”The fuck is that?”
Allmovie.com
Seventeen years after revising the book on gangster movies in his breakthrough Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese returned to the netherworld of Italian-American organized crime with this stunningly ambitious, ferociously entertaining look at one man's rise and fall in a Mafia family. Shot and edited with a propulsive sense of rhythm that Gene Krupa would envy (this may be the fastest 150 minutes in film history), Goodfellas explores the 30-year career of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) as a "mechanic" working for mob boss Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino). While most films about gangsters attribute their characters' criminal lives to greed or sociopathic behavior, Scorsese makes it clear Henry and his friends Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) are gangsters because they enjoy it: they like to steal, they enjoy violence, and their "work" allows them to profit from these qualities, which would be a hindrance in nearly any other career. However, while the film offers a point-blank look at New York's criminal underworld from the '50s to the '80s, Scorsese also uses this story as a unusual but clear moral fable. In the first few reels, Henry and his partners follow a strict code of honor and make sure to obey Cicero's wishes: you pay tribute to the boss, you stay away from dealing drugs, and you don't kill anyone unless it's absolutely necessary. By the mid-'70s, these guidelines have been forgotten, and as Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy slip away from Paulie's corrupt but strictly ordered ethical universe, it leads only to death and betrayal. Scorsese has long been fascinated with the actions of men searching for a moral compass in a faithless land, but he's rarely told the story with such kinetic force and audacious skill.
VS
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
”I don't feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom. Just my enemies.”
Allmovie.com
Both sequel and prequel to The Godfather (1972), Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II (1974) delves further into the dark side of the capitalist American dream by paralleling the young Vito Corleone's 1910s rise with his son Michael's 1950s spiritual fall. To create a more contemplative view of the Corleones' American success story, Coppola cross-cut between Vito's story (in subtitled Italian) and Michael's, revealing how the honorable aim of protecting the family degenerates into an excuse for wielding lethal power, for the sake only of business. Images of Vito's parental concern and immigrant neighborhood dealings dissolve to Michael's familial disintegration and U.S. Senate subterfuge. Cinematographer Gordon Willis' warm sepia tones for the Vito sequences recall period photographs, contrasting sharply with the crass brightness and cold shadows of 1950s Lake Tahoe and Havana. With the memory of The Godfather present in Robert De Niro's uncanny evocation of Marlon Brando and in flashbacks to 1942, Coppola underlines how much The Godfather's potentially alluring myth of family unity begat horrific violence; the film becomes both a critique of responses to the first film that may have glorified its family-oriented violence and a more explicit and mournful allegory of American corporate violence and corruption across the 20th century. These aspects, together with the unique cross-cut narrative, give the movie a richer dimension and a wider scope than the first one's family drama, and it was hailed by most observers as the rare sequel that equaled, or even surpassed, the original. A box-office hit, it was nominated for ten Oscars and won six, including Best Picture, the Director prize denied Coppola in 1972, Supporting Actor for De Niro, Art Direction, and Score. Years of sequel plans finally produced The Godfather Part III in 1990; and parts I and II were later cut together in chronological order for TV as The Godfather Saga, eliminating this film's cross-cut structure. Often equated with Citizen Kane (1941), The Godfather Part II remains one of the most artistically challenging popular films ever made.
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