In the era of the Great Depression and Prohibition in the United States, gangsters became the new heroes. Perfectly dressed guys like Al Capone and John Dillinger have regularly appeared on the pages of the crime chronicle, becoming celebrities and trendsetters. They were imitated in life and on the movie screen. The best actors of the time, from James Cagney to Edward J. Robinson, portrayed tough and unprincipled guys in three-piece suits, fedora and the constant Thompson machine gun in their hands. In Scorsese’s films, in his own words, mafia is a mixture of the tragic fates of mobsters and the cult American gangster cinema.
Martin Scorsese’s gangster saga Goodfellas (1990) is considered by many to be perhaps the best film in a director’s career. The Goodfellas, in the flow of the late 1970s and 1980s, is a farewell to the romantic image of gangsters who have now mastered the drug trade. The film is based on Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family of 1985. It tells the viewer a story of success and defeat, peppered with uneasy relationships between friends, enemies, and loved ones. Scorsese voices one of the most tenacious American myths in the simple-minded monologues of the protagonist and consistently destroys it: the charm of big money, power, risk disintegrates into ordinary meanness, senseless cruelty, and unappetizing greed. The film Goodfellas plunges the viewer into the criminal underground and, like no other, exposes the brilliance, blood and greed of gangster culture.
At the same time, this is a completely entertaining movie: Scorsese throws freeze frames with fantastic ease and flaunts super-long plans such as a textbook three-minute drive through the corridors of a nightclub. His scenery fills with blood without any transition, and arranges the massacre with a pop hit as a leading theme. Scorsese plays with scenes, uses them as he pleases to tell a compelling story without causing his auditory to recoil from the cruelty on screen.
Tommy’s final shot into the camera, for example, is considered to be a kind of an homage to The Great Train Robbery (1903), where in the end the bandit also shoots from a revolver into the auditorium. Costume designer Richard Bruno traces the evolution of the protagonist through changes in his wardrobe. Thirty years of mafia go from the typical double-breasted beige suit, which Henry buys for one of the first criminal fees, and the elegant suits and leather and velvet jackets, which became relevant in the 1970s. The last decade ends with a blue robe of an ordinary US citizen in the movie’s finale. Scorsese also paid special attention to the tight white collars of the heroes’ shirts, as they were supposed to symbolize the iron grip of the mafia, which firmly holds the “goodfellas” by their throats.
Despite his success in bringing the many-sided New York to life on screen with Goodfellas, there was one film that Scorsese could not get started on for a long time – Gangs of New York. Based on a documentary detailed book by Herbert Asbury, it shows the birth of that brutal gangster world of modernity, which the director captured in Goodfellas and his other previous films. An epic picture of a living classic, the film reveals the Evil Streets of the 1860s New York. Almost a century ago, the New York phenomenon was described in documentary prose, but Scorsese created a film poem.
The first thing that attracts attention in Gangs of New York is the scale. Dozens of clans, each with its own colors, ideology, religion, interests, are tearing New York apart, which is different from the Goodfellas, where the world revolved around the three protagonists. The street hierarchy of the 19th century is also shown in much more detail; for example, each character has their own conditional rank and place. The picture is filled with crowd scenes, numerous details and features of both characters and everyday life of that era, which further enhances the grandeur of the director’s plan.
In Gangs of New York, Scorsese places great emphasis on such a difficult topic as interethnic relations, rather than focusing purely on the aspects of gangster life. Not unlike in Goodfellas, he decides to touch upon acute issues of patriotism, law and duty, equality – issues that are still relevant in the world. Baker (2021) explains that “the struggles of American immigrants, the prejudices they faced, and their varied means of overcoming them are central to the film – Scorsese’s most explicitly “Irish” one” (p. 19). Within Gangs of New York, the director discusses who the real American is – a native who was born on this land or an emigrant who came for a better life.
However, the key idea of the Gangs of New York is similar to the Goodfellas’ – it is the cyclical and dynamic nature of life. Nothing stands still, the world is constantly in motion, each life process has its own cycle. And this has its own splendor and its own tragedy, which Scorsese both painted beautifully in each film, granted that he used different cinematography tools for them.
The story of street gangs and organized crime in New York, about which Scorsese shot the Goodfellas in 1990, interested the director since childhood, when his father first told him about the New York riots of 1863. Scorsese continued exploring this issue in Gangs of New York, where he chooses to tell the story of the street gangs of the 19th century Lower Manhattan – a one of the natural urban systems of the city of immigrants. Both films revolve around mafia, mobs and gangsters – however, both explain the people’s places in them in different ways.
Reference
Baker, A. (2021). A companion to Martin Scorsese. Wiley Blackwell.