Goodfellas

"As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster."

Martin Scorsese's famous 1990 film, based on the book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, which followed the story of New York City gangster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) from his induction into the Lucchese crime family in the 1950s to his downfall and entry into the Witness Protection Program in the 1980s. Along with Henry, the film follows Henry's boss Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro), his best friend Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), and his wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco). The film details Henry's moving up the ranks, his eventual imprisonment, his role in (at the time) the largest heist in American history, and his involvement with the cocaine trade (which eventually gets him arrested by narcotics officers and shunned by the Mob). As the ground crumbles around him, he turns to the Feds for protection, eventually having to "live the rest of [his] life like a shnook".

The movie became famous for several reasons, including a long tracking shot through the kitchen of the Copacabana; the montage near the end showing Henry's increasing drug-induced paranoia as he tries to run some guns, get a drug shipment off to Pittsburgh, and make dinner for his family; and Tommy's profanity-laden dialogue and Hair-Trigger Temper, which threatened to make Joe Pesci typecast for some time — and won him the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. The movie itself ended up losing Best Picture to Dances with Wolves. The movie was selected for the National Film Registry in 2000.

Goodfellas was followed by Casino, based on the book of the same name (also by Nicholas Pileggi), which also featured De Niro (who 'f**ocitated' Liotta's role in becoming the centre of the movie's romantic subplot) and Pesci (still the same sort of vicious, cynical character- though, it should be noted, both guys he played really existed, and he played them pretty faithfully).

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Goodfellas provides examples of the following tropes:

• Adaptation Distillation: Joe Pesci's character, Tommy DeVito, is based on two real-life people: Tommy DeSimone, a violent member of the Vario organization, and Paul Vario Jr., Paulie's son. Specifically Tommy stands in for Paul Jr. when Henry meets him as a child, and during the double date with Karen. Practically everything else Tommy does is based on DeSimone.
• Affably Evil:
  • Most of the mob is like this when Henry is barely a teenager. Everyone from Paulie and Jimmy on down are all smiles and sunshine. But then the body count grows and the broken deals start piling up...
  • Tommy, when he realizes too late he's gotta answer for what he did to Billy Batts...
• Age Lift: Joe Pesci was 46 at the time of filming. Thomas DeSimone, who Tommy DeVito is based on, was in his teens and twenties at the time of the events in the movie, being murdered in 1979 at age 28.
• Alliterative Name: Henry Hill. Jimmy "the Gent"
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Henry pistol-whips the guy who gropes Karen, then gives her the gun to hide, and she confesses in voiceover "I gotta admit - It turned me on."
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: For a few minutes, the film gives Karen narration duties.
• Asshole Victim: Tommy De Vito.
• Ax Crazy: Tommy, which was basically Truth in Television.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Averted. Of course, the bad guys are the main characters.
• Bare Your Midriff: When the police are breaking down the door at Henry's house, we briefly see Lorraine Bracco's belly, as she hides a gun in her panties.
• Berserk Button: Bringing up Tommy De Vito's humiliating past as a shoe-shine boy. He doesn't need much of an excuse to go berserk, but this is one easy way to do it.
• Big Applesauce: All of the movie was shot in (and takes place in) New York City and environs. In a twist, we barely see the stereotypical Manhattan sights as most of the movie's action happens in Queens near JFK Airport.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Jimmy and Tommy are personally responsible for much of the conflict here.
• Bittersweet Ending: Least in the case for Henry who is the main character. He successfully manages to leave the mob life with his family and go into Witness Protection Program. But to do so, he had to leave everyone he ever knew behind and rat out the two men who raised him in said mob life. Largely because one of them, Jimmy, was going to have him killed as a liability to protect his own skin. And even before then, Paulie ultimately turned his back on Henry for selling drugs and getting caught (which he did warn Henry not to do). But even though he's alive, Henry laments that all the perks and excitement he got from working with the mob has now ended and he's forced to live his life legitimately. Or, as he puts it, "as a common schnook".
• Black and Gray Morality: It's a movie about gangsters, what did you expect?
• Black Dude Dies First: The black driver who participated in the Lufthansa heist — and screws it up — is the first to get whacked to keep him quiet.
