer, and Tom Cruise were considered for the role of Hill. [20] [21] [22]

According to Hill, despite combining characters and slightly altering plot points and timelines, Goodfellas was about 95 percent accurate. Perhaps some of that remaining five percent has to do with the on-screen portrayals of Paul Vario, the one-time head of the Lucchese crime family, and Jimmy Burke, architect of the Lufthansa heist. Most fans of the film know that it’s Martin Scorsese's mother Catherine who plays Tommy's mother in the infamous dinner scene following Billy Batts’s murder, but the family connections hardly stop there. Tommy’s mother’s painting of two dogs sitting in front of an old man ("One's going east, and the other one is going west. So what?") was actually painted by co-writer Nicholas Pileggi’s mother. Scorsese's father Charles also pops up as Henry’s prison compadre who puts way too many onions in the gravy. 15. Robert De Niro used real money as a prop in Goodfellas. Goodfellas (1990)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango. Archived from the original on August 17, 2019 . Retrieved October 18, 2023.Goodfellas is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, particularly in the gangster genre. In 2000, it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress. [5] [6] Its content and style have been emulated in numerous other pieces of media. [7] Plot [ edit ]