The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Martin Scorsese · a film · 1990 · 146 minutes
Mode
Gangster chronicle told as memoir; crime film, marriage story and black comedy carried at one velocity
Mythos
Faust — the boy who sells himself for the life and gets it; the fall from favour; Judas, the brother who testifies
Phase
Thirty years, 1955 to 1980, in a rise and a fall, opened from a trunk in 1970 and closed by one day cut to the speed of cocaine
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 146 minutes; Michael Ballhaus’s camera, Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing, a soundtrack of period pop running the whole length; narration by the husband and the wife
Register
From a kid’s wonder at a cabstand to a kid shot for answering back; the Copa by the kitchen door; a laugh that turns on a word
Scale
One crew, two families and a neighbourhood in Brooklyn and Queens
Governing Proposition
A boy in East New York watches the wiseguys at the cabstand across the street and wants nothing but to be one of them. The film gives him thirty years of it, in his own voice and his wife’s, at a pace that never lets the viewer stand outside the pleasure: the Copa by the kitchen door, the money, the cars, the table that is always kept. Then the pleasure turns, friend by friend, into paranoia and bodies, and the man who sells everyone ends in a suburb mourning the loss of the life, not of the lives. The wager is that velocity can make the audience complicit before it can judge, and that the mob can be shown as what it was: a job, a neighbourhood and a consumer fantasy with murder in it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins on a dark road at night in 1970. Three men in a car hear a noise from the trunk, pull over and open it. A man wrapped in a bloodied tablecloth is still alive; Tommy DeVito, played by Joe Pesci, stabs him, and Jimmy Conway, played by Robert De Niro, shoots him. Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, shuts the trunk, and in freeze-frame, lit red by the taillights, his narration tells us that he has always wanted this. Then Tony Bennett and the title. In its first minutes the film has shown the end of the life and declared the appetite for it, in that order.
It goes back to 1955, East New York, Brooklyn. A boy, played by Christopher Serrone, watches from his window the men at the cabstand across the street, who park where they like and are never kept waiting. He runs their errands, parks their Cadillacs, learns the trade. Paulie Cicero, played by Paul Sorvino, runs the stand and moves slowly because he does not have to move for anyone. The boy’s father beats him for missing school; the men take care of the mailman. He meets Jimmy, who tips everyone, and Tommy, a kid his own age. He torches cars, sells cigarettes from a trunk, and is arrested for the first time, and the men meet him outside the courthouse and celebrate it. The freeze-frames hold these moments as he holds them: as pride.
The screenplay, by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese, comes from Pileggi’s Wiseguy (1985), his book on the life of the real Henry Hill. Scorsese directed for Warner Bros., with Irwin Winkler producing, Michael Ballhaus photographing and Thelma Schoonmaker cutting; the film was released in September 1990, when he was forty-seven. What the opening settles is the method. The narration will be Henry’s, the film will show the life as he saw it, with the pleasure intact, and it will let the viewer discover what the pleasure costs at the pace he discovered it.
Movement II
In the Bamboo Lounge Henry, grown now, introduces the crew by name as the camera moves from face to face, each man turning to greet him. The place is run by Sonny Bunz, who is owed money and will have the lounge burned for the insurance when the debt comes due. Tommy tells a story about a beating and Henry says he is funny; Tommy asks what he means, and the table goes quiet while the men wait to see whether it is a joke. It is, and then it is not quite, when Sonny asks about his tab. The scene teaches the viewer the rule of the world: the laugh and the threat are the same man in the same minute.
Henry is set up on a double date with Karen, played by Lorraine Bracco, a Jewish girl from the Five Towns. He stands her up, she makes him face her, and the courtship goes on in her voice as much as his. He takes her to the Copacabana, and the camera follows them from the street, down the stairs, through the kitchen, past the waiters, into the club, where a table is carried out and set down in front of the stage, in one shot, to the Crystals. Karen asks what he does; he says construction. The scene is the seduction of the film as well as of the girl. When a neighbour assaults her, Henry pistol-whips him on his own lawn and hands her the gun to hide, and she tells us it excited her. They marry; the wedding is a hall of men named Peter and Paul, and envelopes of cash.
Then the trunk returns. Billy Batts, a made man just out of prison, played by Frank Vincent, needles Tommy in Henry’s lounge about his boyhood shoeshine. Tommy comes back later, and he and Jimmy beat Batts nearly to death while Donovan plays on the jukebox, wrap him in a tablecloth and drive him upstate to bury him, stopping at Tommy’s mother’s for dinner. She is played by Catherine Scorsese, the director’s mother, and she shows them a painting. Six months later the land is sold for building, and they dig him up again.
