Goodfellas at 30: Does it stand the test of time?

The restored 30th-anniversary version of Martin Scorsese’s film which is back in British cinemas and will be screened at the 77th Venice international film festival next month still casts its immense spell, says Geoffrey Macnab

Robert De Niro as Jimmy Conway and Ray Liotta as Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese's 'Goodfellas' (1990) (Warner Bros)

When Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas was released in cinemas 30 years ago, the verdict was unanimous: this was an instant, cast-iron classic. Scorsese was immediately credited with reinvigorating the gangster film, a genre that had been flogged nearly to death over the previous 80 or so years, since DW Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912).

In the 1970s and 1980s, the era of The Godfather and Once Upon a Time in America, gangster films had become increasingly self-conscious, often turning into epic, sombre, decades-spanning sagas in which the heroes had a tragic grandeur. In Goodfellas, by contrast, the watchword was exuberance. Instead of a brooding, mumbling, and introspective don played by Marlon Brando, the film gives us Joe Pesci’s lowlife, Tommy DeVito. He’s a diabolical, hyperactive, and pint-sized psychopath who seems to have escaped from some nearby Looney Tunes cartoon. Instead of Al Pacino as a young, Hamlet-like outsider, reluctantly joining the family business, it has Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, the wise guy on the make, who thinks he is the “luckiest kid in the world” to be working for the mob.

Scorsese didn’t skimp on the violence. The film’s famous opening scene – in which Liotta’s character looks on as Pesci’s Tommy and Robert De Niro’s James “Jimmy” Conway stab and shoot a man to death who has been making noise in the trunk of their car – sets the tone for what follows. There are corpses in garbage skips and meat freezers. Characters are “whacked” in ever more grotesque ways.