Summary
We see Karen and Henry showing off their new house to Morrie and his wife. The house is lavish and tacky, and the wall opens with a remote control to reveal a television and liquor cabinet. Morrie pulls Henry aside while Karen is showing off the dining room to talk about a big upcoming heist that Jimmy is organizing. We see the mobsters gathered at a bar getting ready for what Henry calls “the biggest heist in American history,” the “Lufthansa Heist,” which will involve $6 million. Henry lays out the plan for the heist: “Tommy and Carbone were going to grab the outside guard and make him get us in the front door, Frenchy and Joe Buddha had to round up the workers, Johnny Roastbeef had to keep them all tied up and away from the alarm, even Stacks Edwards got in on it…all he was supposed to do was steal the panel truck and afterwards compact it with a friend of ours in New Jersey. Only Morrie was driving us nuts—just because he set this up, he felt he could bust Jimmy's balls for an advance on the money we were going to steal. He didn't mean anything by it; it was just the way he was.”
The scene shifts and we see a baby being laid down on Henry and Karen’s bed. Karen, Henry, and Lois, their babysitter, look at the baby as Henry tells us that even Lois was involved with the heist. We then see Henry cooking and doing cocaine in his mistress Sandy’s apartment. He scolds her for keeping her apartment so messy and leaving the drugs out, and she begins to kiss him and seduce him. We see Henry in the shower as he listens to the radio reporting on the Lufthansa heist, learning that the gang was successful. He begins screaming in ecstasy, slapping the wall of the shower, laughing exaggeratedly, and yelling Jimmy’s name. A quick cut takes us to a bar, where Jimmy is greeting Henry with open arms as Christmas music plays. The mobsters celebrate their success and one of them shows off a fancy pink car he just bought. Jimmy scolds him for buying something so soon after the heist, even though the man insists that he bought it under his mother’s name as a wedding gift for his new wife. Jimmy only gets angrier as the man apologizes and breaks out into a rage. The man and his wife go to get a drink as Frank enters the bar. Frank’s date is wearing an expensive fur coat, which angers Jimmy even more and he pulls it off the date. Frank agrees and leaves with his date to return the coat.
The party continues. Morrie comes over to Jimmy and tells him he needs the money, which only serves to frustrate Jimmy more. Henry tries to warn Morrie not to push it with Jimmy tonight, and offers to go talk to Jimmy himself. In the next room, Jimmy takes out a stack of money and gives it to Henry as part of his share. Suddenly they are interrupted by someone on the other side of the door wanting to talk to Jimmy. Jimmy warns Henry to be smart about how he spends the money, to which Henry agrees. The scene cuts abruptly to Henry arriving home with a Christmas tree, which he announces to his family was “the most expensive tree” available. We see his children unwrapping expensive presents under the tree as he hands Karen a stack of bills. As the camera zooms in on the Christmas tree, white with purple ornaments, Henry narrates, “Lufthansa should have been our ultimate score, the heist of a lifetime, 6 million in cash, more than enough to go around.”
We see Stacks, a black member of the gang who helped with the Lufthansa heist, asleep in bed. He is awoken by Tommy banging on his door. Tommy is with Frank and comes into Stacks’ apartment and makes some smalltalk. After making some pleasantries, and lightheartedly joking that Stacks is always late, Tommy abruptly shoots him, making a bloody mess on the bed. Frank is clearly a little disturbed and Tommy quickly ushers him out of the apartment. We see Tommy returning to Stacks’ house and shooting his body repeatedly as Henry narrates, “Stacks was always crazy. Instead of getting rid of the truck like he was supposed to, 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.”
We see Henry approaching Jimmy at the bar, telling him that he needs to talk. The two men go in the next room, where Henry asks Jimmy about Stacks and what’s going to happen next. Jimmy assures him that it’s all going to be fine, and Tommy comes in and tells Henry not to worry so much. Jimmy then informs Henry that Paulie is going to make Tommy a boss. Henry congratulates Tommy and seems to forget all about what he was worried about. When Morrie tries to confront Jimmy about his share of the money, Henry pulls him aside and gets him to calm down, assuring him that he’ll get his money if he just stops “bustin’ balls.” As Jimmy anxiously smokes a cigarette at the bar, Henry speaks in voiceover about Jimmy’s anxiety: “His mind was going in 8 different directions at once.” We see Jimmy and Henry walking down the street, Jimmy asking if Morrie told his wife about the heist. “That’s when I knew Jimmy was gonna whack Morrie. That’s how it happens. That’s how fast it takes for a guy to get whacked,” Henry narrates. Henry tries to take Jimmy’s attention away from Morrie, but Jimmy insists that Henry bring him over that night.