• Black Comedy
• Boom! Headshot!:
  • Tommy, to Stacks, due to stupidly leaving the getaway truck from their heist near a hydrant when he was suppose to have it destroyed. Which got it impounded and later dusted for fingerprints: "You're always fuckin' late. You'll be late for your own fuckin' funeral."
  • Then, later, Tommy himself, for revenge on mudering Billy Batts, under the guise that he was going to be made.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: At the end during the trial, Henry Hill begins speaking to the camera, lamenting not only betraying his mentors but lamenting the end of his mafia lifestyle.

Henry Anything I wanted was a phone call away. Free cars. The keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the city. I bet twenty, thirty grand over a weekend and then I'd either blow the winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the bookies. (gets up from the witness stand) Didn't matter. It didn't mean anything. When I was broke, I'd go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking. And now it's all over...

• Broken Pedestal: While Henry doesn't expect much help from Paulie, he still bitterly laments the meager 'severance pay' he is given after a lifetime of service and tutelage.
• Brooklyn Rage: Especially Tommy.
• Bullet Dancing: Tommy vs Spider. Horribly subverted when Tommy keeps waving his gun around as a joke and accidently shoots Spider.
• The Cameo: Assistant U.S. Attorney Ed Mcdonald, As Himself; the prosecutor who handled Henry Hill and sponsored him into witness protection.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Tommy, in what became a career-defining role (to some people) for Joe Pesci. Henry's narration is also filled with plenty of F-bombs.
• Conspicuous Consumption / Suspicious Spending: After a big heist Jimmy is appalled when some of his accomplices show up with incredibly expensive purchases that would logically suggest newly acquired wealth. Jimmy had explicitly warned them to lay low to avoid the implication and the trope. And ultimately the reason he has most of them whacked.
• Contrived Coincidence: The goodfellas get pinched after strong-arming a man whose sister happens to work as a typist for the FBI. Lampshaded by the narration.
• Conveniently Cellmates: Henry shares the same prison accommodation as his gangster pals. This is Truth in Television for them and many other organized crime figures at the time, usually achieved through corrupt prison staff.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Tommy is seen telling his girlfriend not to talk to any men while he goes to the other side of the room, and she comments that he gets so jealous he would kill her for looking at anyone else.
• Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!: The film pulls no punches at showing the dizzying highs as well as the horrible lows of the gangster lifestyle.
• Dawson Casting: Joe Pesci was 46 at the time of filming and plays Tommy starting his early twenties.
• Deconstruction: Of the gangster film. It didn't take.
• Destroy the Evidence:
  • Subverted with Stacks who was suppose to do this with a getaway vehicle that was used in Jimmy's bank heist via a compactor. But instead of going to the location to do so, Stacks parked it near a hydrant, visited his girlfriend, got high and passed out in his home. The truck ended up impounded and later dusted for finger prints by the police. He becomes the first member of the heist Jimmy has assassinated for this reason as it was only a matter of time before the police traced the clues back to Stacks.
  • Karen flushes down the cocaine Henry stashed away after cops move in to bust him after getting evidence for his drug operations, to the dismay of Henry as he needed it to get back on his feet in the mob.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Despite the fact that the movie deconstructs many standard gangster film tropes and has something of a Downer Ending, it's still considered one of the coolest depictions of the Mafia ever put on film - by members of the Mafia themselves, even. The gangster that DeNiro's character was based on was reportedly thrilled such a great actor was portraying him, and kept trying to get in touch with DeNiro from prison to give him pointers. Similarly, the real Henry Hill wrecked his witness protection because he couldn't resist bragging about the movie.
• Don't Make Me Take My Belt Off: Henry's father when he finds out the young Henry has been playing hookie to do mob errands. Dad's is only seen again in the movie -and with a long face- during his son's wedding, as Henry basically places himself in a new "family."
• Double Standards: Or triple... Tommy who is disgusted by the notion that a woman could be attracted to a black man -Sammy Davis Jr- laments that some gal rejects him because he is Italian.

Tommy : "In this day and age, what the fuck is this world coming to? I can't believe this, prejudice against - a Jew broad - prejudice against Italians"

• Downer Ending: On the one hand, most of the main characters end up dead or in prison. On the other hand, they were almost all murderers.
