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Shocking movie phrases lodged in our brains have found their way into our everyday vocabulary.
Sometimes we say the lines when we want to emphasize a point, raise a smile, or laugh out loud.
Whether it was The Godfather, Don Corleone, or Tony Montana from Scarface, the gangsters were devilishly great with their words.
Martin Scorsese’s mob masterpiece ‘Goodfellas’, which debuted 30 years ago this month, is loaded with ammo for gangster talk.
Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, and Ray Liotta became one-line merchants when Nicolas Pilleggi tore up the textbook for mob movies with his quick script.
The popularity of some of the film’s best lines has been strengthened following the screening of the restored 30th anniversary version of the film at the 77th Venice International Film Festival in its classics section from September 2-12.
The festival is a milestone in the reopening of the film business that was brought to its knees by the coronavirus pandemic.
Over the years, the lines of “Funny how?” The scenes in which Pesci (Tommy DeVito) takes center stage have been uttered and repeated by gangster movie lovers, just as Scorsese’s cast iron classic has been seen, re-watched and adored for three decades. .
A group of gangsters huddle around a table in a dimly lit restaurant. The livewire is a crazy five foot four Tommy who has racked up a $ 7,000 bill and is telling a vulgar joke.
Tommy tells them that the police took them in for questioning after a bank robbery.
His friends laugh together at the right time. They are being careful. Tommy, who switches between charm and homicidal madness in an instant, owns them.
In the middle of the expletive-filled story, Henry Hill (Liotta) tells Tommy that he’s funny, to which the psycho appears insulted.
The atmosphere hardens and the short-tempered executor in a criminal organization growls, “What do you mean I’m funny? Am I funny, I mean funny like I’m a clown? I amuse you I make you laugh, am I here to have fun What do you mean fun? Funny in what way? How funny am I?
It’s an absorbing scene, a mix of searing tension, awkward confrontation, and humor, showing how Tommy can go from calm to raging monster in an instant.
The frenetic scene is one of the most intense moments in Scorsese’s violent, profane and often comedic masterpiece, based on Pilleggi’s book “Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia family” about four gangsters spanning three decades, it is extraordinary.
The “funny how?” scene, possibly the most well-known scene in the movie was not in the script.
The moment is based on Pesci’s early work experience at a restaurant where he unthinkingly complimented a mobster on his sense of humor.
When Pesci transmitted the thread to Scorsese, the director decided to include it in the film only with the knowledge of Pesci and Liotta.
He chose to keep the scene’s support out of the script dialogue that day to elicit frank and astonished reactions from them.
Such sharp lines and actions – the bottle on the head of the uptight owner of Bamboo Lounge and the aftermath of bully Billy Batt, “Now, go home and get your glitter box” have become inimitable elements of the cinema.
In another scene where Tommy shoots the stuttering Spider in the foot, the drunken mobster waves his smoking revolver from the poker table and yells, “Take him to Ben Casey!” while the boy writhes in pain on the ground.
Ben Casey was the titular doctor of a hit television show in the early 1960s.
Tommy plays a fearless character who constantly demonstrates his power to amuse viewers.
The “f” word is believed to be said about 320 times in the movie, cleverly mostly by Tommy. Another Scorsese movie, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” is said to be Hollywood Don’s F-bomb with 544.
When his mother, played by Scorsese’s mother Catherine, pressures Tommy to get married, he blurts out, “Sure, Mom, I get settled in with a cute girl every night, then I’m off the next morning.
Interestingly, in “Raging Bull,” a 1980 Scorsese film about the life and fights of troubled middleweight champion boxer Jake LaMotta, he says the same thing to his explosive brother played by Robert De Niro.
“What are you thinking about? Keep looking, you’re dead! Are you married. You’re a married man, it’s all over. Leave the girls for me. “
Pesci has prominent quotes in most of his films, even when he met Scorsese and De Niro in “Casino” (1996).
Tommy’s sociopathic violence in “GoodFellas” is doubled when Pesci as mob boss Nicky Santoro spits out more flashy lines, many of which cannot be printed.
So naturally, the audience would have expected to be on the verge of laughing when he won the Oscar for Best Cast for “Goodfellas.”
Instead, his acceptance speech was only five words long, “It is my privilege. Thank you.”
No one expected that from an actor who played one of the most vocally intimidating characters in movie memory – a man whose verbosity can make you laugh out loud one moment and give you goosebumps the next.
