Nearly 40 years after its release, one of Martin Scorsese’s greatest movies remains a gold standard of crime films.
In 1972, legendary Hollywood director Francis Ford Coppola set a new bar for gangster and crime films with the release of The Godfather, featuring a star-studded cast of Marlon Brando, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Al Pacino, and Richard Castellano. Based on Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel, the movie won three Oscars at the 45th Academy Awards.
Eighteen years later, Scorsese added his own film to the upper echelon of gangster movies with the release of Goodfellas. Like The Godfather, Goodfellas was based on a novel, Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy. The novel documents American mobster Henry Hill, a real-life longtime associate of the Lucchese crime family before becoming an FBI informant.
Goodfellas stars Ray Liotta (Henry Hill), Robert De Niro (Jimmy Conway, based on real-life gangster James Burke), Joe Pesci (Tommy DeVito, based on real-life gangster Thomas DeSimone) and Lorraine Bracco (Karen Hill, Henry’s wife).
According to Rotten Tomatoes, Goodfellas follows Henry as he “rises through the ranks of his neighborhood’s organized crime branch,” before landing “in the FBI’s witness protection program after testifying against his former partners.”
Goodfellas holds an impressive 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In their 2022 list of “The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time“, Variety ranked Scorsese’s 1990 classic No. 12.
Joe Pesci Won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in ‘Goodfellas’
(Photo by Warner Brothers/Getty Images)
Goodfellas garnered six Oscar nominations for the 63rd Academy Awards.
Pesci won the only Oscar for the film, taking home the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, beating Al Pacino (Alphonse “Big Boy” Caprice in Dick Tracy), Bruce Davison (David in Longtime Companion), Graham Greene (Kicking Bird in Dancing With Wolves) and Andy Garcia (Vincent Corleone in The Godfather Part III).
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