• Drugs Are Bad: Henry would probably still be rolling in cash and in the good graces of Paulie and Jimmy had he stuck to theft and stayed out of the drug trade... and not got hooked on coke. Paulie warns Jimmy and Henry not to get involved with drugs because of the increased attention it brings from the feds.
• Enforced Method Acting: A number of scenes are partially ad-libbed with actors not told beforehand
  • Specially relevant in the "I'm funny how?" one; Pesci and Liotta were instructed to improvise, other actors didn't know what was going to happen so their surprised-to-panicked reactions and puzzled faces are genuine. The scene mirrors what happened to Pesci in Real life; he told a mobster in a restaurant that he was funny and the mobster got angry. Scorsese implemented it once he learnt about it, as it wasn't in the book.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Tommy De Vito.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In the movie at least, Henry's an unrepentant sociopath and lifelong criminal, but draws the line at murder. However, the actual Henry Hill killed at least three people.
• Fate Worse Than Death: Henry Hill, who has to live the rest of his life as both "a rat" and "a schnook".
• Fed to the Beast: Henry and Jimmy do this to a client that owes the mob money while in Tampa Bay. Driving to a zoo at night and threatening to dump him into a lion's den. The client immediately agrees to pay them, much to Henry's amusement who figures it must be a regular occurrence with the mob.
• Food Porn: The film has moments showcasing meals being prepared, served and eaten. At one point Henry even describes what he was planning to cook while getting ready to do some errands for the day.
• Foreshadowing:
  • "n****r stickup men get caught because they fall asleep in the getaway car," which should give you a hint about Stacks's murder
  • Paulie's educated concerns about drug traffic and his reluctance to use telephones, indicating that he knows the consequences of such and also knows about RICO conspiracy charges and wiretaps.
  • "You may fold under questioning!"
• Gallows Humor: Quite a bit, most notably the grave digging scene.
• Genre Savvy:
  • Paulie is very aware that drugs can bring the whole thing down. He also has an aversion to telephones and personal meetings, hinting he knows about wiretapping and criminal conspiracy cases.
    • His minions and their underlings however...
  • When Henry is busted for his drug operations, he notes that the person who held him up was a cop and not a mob member, since the latter would kill him quietly without warning.
  • Karen likewise notes something isn't right after her final talk with Jimmy at the end who tries to talk her into going into a building to get an object he left for her, quickly excusing herself as "needing to go see her mother", seeing it for the trap to murder her that it is.
• Gilligan Cut:
  • Henry pointing how Jimmy instructs him to be discreet with a heist money. Cuts Henry entering his house with a huge Christmas tree and shouting to his family "I got the most expensive tree they had!"
  • This one, during one of Karen's monologues:

Karen Hill: After awhile, it got to be all normal. None of it seemed like crime. It was more like Henry was enterprising, and that he and the guys were making a few bucks hustling, while all the other guys were sitting on their asses, waiting for handouts. Our husbands weren't brain surgeons, they were blue-collar guys. The only way they could make extra money - real extra money - was to go out and cut a few corners. [Cuts to Henry and Tommy hijacking a truck]

• Glory Days: How Henry looks at his old life.
• Greed: Jimmy's Fatal Flaw. He puts together and pulls off a spectacular bank heist which nets everyone a much bigger payout then they were expecting. However he eventually start killing off all involved, partly because most of the members start buying expensive things like cars and minks which he thinks will draw attention from the cops. And partly because of slip ups like Stacks leaving the getaway car to be found and his prints identified making them liabilities. But, as Henry figures, he largely wants all the money for himself. Only Henry and Tommy are spared because they're close friends, plus the former didn't really participate in it other then just being told about it and wasn't badgering him for a cut (Though Jimmy does give him a part of it in private) and the latter at the time, got the news he was going to be made in the mafia.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Pesci is famous for this role here and in Casino.
• Have You Told Anyone Else?:
  • While discussing Morrie and his badgering of getting his cut of the heist money, Jimmy asks Henry if he thinks Morrie tells his wife anything. Henry instantly realizes he's going to have Morrie killed.
