16 + GUIDE - British Film Institute

HOMPSON, David and CHRISTIE, Ian
Scorsese on Scorsese.
Faber and Faber, 1996. ix-xxi, 254p. appendix. filmog. bibliog. index.
This revised and updated volume features extensive sections on GOODFELLAS (pp.150-65)
and CASINO (pp.198-209). Scorsese discusses the influence of the French New Wave on the
style of GOODFELLAS, characterisation, music and Mob life. On CASINO, the director justifies
its violence and gives details of the film’s factual basis, as well as talking about music and
costume in the film. For Scorsese, CASINO is “the Old Testament story: gaining paradise and
losing it, through pride and through greed” (p200).
YAQUINTO, Marilyn
Pump ‘em full of lead: a look at gangsters on film.
Twayne Publishers, 1998. i-xix, 265p. illus. bibliog. filmog.
For Yaquinto, GOODFELLAS is “a roller-coaster look at the day-to-day lifestyle of a group of
wise guys and their families. They don’t live with the ethnic holism of the Corleones, with their
sturdy links to Sicilian traditions. Instead, these hoods reflect the breakdown of family order
and the infiltration of yuppie nihilism” (p169). While calling GOODFELLAS Scorsese’s
“gangster masterpiece”, Yaquinto is less kind to CASINO, describing De Niro and Pesci’s
“familiar face-off (of) complex, smouldering gangster versus unmanageable, lunatic killer” as
“a parody, lacking all its former edginess and sense of threat” (p174).
Journal Articles
CREATIVE SCREENWRITING
vol.8 no.2. March/April 2001, pp.38-43
‘A real good fella’, by David Konow
A revealing interview with the author, and co-screenwriter, of GOODFELLAS and CASINO.
Pileggi discusses his early career as a police reporter; his interviews with Henry Hill (the
subject of his book Wiseguy, on which GOODFELLAS was based) and his collaboration with
Scorsese on both films.
CINEACTION!
no.41. October 1996, pp.14-21
Style as attitude: two films by Martin Scorsese, by Richard Lippe
Lippe’s essay is distinguished by detailed textual analysis of both GOODFELLAS and CASINO.
The former is discussed in terms of its bravura opening sequence, its Godardian play with
generic expectations and its “undercurrent of absurdity” (p16). CASINO’s opening sequences
are also discussed for the ways in which they establish theme and tone. Lippe sees the film
as “a strictly dramatic work…about failure, loss and death” (p18) whose tone “links Casino not
to Goodfellas but to The Age of Innocence and Raging Bull” (p18). Lippe also links CASINO to
Barry Levinson’s BUGSY (1991, about the mobster Bugsy Siegel) which similarly “connects
Las Vegas to the fate of a heterosexual couple’s relationship” (p21) but “unlike Bugsy, Casino
isn’t a romantic film” and its “portrait of Las Vegas isn’t inviting or seductive” (p21). Lippe
calls the film “[among] the finest achievements of the decade” and calls for its reappraisal
those critics who regarded it a no more than a re-run of GOODFELLAS.
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