Here is an excerpt from a classic film review written by Pauline Kael for The New Yorker (September 17, 1990). To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Illustration Credit:  Warner Bros courtesy Everett

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Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas” has a lift. It’s like “Raging Bull,” except that it’s not domineering. It’s like “Raging Bull” made in a jolly, festive frame of mind. It’s about being a guy and guys getting high on being a guy. In the Nicholas Pileggi book “Wiseguy,” which this movie is based on, the Mafia-led mobsters are moral runts—and that was the joke of how John Huston showed them, from the Don on down, in “Prizzi’s Honor.” But Scorsese, a rap artist keeping up the heat, doesn’t go in for ironic detachment. He loves the Brooklyn gang milieu, because it’s where distortion, hyperbole, and exuberance all commingle. His mobsters are high on having a wad of cash in their pockets. The movie is about being cock of the walk, with banners flying and crowds cheering.

Is it a great movie? I don’t think so. But it’s a triumphant piece of filmmaking—journalism presented with the brio of drama. Every frame is active and vivid, and you can feel the director’s passionate delight in making these pictures move. When Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), the central character, crosses a Long Island street to beat up the man who tried to put the make on his girl, the dogwood is in bloom, and all through this movie we’re aware of the ultra-greenness of the suburbs that the gangsters live in; these thieves are always negotiating their way through shrubs and hedges. Or they’re preparing food, ceremonially, gregariously—stirring vats of sauce, slicing garlic razor thin. We see them in bars and restaurants, where they take preferential treatment as their due, and in the tacky interiors of their noisy homes. We see them hijacking, fencing stolen goods, fixing horse races, shaking down restaurant owners, committing arson, preparing cargo thefts at the airport, burying murder victims. And the different aspects of their lives are like operatic motifs.

What’s missing? Well, there are no great voices. The script, by Pileggi and Scorsese, isn’t really dramatized; instead, Scorsese raises the volume on the music, and the guys work themselves up, get hard, erupt. This isn’t the kind of mindless movie that offers up brutality as entertainment, with good guys versus bad guys. Scorsese offers up brutal racketeering and says this is all there is to these men. Scorsese’s Jake La Motta could do one thing: fight. These guys can do one thing: steal.

The book is an account of the life of the actual Henry Hill, as he told it to Pileggi after he entered the Federal Witness Protection Program, and the movie picks up his story in 1955, with the obliging eleven-year-old kid, half-Irish, half-Sicilian, working as an errand boy at the cabstand hangout of the Brooklyn neighborhood gang headed by Paulie (Paul Sorvino). As the gang’s pet, Henry gets the approval he wants and plenty of spending money; by the time he’s fourteen, he’s on the payroll of a construction company and knows the ins and outs of the rackets. In the years ahead, crime is a romp for him. He gets a real charge out of pulling scams side by side with his older pals, Jimmy (Robert De Niro) and Tommy (Joe Pesci), and when he takes his Jewish girlfriend, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), to flashy, expensive places he hands out big tips and is greeted as a celebrity. (He’s twenty-one.) Karen, who’s no bimbo (she has a sense of her worth), likes the danger that emanates from him. His life has the look of a Puerto Rican Day parade crossed with a rock concert; she’s excited when she sees his gun (the gun he slugged his rival with). In “Raging Bull,” the young male tries to ram his way through a brick wall; in “GoodFellas,” the young male finds a welcoming warm spot, first with Paulie and the gang, and soon with Jimmy and Tommy, and then with his wife—Karen—and a couple of kids, and a mistress set up in an apartment.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Pauline Kael wrote for The New Yorker from 1967 until her retirement, in 1991. In 1968, shortly after the publication of her review of “Bonnie and Clyde,” she became the magazine’s film critic. While at The New Yorker, Kael wrote hundreds of Current Cinema columns, as well as many shorter film reviews. She was the author of thirteen books, including “I Lost It at the Movies,” “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” “Deeper Into Movies” (which won the 1974 National Book Award), and “5001 Nights at the Movies.” Kael received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1964 and was an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa. She received Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York in 1974 and 1983 and a George Polk Memorial Award in 1970. Kael died at her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 2001. In 2011, her film criticism was anthologized in the Library of America collection “Deeper Into Movies.”