We see Morrie at the bar talking with the other mobsters, as Henry watches him and thinks about how he can possibly talk Jimmy out of killing Morrie without letting Jimmy know that that is his intention. The men gamble and drink around the table, as Tommy tells a funny story to their delight. As the men laugh at Tommy’s story, Jimmy turns to Henry and calls off the plan to whack Morrie that night. Outside, out of view of Henry, Morrie wants to talk to Jimmy about the money. Jimmy laughs about what a “ball buster” Morrie is, and they laugh about it, before getting in the car with Tommy and Frank to go to a diner to talk over coffee. As they get in the car, Tommy stabs Morrie in the head from the backseat, and Jimmy orders them to chop up the body and get rid of the car, leaving them to deal with it. Late that night, Morrie’s wife shows up on Henry and Karen’s front step, telling them that Morrie didn’t come home. “I know something happened!” she yells, and Henry tries to calm her down by telling her he’ll find him the next day. Henry goes to the diner to meet with Jimmy, who tells him to keep making excuses to Morrie’s wife. They say their goodbyes.
The scene shifts to the man’s pink car sitting under a bridge, near a bunch of young boys holding baseball bats and bashing up old abandoned cars. Two of the boys walks towards the pink car, curiously. We then see the pink car at another time, with the owner and his wife sitting in the front, both of them shot in the head. In voiceover, Henry tells us that “Jimmy was cutting every link between himself and the robbery,” as we see a number of dead gangsters being loaded into a big trash truck. A garbage man is appalled to see the bloody bodies of the men as Henry narrates, “From then on, I kept my mouth shut.” He tells us that Jimmy didn’t like turning money over to the men who did the heist, so he would just kill them instead. “Months after the robbery, they were still finding bodies everywhere,” Henry says, as the camera zooms into the back of a meat truck, where butcher’s meat hangs. Among the meat is the hanging dead body of Frank. Henry tells us that he was safe from Jimmy’s wrath because he brought in drug money from Pittsburgh, and that in spite of all the killings, Jimmy was very happy at this time.
Part of why Jimmy is so happy is because Paulie is making Tommy a boss. We see Tommy at home, all dressed up for the ceremony, saying goodbye to his mother, who wishes him luck and tells him to be careful. Tommy goes out to a car that’s picking him up as Henry narrates, “We always called each other goodfellas, like you’d say to somebody, ‘You’re gonna like this guy. He’s alright. He’s a good fella. He’s one of us.’ You understand? We were goodfellas. Wiseguys.” Henry explains that while he and Jimmy could not get made because they had Irish blood, Tommy’s promotion meant that they would have one of their own in the inner circle, and they would become less disposable. We see Tommy getting escorted into a house, expecting to get made, but as he enters, he is brutally shot in the face by one of Paulie’s men. Vinnie, one of the gangsters, calls Jimmy on a payphone to tell him. Jimmy is violently upset and slams the phone down, crying at the news. Henry comes out of the nearby diner and Jimmy tells him they whacked Tommy. “It was revenge for Billy Batts, and a lot of other things,” Henry narrates, and we see Tommy’s body dead on the tile shot from above, blood spilling out of his head.
A supertitle reads, “Sunday, May 11th, 1980, 6:55 AM.” Henry snorts a line of cocaine, puts a gun in a paper bag and leaves his house, throwing the bag with the gun in the trunk of his car and looking up suspiciously at a passing helicopter. Henry outlines what a busy day May 11th was in voiceover: he had to drop off some guns at Jimmy’s, pick up his brother at hospital, drive his brother to dinner, and pick up some “Pittsburgh stuff” to give to Lois the babysitter to deliver to Atlanta. We see Henry delivering the guns to Jimmy, who gives them back angrily, complaining that they aren’t good, and advising Henry to stop doing drugs. At 8:05, we see Henry driving down the highway, looking up suspiciously at the helicopter he spotted earlier, which seems to be following him. He arrives at the hospital to pick up his brother, and a doctor approaches him about how worse for wear he looks (from all the drugs). The doctor insists on giving Henry a check-up, to which Henry reluctantly agrees, and gives Henry some Valium before sending him home. Henry takes his brother out of the hospital in a wheelchair. As they drive on the highway, Henry points out the helicopter that he thinks has been following him all day. While his brother doesn’t believe him, Henry insists, “I’ve seen it all day.”