Movement III
At a card game in a back room, a kid named Spider, played by Michael Imperioli, is slow with a drink, and Tommy shoots him in the foot. At the next game Spider, limping, tells Tommy where he can go, and the table laughs, and Tommy shoots him dead. Jimmy’s anger is about the hole they now have to dig. The two scenes are cut like the scene about being funny, and that is the point: nothing distinguishes the night that ends in laughter from the night that ends in a body except the mood of one man.
Henry takes a girlfriend, Janice, and keeps an apartment for her. Karen finds out, and in the film’s coldest domestic scene wakes him with a pistol at his face, in her voice, and cannot pull the trigger; he turns the gun on her and leaves. Paulie sends him back to his wife, since the crew does not do divorce, and to get him out of the way for a while sends him and Jimmy to Tampa to collect a debt. They threaten the debtor with the lions at the zoo, and are arrested on their return. Henry does several years. In prison the life continues: Paulie slices garlic with a razor, the men cook steak and lobster in a cell, and Henry runs drugs through Karen’s visits, the start of what will end everything.
He comes out, and Paulie, who hates drugs because they bring the law down on everyone, tells him to stop. He does not. He sets up with Tommy and Jimmy and a connection in Pittsburgh, with Karen’s help and his girlfriend’s apartment as the kitchen. And Jimmy sets up the Lufthansa robbery at Kennedy Airport, then called the largest cash theft in the country’s history, which is given to the viewer in a few shots of a van and some bags, since the robbery is not what matters. What matters is the money, and the men who have it, and how long Jimmy can bear to watch them spend it.
Movement IV
After the robbery Jimmy tells the crew to buy nothing, and they come to the Christmas party in a pink Cadillac and a fur. Morrie Kessler, played by Chuck Low, the wig salesman whose television commercial the film has already shown and who brought the idea in, will not stop asking for his share. Jimmy stands at the bar smoking, watching Morrie through the smoke, and the camera moves slowly toward him while Cream plays, and the viewer watches a man decide to kill his friend. The decision is taken in silence; the killing, an ice pick in the back of the neck in a parked car, is done by Tommy as an interruption to a conversation.
Then the bodies. To the piano coda of the Derek and the Dominos song, the camera finds them: the couple in the pink Cadillac in the snow, Frankie Carbone frozen in a meat truck, a body in a garbage truck. Stacks Edwards, played by Samuel L. Jackson, has already been shot in bed for sleeping through the morning he was meant to dispose of the van. Jimmy has killed almost everyone who could tie him to the robbery. The film does not show the killings; it shows the aftermath as a litany, with the music making it beautiful, and the viewer learns what the velocity was for.
Tommy is told he is to be made, the honour that Jimmy and Henry, with their Irish names, can never have. He dresses, and is driven to a house, and walks through a door into an empty room, and is shot in the head. It is the answer for Billy Batts, delivered years late. Jimmy takes the call in a phone booth and smashes the receiver; De Niro plays the grief as rage at an object, since the man cannot afford grief. Pesci’s Tommy has been the film’s comedy and its terror in one body, and his death, sudden and without ceremony, obeys the rule he lived by.
Movement V
One day, titled on screen with its date. Henry has to sell guns to Jimmy, pick up his brother from the hospital, cook a dinner, cut the cocaine, keep his girlfriend from using the shipment, and get the babysitter who carries the drugs onto a plane. He does all of it high, and the film cuts to his pulse: the helicopter he is sure is following him, the sauce that has to be stirred, Harry Nilsson and the Rolling Stones, a spoonful of powder in a kitchen, the babysitter who insists on going home for her lucky hat. The day ends with a gun at his head in his own driveway: the narcotics police, not the helicopter. Karen flushes the cocaine as they come in; it was the only money they had.
Paulie gives him some money and turns him away. Jimmy, at a diner, asks him to go to Florida to do a job, and the background slides toward Henry as he understands that Jimmy intends to kill him; the shot tracks out and zooms in, and it is borrowed from Hitchcock. Jimmy sends Karen down a street to a warehouse to pick out dresses, and she sees the men in the doorway and runs. Henry, with his crew gone and the two men who are left both wanting him dead, goes to the federal prosecutor, played by Edward McDonald, who had prosecuted the real Henry Hill, and takes his family into the Witness Protection Program.
