Hollywood is a business, pure and simple. Any pretense toward art or cultural significance is a smokescreen. When these things happen, it is usually due to a combination of timing, luck, and happenstance. And it is a rare occurrence, especially in the era of the blockbuster-driven, publicly-traded media conglomerates.

It does happen, though, and in the rare instances when Hollywood produces something of both artistic value and real cultural impact, one can usually find the pure vision of a single individual behind it. The less watered down a film by too many cooks, the better the odds of finding pure movie-making genius (with equal odds that it could be an unwatchable disaster.) It’s times like this that the French auteur theory finds full validation. And Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas couldn’t be a more perfect example.

We look back on the film with awe today, holding it in the same esteem as Hollywood’s greatest films, but GoodFellas was hardly a box office hit. Its total domestic gross topped out at just under $47 million, ranking 27th on the list of highest grossing movies for 1990. It was outpaced by the likes of Look Who’s Talking Too, Three Men And A Little Lady and Problem Child (think about that the next time you see DeNiro laughing in the theater in Scorsese’s Cape Fear). Warner Bros. dumped the release in the post-summer, pre-awards dead-zone of September, making clear their lack of confidence in the film. Even the Academy looked down their nose at the crime drama. Although it was nominated in all the big categories (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress), only Joe Pesci, in his bravura performance as Tommy DeVito, took home the Oscar. The film and the oft nominated, never a winner Scorsese lost out in a sweep by Dances With Wolves, of all things.

I guess the blue-haired old ladies couldn’t stomach the 246 utterances of the word “fuck.”

Yet despite this, GoodFellas has reached a rare place in the western world, influencing both entertainment and culture in countless ways. In the realm of great mob movies, the debate rages as to which is superior: The mega-grossing, Oscar awarded Godfather series or GoodFellas. In my world, as good as the first two Godfather movies are, it is GoodFellas by a mile. If it weren’t for GoodFellas, we would never have been blessed with The Sopranos, nor would we have the countless lesser films that have ripped it off over the years. Our view of the mafia, both real and fictional, is informed by what GoodFellas showed us. The film is universally acknowledged as one of the best, if not the best, films ever directed by Martin Scorsese - a director who is arguably among America’s finest film directors of all time.

Based on the non-fiction book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi (who also wrote the screenplay), GoodFellas tells the story of the rise and fall of low-level gangster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta).

But there is a catch that separates Henry and the rest of the cast from gangster films of the past. The characters in GoodFellas aren’t the biggest of bosses (like in The Godfather) or even a collection of mid-level, middle manager made guys (like in The Sopranos). These are the foot soldiers. The men near the bottom of the totem pole. The pawns. The cannon fodder. Rarely has a movie ever given us a look into their violent, profane world, and it is made all the more fascinating by its roots into reality.

Italian organized crime divided its territory and its hierarchy around the concept of “family.” Within each family you had a boss. That boss had a number of capos (captains). Under each captain was his crew, made up of wiseguys. La cosa nostra (“our thing”) was strictly a Sicilian organization, so while you could work for a capo, you could only become a “made” guy if you were 100 percent Sicilian. Only made guys could rise through the ranks to become capo. Made guys were also protected from indiscriminate hits and had a level of protection, prestige, and earning that came with the title.

And Henry and company are not made guys.

Henry, half-Italian and half-Irish, grew up in Brooklyn, New York, surrounded by men with a connection to la cosa nostra. These were powerful, glamorous, popular guys who were always surrounded by action. For a working-class kid, they were the closest things to celebrities he had ever seen. Naturally, Henry idolized them. In hanging around with these wise guys, Henry earned their trust and some cash. As he grew from a boy to a man in the New York of the ‘50s and ‘60s, he became fully ensconced in the world of organized crime.

GoodFellas is a true epic that follows Hill from the ‘50s to the ‘80s. As Henry makes a name for himself, he runs primarily with Jimmy Conway (Robert DeNiro), an Irishman, and Tommy DeVito (Pesci), a Sicilian loose cannon. Together, they run their various businesses, stick up some trucks, bust out some clubs, and in their biggest score, rob millions from the Lufthansa cargo terminal at Kennedy Airport. They also do time in prison, mess around with their mistresses, whack a made guy, and run drugs against the explicit orders of their capo, Paulie (Paul Sorvino).

As we move from Henry’s (and the mafia’s) heyday of the ‘60s to the grimmer, grittier ‘70s, we see Henry grow older and increasingly cynical. Jimmy starts becoming paranoid, and Tommy becomes out of control. Each of these steps leads to mistakes made by men who once had their little corner of the world by the balls; and each of their mistakes compound until the inevitable collapse. For me, the great climax of the film is the most exciting. It is a single day in Henry’s life fueled by the all-day cooking of a meal, a coke-addled errand drive, a paranoia that turns out to probably be real, and a musical collage without peer.

This sometimes complex, four-decade, vignette-filled narrative could not have worked without a tight script and strong directing. The beautiful thing about Pileggi’s screenplay and Scorsese’s direction is that they made a perfectly logical and coherent thread out of a life messier than most. In boiling down the essence of the story, you could see the subtle subtext at work; each of Henry’s accomplishments was a clear step toward his eventual downfall.

In telling his story, they are also portraying the fall of the mafia. As drugs, paranoia, and bloodlust rage out of control among the new generation of wiseguys, the old ways that kept the organized crime families profitable, powerful and stable crumbled into dust. The final nail in the coffin is when the RICO laws took effect, causing mobsters to take federal deals and talk instead of doing extended prison time. The once sacred oath of omerta and the stigma of being a rat were no longer enough. The threat of an informer being brutally killed became an empty one. The mafia, a group that always denied they even existed until the ‘70s, was a shadow of its former self.

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