Screen:

...Bringing her to an expensive night club, he steers her past the long line outside and through a side entrance...

...Yet, in the finished movie, all we get is the briefest of shots of the man's flight followed by the curtest indication of the boy bringing succor...

...Disgusting, but it sure rivets your attention...

...The men haven't really betrayed him or overtly questioned his authority...

...But I wish Scorsese would choose a protagonist with a sensibility as alive as his own...

...he is one of us...

...Going down some steps, Liotta greets some of the club's personnel...

...This part of the movie grows logically enough out of the earlier ebullient scenes...

...But Jimmy is both greedy and paranoid, so the slaughter begins and the dead men's shares are confiscated by Jimmy...

...now he sees the personal threat and leaves...

...While the Coens use tricks to keep the jaded viewer watching (and leave him more jaded than before), Scorsese uses tricks to crack open realities that would otherwise be closed to us...

...The Miller's Crossing sequence is nothing but a stunt, while the long tracking shot in GoodFellas contributes to what the entire movie does...

...The boy Henry drew us in...

...As filmed, the beating makes no sense in any respect: physically (Byrne emerges without a bruise on his face), psychologically (Finney's character is the sort who would take vengeance on a traitor with tears running down his face and cries of rage on his lips, not with impassivity), or dramatically (this public beating establishes Byrne's credibility with Finney's enemies, but we don't see Byrne arranging for the attack to be public...

...Now, about that tracking shot in GoodFellas: Young gangster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) is taking a middle-class Jewish girl (Lorraine Bracco) out on their first serious date...

...De Niro and Pesci play monsters whose consciousness we can't enter either, but they are glittering monsters whom we watch with fascination from afar...

...This is partly the fault of Ray Liotta's rather threadbare performance that never holds the attention as Joe Pesci's pit bull ferocity or Robert De Niro's volcanic rage do...

...Both scenes are stunts designed to wow the viewer...

...Once Henry feels his life is in jeopardy, he turns Jimmy and Paulie in...

...When De Niro smashes a telephone and then overturns the phone booth, he commands the attention that wild beasts always get...

...How many times would we have to watch the guy fall...

...They know him...

...we too might commit crimes if crime were absolutely the only thing that could give us a purchase on joy...

...Scorsese and his superb editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, scoop out of each scene just what they need to reveal its point: the significant dialogue out of a welter of ad libs, the lethal glance, the supplicating gesture...

...After seeing GoodFellas, you will understand why a young man would want to be a gangster, and you will understand why a woman would want to be married to one...

...The Coen brothers (director Joel and writer-producer Ethan) have taken Dashiell Hammett's excellent crime novel, The Glass Key, exchanged its tense, logical action for gory special effects, dissolved its grimy urban poetry with overblown photography and forgettable sets, and substituted cheap ethnic stereotypes for Hammett's cruelly veracious characterizations...

...If local thugs are more powerful than a division of the U.S...

...RICHARD ALLEVA...

...It's been years since I read The Glass Key but I still remember its description of the way a goon's jacket bunched up between his shoulders as he bent over a prostrated enemy and prepared to break his neck...

...On a recent PBS documentary about Scorsese, the filming of a scene near the movie's beginning was shown...

...Henry saw the rewards of a gangster's life and enlisted...

...In Miller's Crossing, gangster boss Albert Finney punches aide-de-camp and former friend Gabriel Byrne through every room of a two-story hotel...

...And so goes the entire movie...

...A wounded man running down a street eventually collapses in a store where the child Henry helps him...

...Even their display of wealth wasn't especially dangerous considering the flashy life these gangsters have always led...

...Won't they get thrown out...

...government, why not run with the thugs...

...This illusion, so impossible for most of us to entertain, seems fully justified to the girl because of the way she has been whirled by Henry into luxury and convenience...

...In their economies, Scorsese and Schoonmaker are true artists...

...Because the eleven-year-old boy Henry Hill runs important errands for the neighborhood gang, the smiling thugs fill his pockets with money and make his problems disappear...

...And that's all the Coens care about...

...And, in the course of the movie, we have been gradually shut out of Henry's consciousness, so that the sense of discovery that we got from the earlier scenes is lost...

...No gangster code has been clearly trespassed...

...If his school sends letters to his parents warning them that Henry is truant, the thugs intimidate the mailman into pocketing those messages...

...When Henry's mentor Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) brings off a spectacular heist at JFK airport, he cautions his gang not to display too much wealth too soon for fear that the police will take notice...

...it takes you to a place on the American map which, though it really exists, might as well be labeled Here Be Monsters...

...into the club itself where all the waiters know him and where a table instantly materializes despite the lack of reservation...

...You pay your seven dollars at the box office and the brothers kill two hours of your life...

...Passive monsters don't make good protagonists...

...And just behind the couple are some very heavy looking gents and very flashy women who smile and wave and press flesh and who probably also got into this club without a reservation and found themselves seated at tables that also instantly materialized...

...Each scene reveals the level of ambition of each movie...

...And, for the moment, the illusion seems fully justified to us, too, because director Martin Scorsese and his tracking, twisting, gliding camera have whirled us along with the girl...

...no rules broken...

...She's somewhat abashed...

...But though the adult Henry may be uninteresting, GoodFellas never is...

...Watching GoodFellas is like seeing Horowitz succeed in playing the piano while wearing a strait-jacket...

...Scorsese patiently showed his actor how to vary his run with various collisions against garbage cans, etc...

...But the adult Henry, though less monstrous than his fellows, has too shallow a nature for us to experience the downfall of the gang through his eyes...

...Henry, his date decides, is a catch...

...It's nice to be with a gangster...

...Down and around the couple go through an underground passageway and down and around the camera tracks with them...through corridors...

...And if your hardworking Irish father and honest Italian mother seem perpetually careworn and depressed while the local fixer Paulie (Paul Sorvino's superb characterization) carries himself like a king, why not be like a king...

...Hi, Henry...

...But when the underlings nevertheless start splurging, Jimmy starts killing them...

...SCREEN BADFELLAS 'MILLER'S CROSSING' & 'GOODFELLAS' Two new gangster movies, Miller's Crossing and GoodFellas, each has a virtuosic scene in which the camera follows the action through corridors, around corners, into a succession of rooms, down flights of steps...

...They don't care if people remember their movies or not...

...But Liotta's Henry, slightly twitchy, slightly dismayed as bodies fall to either side of him, is merely a passive monster...

...The Coens are nothing but professional time wasters...

...That one image conveyed more horror than the scene in Miller's Crossing in which torrents of blood gush from a man's eyes when he's struck in the face with a fireplace shovel...

...It's quicker this way...

...That's the peculiar but undeniable feat of the first forty-five minutes of this movie...

...It's quite a stunt but you keep wondering when he's going to take the damn thing off...

...it just happens by serendipity...

...What could have been a wallow in blood was cut down to a necessary and vivid glimpse of pain and pity...

...Byrne has just revealed that he's slept with Finney's inamorata...

...The scene threatened to be overlong, bloody yet plodding...

...It's a little too cut-and-dried to be truly dramatic...

...They don't care if their images reverberate in the viewer's mind once the initial shock wears off...

...How ya doing...

...The chief difference between this movie and other gangster films like The Godfather is the lack here of even spurious honor among these thieves...