In the courtroom he names Jimmy and Paulie, and then he stands and speaks to the camera to tell us what he has lost: not the friends, the life. The last shot is a suburban house, a man in a robe picking up the newspaper, and then Tommy, in a doorway, firing a pistol at the camera, a gesture borrowed from The Great Train Robbery (1903). The heirs came quickly: the talk and the sudden violence in Tarantino, the decade of songs in Anderson, the New Jersey cousins and much of the cast in The Sopranos. What they took was the method. It makes the viewer want what Henry wants, at his speed, and only afterwards shows the bill.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and on the cut. The film runs close to two and a half hours over thirty years, and almost nothing idles: Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing drops whole years in a freeze-frame and a line of narration, and each scene is kept only as long as it pays. The subtractive test is hard to pass. The Bamboo Lounge introductions, the painting at Tommy’s mother’s table, the garlic sliced with a razor in prison, Morrie’s wig commercial: each looks like colour and is load-bearing, since the texture is the argument, the life as a job and a pleasure. What gives: the affair with Janice runs slightly past its use, and the Tampa debt collection, with the lions, is an anecdote the film enjoys rather than needs. Those are weighed, and the figure stands high.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: organised crime, seen from inside, is a job and a consumer fantasy, and its hold on the people in it is the hold of appetite, not of honour. The film shows the mob as an economy of tribute, Paulie taking his cut as a landlord takes rent, and as a shopping list: the Copa table, the fur, the Christmas money, the cocaine. Henry’s last narration, mourning the loss of the life rather than of any person, names the condition, and Karen’s narration makes the fantasy a shared one, the wife bought with a wad of bills. It is a meaning, and it holds. Held at the figure because the disclosure is sociological: the film names the appetite but does not look past it to what in a person it answers.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation returns, and it is cold: the Copacabana Steadicam, one unbroken shot from the street through the kitchen to a table set down before the stage; the piano coda of Layla over the discovered bodies, the pink Cadillac in the snow, the meat truck; Jimmy at the bar deciding to kill Morrie as the camera pushes in; the long coked day of 11 May 1980, cut to the speed of the drug; the diner shot in which the background slides toward Henry as he understands Jimmy wants him dead; Tommy firing at the camera. Michael Ballhaus’s camera and the songs do the lifting. Held at the figure because the height is of one kind, exhilaration and dread, never beauty or grief, and the passages of prison and marriage run flat by design.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The archetype is brushed and not built. Faust stands behind the film: a boy sells what he has for the life, gets everything, and the bill comes in. The fall from favour, the betrayal of the brothers, the Judas who testifies, are all present, and the Catholic frame of a Scorsese film is felt in the Christmas money and the church weddings. But the film is deliberately sociological. Its explanations are the cabstand, the neighbourhood, the Irish names that keep Jimmy and Henry from being made, the economy of tribute; it never lets the pattern become load-bearing, and it declines the operatic register in which The Godfather made its family a dynasty. The particulars stay hard and the deep pattern stays behind them. That is the choice, and the figure records it.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the American gangster film as The Godfather had remade it: operatic, dynastic, slow, scored for orchestra, its violence ceremonial. The departures: a pop soundtrack running through thirty years and dating each one; freeze-frames with narration over them; two narrators, one of them the wife; a pace that compresses years into minutes and a last act cut to the rhythm of cocaine; violence that is sudden and petty, a kid shot for an insult, a made man kicked to death over a remark about a shoeshine box. The stake was real: a studio film with no sympathetic centre, released into an expectation of another Godfather. Held near the gate by precedent: Scorsese’s own Mean Streets (1973) had the neighbourhood, the songs and the volatility, and this film enlarges that method.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is that complicity is an appetite, and the form administers the appetite: the narration lets Henry sell the life to the viewer as he sells it to himself, the velocity never allows a pause in which to object, the songs make every acquisition a pleasure, and the freeze-frames hold the moments he is proud of. A slower, third-person telling would know less; it would judge, and lose the pleasure that is the subject. The last day proves it: the cutting becomes the drug, and the viewer feels the paranoia before the plot explains it. Held below the top where the form carries exposition: the courtroom, Karen’s talk with the lawyer, the final address to the camera, which states what the structure has shown.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and there are thirty-six years of it. The film has stayed in continuous critical and popular circulation, is taught and reverse-engineered by filmmakers, and rewards return chiefly on the formal side: the cutting rhythm, where the camera moves and why, how the songs are placed against the action, what the narration conceals. The semantic yield is shallower. Its questions are fewer than Vertigo’s and more answerable: whether the film indicts or celebrates, which was argued in 1990 and has largely been settled on the side of both at once. The formal depth exceeds the semantic. Held at the figure for that reason: the well goes down a long way through craft, and less far through meaning, and the second return teaches more about how than about what.