Analysis
Momentum and flow are central to the viewer’s experience of Goodfellas. Hardly any of the scenes go on for very long before a transition is made to a new location and set of circumstances. We see events rush by in flashes, from weddings, to jail, to parties, to heists, to drug-fueled liaisons with Henry’s latest mistress. As Henry gets more and more embroiled in his chaotic and shady ventures, the film seems to pick up more and more speed, with shorter and shorter scenes and higher and higher stakes. This mirrors the structure of Henry’s life: as things get worse and move faster, he keeps getting further embroiled in the mess he’s made, unable to stop the dramas he runs up against. It also mirrors the wild drug-fueled patter of his life. As the music gets groovier to reflect the rock music of the 1970s, the effect of the quick jumps becomes trippier, representing Henry’s increased reliance on cocaine, not only for profit, but for energy, drive, and confidence.
Again, props and objects, and the camera’s perspective on them, are important to Scorcese’s storytelling in this part of the film. Indeed, in the world of organized crime, the signifiers of success and wealth are represented by fancy items, expensive clothes, and flashy displays of consumption. While the gangsters in Goodfellas exhibit some comically bad taste—Karen and Henry’s new apartment includes a television display/liquor cabinet combination with a remote control opener, another gangster buys a pink coupe, and Henry brings home a white artificial Christmas tree—this bad taste is expensive, and the men burn through their winnings faster than anticipated. When Jimmy sees the expensive items that some of the men have bought for their wives, he becomes livid that they would throw their money around so soon after the heist, even going so far as to physically remove Frank’s girlfriend’s mink coat to make his point. Immediately after promising Jimmy to be smart about the money, Henry brings home the most expensive fake tree he can find. As the camera zooms in on one of the tree’s ornaments—an ugly but expensive-looking purple ball—Henry tells us that they thought that the Lufthansa heist would bring in more than enough, but this clearly wasn’t the case. The camera lingers on the ornament for a minute before moving to the next scene, and it serves to symbolize the gangsters’ decadent greed.
The brutality of the film continues to shock and jar, and Tommy’s rage and sense of justice remain particularly warped and bloodthirsty. While visiting Stacks’ house, Tommy makes standard pleasantries, before abruptly shooting Stacks, then returning to his house later to continue shooting him unnecessarily, purely out of spite. Tommy is depicted as a heartless sociopath, remorseless and skilled at switching between lightheartedness and atrocious violence. While the stakes of all of their operations are high—if anyone messes up, as Stacks did, they risk going to jail for life—and the main modus operandi of the mafia is brute force, Tommy displays a flamboyantly unchecked desire to kill and hurt. While Henry and the other gangsters treat violence as a necessary evil of their position, Tommy seems to relish and delight in it. The murder of Stacks is exceedingly disturbing also because of Stacks’ status as the only black man in the gang. The sight of a bloodied and brutalized black male body propped up against his own blood soaked bed is an unsettling one, and depicts to the viewer that as countercultural as the mafia imagines itself to be, it still retains the violent hierarchies of the broader culture. Stacks’ incompetence with the heist certainly made him vulnerable to punishment, but he is all the more disposable to the gang because of his race.
In this section of the film, we learn what the eponymous “goodfella” is. Unsurprisingly, a goodfella means someone who is a good guy who can be trusted by other members of the mafia. It’s a kind of ambiguous and repurpose-able term for someone likable and trustworthy, and a shorthand for the fraternal and patriarchal codes that dictate the gangster society and invite people in. In a movie that has already depicted so much brutality and senseless violence perpetrated by the men in the gang, the definition of the word strikes an uncanny and complicated cord. While the men in the inner circle might understand what a “goodfella” is, and the word carries a lot of meaning for those men who are protected by the belonging it grants, we can see that the men who survive have had to be ethically reprehensible to maintain their status (or ascend the ranks, like Tommy). There is an irony in the term “goodfella” and its meaning; it is a word meant to define trustworthiness, but the ethics and codes that dictate the mafia are themselves untrustworthy, and their most loyal devotees are dishonest, crooked, and morally bankrupt. Thus, we can see that “goodfellas” are anything but good; in fact, they are the toughest, meanest and most ruthless around. The irony of this designation is made all the more potent by the abrupt and shocking murder of Tommy.
Throughout all of the movie, the tone remains bright, fast-paced, and somewhat light-hearted. Because everything moves so quickly, there is hardly any time to harp on the tragedies and the brutalities of Henry’s plight. The first time we see one of the men express an emotion about the unforgiving codes of the mobsters is when Jimmy breaks down after Tommy gets whacked. This hardly lasts for very long, however, and in no time, the viewer is dropped down in May 11th, 1980, which, the film hints, is sure to be a momentous day. The fact that the exact date and time is given, while such details have only been vaguely indicated in the rest of the film, lets the viewer know that this particular day will prove especially significant in the grand scheme of the movie. Beyond Henry having a particularly busy calendar with a lot to do, something seems to be coming to a head, perhaps indicated by the helicopter that has been trailing his car all day.