  • Near the end of the film, Karen visits Jimmy to ask for help in their financial situation after Henry is kicked out of the mob. One question he asks Karen if Jimmy has talked to anyone, a tip off that he sees Jimmy as a liability after his drug arrest and worried he'll rat him out to the police or to Paulie of his participation in Henry's drug operations.
• Historical Villain Downgrade:
  • Paulie Cicero is depicted as Affably Evil and a likable capo. Henry Hill explains him away as "protection for wiseguys among themselves". Mobster Paul Vario - his Real Life counterpart - had more direct involvement in the nastier (and bloodier) crimes committed by his crew. In Wiseguy (the book the film was based on), author Nicholas Pileggi writes, "He abhorred unnecessary violence (the kind he hadn't ordered), mainly because it was bad for business."
  • Tommy DeVito's real life counterpart, Tommy De Simone, was even nastier than he's portrayed. The final straw that led to his murder was trying to rape Karen Hill while her husband was in prison.
  • The movie leaves out the tiny fact that in real life Jimmy liked to shake down people by locking their kids in the fridge, or other stuff like cutting his wife's annoying ex-boyfriend into pieces, as well as numerous other murders. He and Paulie also ripped off the robbers and other guys involved in the Lufthansa heist- nobody got more than a $50,000 cut and most got less. They still got murdered for the connection.
  • In the film, Hill says that Jimmy had never asked him to kill anybody. Though Hill is an accomplice after the fact on several murders, he never personally kills anyone. In Real Life, Henry Hill did personally kill several people, so this crosses over with Unreliable Narrator.
• Hookers and Blow: Henry and Karen become addicted to drugs around the 80's era of the movie with the former getting high on his own supply while charming his supplier so he can continue his operations. Tellingly it's the start of his downfall.
• Hope Spot:
  • The Billy Batts incident is triggered because Billy couldn't stop reminding Tommy he was a former shoe shine boy. Both men seem to calm things down rationally and let is pass...until Billy flat out insults Tommy over it. Tommy retaliates by beating Billy to a pulp, alongside Jimmy, and ultimately stabbing and shooting him to death.
  • Henry has reservations about Jimmy wanting to whack Morrie since Morrie keeps nagging him to pay his cut of the heist money, hoping to convince Jimmy not to go through with it. During a poker night, Jimmy tell Henry not to worry about it which Henry figures he changed his mind about it. Jimmy still goes through with the assassination, he just decided not to involve Henry whom he knows was squeamish about killing.
  • After getting the news Tommy's going to be made in the mafia. Both Jimmy and Henry are excited since they'll be working with someone they closely know and receive much higher standings in the mob. However it turned out to be a lie to lure Tommy into a trap and have his assassinated, partly because he was too unhinged and becoming a liability to Paulie. And partly because he killed Billy Batts, a genuine made man, which is a major taboo in the mafia world.
  • After he's busted for his cocaine operation, Henry has Karen pay his bail from prison and hope to make the money back with the bag of cocaine he had hidden away. Only to find out that Karen was forced to flush it to keep the narcotic officers from finding it, leaving both penniless.
• Hypocrite: Jimmy has no qualms with beating down people for money as shown when he shakes down Morrie for money owed to him. Yet when the time came to return the favor via the payout from the money heist, Jimmy keeps blowing him off And ultimately has him killed to keep from paying him.
• Idiot Ball: Henry's mule/babysitter; she is insistently told to leave the house in order to make a drug related phone call. And what does she do? She phones from the house!. The police are wiretapping everything and it's what ultimately leads to Henry getting arrested and his fallout from the mafia. Bitterly lampshaded by Henry.
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: Played straight by Tommy, then subverted when he intentionally kills Spider.
• I Warned You: The final conversation between Henry and Paulie. Henry tries to appeal to Paulie after losing the last of his cocaine he was hoping to sell to get him back on his feet. But Paulie has No Sympathy for him, angry that Henry went behind his back after specifically telling him to get out of the drug trade once he left prison. The most Paulie does is give him a meager $3200 and essentially tell Henry he's out of the mob.
• In Medias Res: The story starts in the middle of the Billy Batts situation, then it jumps to Henry's origins and continues chronologically from there.