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Released in 1990, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film replaced the operatic gangster picture with a sociological one told at speed, with pop music and narration, and that became the grammar of American crime cinema and television for a generation. The reach is demonstrated and direct. Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) took its talk and its sudden violence; Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) took its rise and fall over a decade of songs; David Chase built The Sopranos (1999) on its New Jersey cousins and drew on its cast; Scorsese himself returned to the method in Casino (1995) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Held below the top because the redirection was of one genre, not of the medium.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across thirty-six years and through a change of medium, since the film’s influence was carried into television. It lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to Dances with Wolves and has outlived that verdict completely; its standing has risen without interruption. The period surface is not a liability because it is the subject: the suits, the cars and the songs date the life year by year. Charged: the violence that shocked in 1990 is now the genre’s baseline, and the narrated, song-driven rise and fall has been copied so widely that its devices can read as familiar. The span holds it level with Raging Bull, a decade older, and Nirvana’s Nevermind, a year younger and as widely present, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing, the freeze-frames, the years dropped between cuts, the last day cut to the drug; Michael Ballhaus’s camera, the Copa Steadicam, the push-in on Jimmy at the bar, the diner shot; the placement of the songs, the Crystals at the Copa, the Layla coda, Sid Vicious at the end; Joe Pesci’s Tommy, funny and lethal in the same breath; Robert De Niro’s Jimmy, his pleasure in a well-worked job and his cold decision at the bar; Ray Liotta’s Henry, a narrator who is all appetite and no reflection; Lorraine Bracco’s Karen, who makes the wife’s complicity sexual and plain. Costs are weighed: the ageing of the principals across thirty years is carried by hair and costume and does not always hold.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Tommy asking Henry what he means by funny, a table of laughing men turning on a word, and the murder of Spider, shot in the foot for a slow drink and then shot dead for answering back. One law governs them, volatility: a laugh and a killing are the same event waiting on the same man’s mood, and the film cuts the two scenes to the same rhythm so that the viewer learns to fear the laughter. The law holds from the cabstand to the suburb, in Paulie’s slow displeasure as well as in Tommy’s speed. Two things strain it: the courtroom scenes, in another and flatter grammar, and the last address to the camera, which steps outside the world it has built to explain it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Several orders are held in one structure: crime as a trade, with its tribute, its fences and its bookkeeping; the family, in Karen’s marriage and the dinner at Tommy’s mother’s with a body in the trunk outside; class, in a boy from East New York who wants never to wait in line; consumption, the suits, the furs, the Copa table; the neighbourhood as a state within the state; the prison as a continuation of the life. They are integrated, since every acquisition is paid for by a crime. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the state proper appears only as detectives and a courtroom, never as the city the mob lives off; the sacred is a wedding and a Christmas; history outside the neighbourhood is a soundtrack. It is a chronicle of one crew.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, then The Living Form at 9.1. Craft that bears weight from the first freeze-frame to the last day, a redirection of the American crime film demonstrated in a generation of heirs, and a form in which the velocity and the narration are the complicity itself.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7 — crime, family, class and consumption are held together, but the state is a courtroom, the sacred a wedding and history a soundtrack: a chronicle of one crew. Above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, where the Faustian pattern is brushed by a film that explains itself through sociology and never builds it, and The Bottomless Well at 8.5, where the depth is formal more than semantic.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on four of five: The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Swerve at 8.7, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5; The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 does not. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. The work is held below the summit by one condition, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 against 8.5, and by its aggregate, 8.7 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Goodfellas as released by Warner Bros. in September 1990, about 146 minutes, from the trunk on the dark road to the last shot of Tommy firing at the camera. No print, script or recording was consulted. The theatrical cut is the object. Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy (1985) and the life of the real Henry Hill are not part of the work, and nothing from them is imported. Dialogue is described rather than quoted. Figures that could not be verified, among them the number of songs on the soundtrack, the length of the Copacabana shot, the count of the dead and the box-office returns, are not given.