The importance of music
“We found that when we were working on it that we could keep going faster and faster because of the cocaine-induced state that he is in,” Schoonmaker said on the BBC’s Film Programme in 2017. “We started jump-cutting shots to give the jagged feeling of what’s going on in his brain. Marty, of course, had thought out very carefully all the framing and camera moves on the shots. There is not much improvisation there, but he had very clear ideas how to give the paranoid feeling.”
The music Scorsese used was key. He set himself a rule that the songs for each scene must have been possible to hear at the time the action is set, helping to locate the audience in a particular time and place. “Marty had certain music that he knew he was going to use,” Schoonmaker told the BBC. Scorsese had composed the shots in his head to particular songs before he started filming. He would often play music on set so he could synchronise the scene perfectly to the musical beats. “The sequences where De Niro is knocking off everybody who has participated in the heist with him, he shot with [Eric Clapton’s Derek and the Dominos song] Layla playing on the set over a speaker so that he could get the camera moves exactly to fit the bars of music he intended.”
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The songs often serve to reflect a character’s state of mind in a scene. As the film opens, Tony Bennett’s Rags to Riches is heard as Hill begins to tell the shaggy dog story of his life of crime; Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals plays over the long tracking shot of Hill’s big date with Karen at the Copacabana, emphasising their youthful romance; while The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter soundtracks Hill’s desperate cocaine use in the apartment of the woman he is having an affair with. Even as the film ends, with Hill rueing the dull suburban life he is now confined to as part of the witness protection scheme, Sid Vicious’ punk cover of Frank Sinatra’s My Way hints that Hill doesn’t regret his criminal past. The real-life Hill would struggle to adjust to life as an average citizen and ended up getting expelled from the witness protection programme in the early 1990s after being arrested on drugs charges.
While Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films of the 1970s focus on the men at the top of the Mafia power structure, bringing a stately gravitas to the gangster mythology, Goodfellas’ frenetic, street-level view of those hustling further down the criminal food chain serves to show how ruthless it is. As the film progresses, the earlier glamour of the criminal lifestyle comes to seem illusory, while its violence seems terrifyingly real. By the end, the majority of its characters are either dead, in prison or unhappy with the life they are living.