• Jerkass: Tommy DeVito to the point of being a sociopath.
  • The other gangsters as well, especially Henry Hill and Jimmy Conway.
• Jewish Mother: Karen's mother, so much.
• Jump Cut: Used prominently during the last part of the movie to emphasize Henry's agitated state.
• Karma Houdini: Subverted Trope- Henry Hill avoids prosecution and mob retribution, but he will spend the rest of his life Brought Down to Normal, forever pining for the Glory Days. And eating bad spaghetti.. To him, being a nobody and a "common schnook" is a Fate Worse Than Death.
• Kick The Spider
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Morris Unavoidable; "I thought he'd never shut the fuck up. What a pain in the ass"
• Kill'Em All: Jimmy eventually wants to cut every link between himself and the heist.
• Little No: Tommy, as he realizes he's about to get whacked. He doesn't even finish saying it. Spoken with the volume of a Little No but with the emotion of a Big No.
• The Load: Most of the trouble the main characters get into is because Tommy would shoot anybody for so much as looking at him funny.
• Lured Into a Trap: Paulie ultimately finds out about Tommy murdering Billy Batts and, to avoid a Mob War with the family Billy comes from, sets to have him killed under the guise of being made. Tommy only realizes it a second too late when he arrives in the room for the ceremony and finds no one there before he gets a bullet to the head from behind by the men who escorted him.
• Luxury Prison Suite: Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. Which is actually nickname of Mafia Manor. Henry and Paulie end up there after getting arrested due to some bad luck with a client they were shaking down (who turned out to have a sister who works for the FBI as a typist. Jimmy was caught too but was sent to another prison and we're never shown how his living conditions were). As Henry notes though, they pretty much lived like kings having their own prison separate from the others, enough room to maneuver, their own kitchen in which they fix food being smuggled in and cops essentially looking the other way long as they get paid.
• The Mafia: Duh. Ironically, though, none of the main trio of characters are technically members and only one (Tommy) is even eligible (Jimmy and Henry both have non-Italian parents which would prevent them being "made").
• Manly Tears: Jimmy after he finds out that Tommy was killed.
• Mean Character, Nice Actor:
  • Joe Pesci had problems with the Spider scene because he couldn't understand the outrageous reaction of his own character.
  • Paul Sorvino almost walked out because he felt that he couldn't reach the cold personality of his role because he was the opposite kind of individual.
• A Minor Kidroduction: The film starts showing how Henry Hill enters the wiseguy's world during his childhood. After a few minutes it AgeCuts to Ray Liotta.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • Karen is assaulted by her neighbour, prompting a violent retaliation from Henry.
  • An inversion is alluded at the wedding; Karen is concerned about a bag of money-gifts but Henry is amused and confident that nobody is going to rob a mob party.
• Mythology Gag: Joe Pesci beating Frank Vincent like in Raging Bull (Vincent's character surname was Batts too). Scorsese would deliver the punchline to the joke in Casino... somehow.
• The Napoleon: Tommy, by default due to Pesci's actual stature. The real-life inspiration was a large, beefy guy.
• Narrators : Henry. Karen occasionally.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: His bosses want to put a hit on Henry at the end because they are worried he'll squeal to the cops. It's the realization that he has a hit on him that makes Henry squeal.
• Nice to the Waiter:
  • Subverted: Jimmy is shown handing out $100 bills like confetti to waiters, bartenders, and doormen, but he's still a completely ruthless psychopath who kills people at the drop of a hat.
  • Played straight by Tommy, who physically assaults them and boasts about it. Deadly with Spider, a young bartender with an entry-level job echoing Henry's past.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: The beating of Billy Batts. So intense that Jimmy dents his shoes.
• Not Using the Z Word: A la The Godfather, the word "Mafia" is rarely, if at all used.
• OOC Is Serious Business: Through most of the film Jimmy at least respect Henry's wishes not to be involved in murder outside of hiding bodies, even dismissing him from Morrie's assassination. However near the end, after Henry is kicked out of the mob, Henry goes to him for any work that can help him with finances and the one thing Jimmy's asks of him is to do a hit in Florida. This tips Henry off that Jimmy plans to discreetly have him murdered out of fear he'll either rat to the cops or Paulie for his participation in Henry's former drug trade, since it's the first time he requested anything of that nature till now. And prompts Henry to go into the Witness Protection Program to save his and Karen's life.
• Oh Crap: Tommy gets just enough time for one before being shot in the back of the head.
• The Oner: The famous Epic Tracking Shot that starts as Henry leaves his car with the valet and follows he and Karen as they enter the Copacabana through a rear entrance, down a corridor, through the kitchen and into the nightclub as their table is set up and comedian Henny Youngman starts his act. It lasts three minutes. Watch it here
• One Steve Limit: Averted during the wedding scene. "Seems like all of them were named Peter or Paul, and they were all married to a Marie."
• Pistol-Whipping: By Henry on a guy who assaulted his wife.
• Pragmatic Villainy: The mob bosses frown on drug dealing, but mainly because it'll bring the full wrath of the federal government on them.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • After the bank heist, Jimmy fears getting caught when the other members who pulled it off start buying expensive gifts like a car and a mink which he fears the cops will take notice of. After Stacks stupidly doesn't destroy their getaway truck and parks in front of a hydrant, where it's impounded and later dusted for prints. Jimmy has everyone of the members , outside of Henry and Tommy, killed so as not to be implicated (though likewise not wanting to share the cut which was larger then expected).
  • Paulie notes he never wants his members to get into drugs as it very easy to leave a trail for cops to follow and draws in too much attention to their operations, warning Henry to drop drug dealing once he's out of prison. Henry doesn't listen however and continues it in secret. Sure enough, he grabs the attention of Narcs and ends up arrested for drug possession.
    • He likewise doesn't like to discuss business over the phone, citing that cops wiretap everything nowadays. Indeed, this ultimately is what leads to Henry's downfall via narcotics officers and a major blunder by his babysitter/drug mule when she ignores his orders not to make drug related calls in his house.
  • Related to the above, on a busy day, Henry notices a helicopter circling the area around him. At first he thinks it coincidence, but starts to see it more frequently and gets increasingly worried that cops are watching him (not helped that he snorted cocaine earlier) and tries his best to do his errands quickly and stay out of sight. His paranoia turns out to be right on the nose when he's forced to leave the house due the demand of his babysitter/drug mule wanting her lucky hat for her plane trip and promptly arrested as he's pulling out of the driveway (Though he thinks the cops were watching him for the bank heist Jimmy pulled. Turns out they were Narcotics officers who had been staking him for a month for his drug operations and moved in on him after said babysitter stupidly called someone over the phone that they caught on wiretap despite Henry warning her not to do so in his house).
• Pretty in Mink:
  • Some of the wives wear fur, although the fact that they were either stolen or bought with stolen money makes this overlap with Fur and Loathing
  • One of the gangsters buys his girl a fur coat with his cut of the Lufthansa cash. Jimmy flips out over it because he told everybody not to buy anything big that attracts attention. This is implied to be one of the reasons why Jimmy becomes paranoid and starts killing the accomplices.
• Pretty Little Headshots: Brutally averted with Tommy's murder. Henry even notes that they shot him in the head so that his mother couldn't give him an open casket at the funeral. Overlaps with Not in the Face.
• Rags to Riches: Henry and Tommy, former shoe shinner. The actual Tonny Bennett song of the same name is the soundtrack during the initial narration.
• Riches to Rags: In a sense. Henry loves the mafia life and all the perks and money that comes with it. In the end, he has to leave it behind to save his own life. While he is living moderately, all the perks he was used to are forever out of his reach to his chagrin.
• Real Men Cook: The wiseguys take cooking very seriously during their incarceration.
• Roman à Clef: Somewhere between this and Very Loosely Based on a True Story.
• Rooting for the Empire: "Jimmy was the kind of guy who rooted for the bad guys in the movies"
• Samuel L. Jackson: In a bit part (this movie was four years before Pulp Fiction after all...) of Parnell "Stacks" Edwards, the black guitar player who gets involved in the great Lufthansa heist: He gets killed by Tommy and Joe Carbone for not having disposed of the van used in the heist as he was told to do. Tommy shoots him in the head at point-blank range, then a few more times in the chest. His death probably sends Jimmy Conway on the course of just killing off all of the heist accomplices (aside from Tommy and Henry) to keep most of the money for himself.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: When Henry is busted for drug dealing, his mob friends begin to cut ties with him in fear that he's going to rat them out to the police. Feeling cornered and fearing that his former friends will try to have him killed, Henry has no choice but to join the federal Witness Protection Program.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Happens between Henry and Linda after driving her home to her apartment. We then see the still shot of the apartment building minutes until the scenery changes to morning light.
• The Seventies: The part of the movie where everything goes wrong for Henry Hill and the mob as a whole.
• Shoe Shine, Mister?: The film features a scene in which Tommy brutally beats and knifes Billy Batts to death for insulting him about being a shoeshine boy in Tommy's younger days.
• Shoot the Messenger: The wiseguys are about to lose the young Henry as an associate due to his truancy issues, so they solve the problem by roughing up the mailman who delivers the troublesome non-attendance school letters to Henry's house and father.
• Shout-Out: To The Great Train Robbery, no less. It's the final scene, by the way (the one where Tommy shoots at the camera).
• Surveillance as the Plot Demands: Justified. The regular police are easily bribed to look the other way, but when drug traffic comes into play, the Narcotics detectives, wiretapping and helicopter surveillance cannot be shaken off.
• The Sixties: The part of the movie where Henry works his way into a comfortable position in the mob and times are good.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: A number of songs, including "Frosty the Snowman."
• A Storm Is Coming: The fact that Henry becoming a drug dealer and an addict is the spiral that eventually makes him fall from grace, flip and collapse the main Paulie's organization is very subtly hinted via the usage of the song Gimme Shelter when his new activities are being introduced.
• Tension-Cutting Laughter: Done famously after a prolonged scene where Tommy De Vito (Joe Pesci) appears to be offended at being called "funny" by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), his rage visibly building over the course of several minutes. A bit of a twist in that it is Hill who breaks the tension.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Billy Batts is bleeding in the trunk, but he's still alive. So Tommy stabs him eight times. Then Jimmy goes ahead and shoots him four times. And then the title screen comes in.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: In a movie about gangsters, the main character Henry does not kill anyone. Not a soul. He buries bodies, steals things, beats people to a pulp, but he doesn't kill anyone. Justified in that, not being Italian on his father's side, he had no chance of becoming a "made man," and thus was more useful without having committed murders. In reality Henry did commit murders for the mob.
• Title Drop: Henry explains that "good fella" is code for mobsters referring to fellow members. The title of the original book, Wiseguy, is also dropped.
• Too Dumb to Live: No, Tommy, you don't kill a made man without the go-ahead from the boss. Sorry.
• Trunk Shot: When Henry, Tommy and Jimmy realize that Batts is still alive in the trunk and they pop it open.
• Verbal Tic: Joey Two-Times. "I'm gonna go get the papers, get the papers."
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The film is based on Henry Hill's memoir Wiseguy. However, Scorsese takes a lot of liberties to tell a good story. Henry Hill still says it's 95-99% accurate at almost any given time. It's arguably more like Roman à Clef.
• Villain Protagonist: Tommy, Jimmy, and Henry
• Where Are They Now? Epilogue: Text boxes explain what happened to Henry, Paulie and Jimmy
  • Jimmy divorces from Karen a few years after going into Witness Protection, does some brief time in prison for unrelated crimes and continues to live a mundane life. At the least, he drops his drug habit and goes clean.
  • Paulie dies in prison during his sentence.
  • Jimmy is given a 20 life sentence won't be released till 2024, by then he'll be in his late 70s and likely returning to a world that's long past his heyday. His real life counterpart actually died in prison, same as his Paulie.
• Witness Protection: Where Henry ends up. The real Henry Hill left witness protection some time after the film was released. He says that everyone who would want him dead is long gone, and now gangsters who do contact him want him to read their screenplays.
• You Remind Me of X: When the three protagonists stop at Tommy's mother's place intending to get a shovel, only to end up staying for dinner, a painting there joyfully reminds them of Billy Batts, who at that moment is lying in the trunk of their car, half-dead