Part 3

Dave: That's interesting that you would find such an interesting perspective on this film. Most people would say they liked the shooting, or they liked the part when he crosses the street with a gun and beats that guy down with the butt of his gun. But you saw something greater than that, and it's very true. I saw something very similar to that. I saw the fact that in movies like The Godfather, The Godfather II, other "mob" kind of movies- Chris: Casino. Dave: Casino, movies like that-you get the impression that these guys wear silk suits all the time and they're always at the nightclubs. But the fact is that these guys worked, and they weren't nine-to-five guys. It's mentioned in the movie-the character who plays Henry Hill's wife, and Henry Hill is played by Ray Liotta-Lorraine Bracco says, she says, "We weren't married to nine-to-five guys," and the first time I heard that, I took it to mean that they don't really live a working life. But the fact is, when you see the movie, these guys are actually working eighteen hours a day. They work all day long, and if they got called out of bed at midnight, they've got to work. They hustle. These guys are low-level mobsters, just to hold up liquor stores, hold up trucks. They're not the bigwig guys in the big, palatial estates. I mean, if you remember where they lived, they don't live in big homes. They don't have-you know, they have above-ground pools. I thought it was a nice story about what was the rise and fall of somebody who made the wrong choices and everything, but I quite like it, and it's a famous movie, and they have some wonderful additions to it-other directors actually talking about what an impact it had on them. Where Scarface, the movie, was a little bit over-the-top, this one was more of a working-class mobsters, which I kind of appreciated.

Chris: Well, I'd also like to add that that's very true. I guess it was a different type of gangster or mobster than you'd see on, like, The Godfather or Scarface, where it's such a high-level man on the Mafia chain, as to where these guys were the thugs, I guess, the muscle of the group. I also find that oftentimes, with the downfall of such powerhouses like that, oft in case the downfall is drugs. I find that relevant for many mobster flicks, like Scarface, the downfall was cocaine. GoodFellas, the downfall was cocaine. Oft in case, the downfall is a drug of some sort.

Dave: That occurred in real life, it really did, that there were certain godfathers of certain syndicates who refused to do drugs. They were smart enough to know, they'd lived long enough, certain vices-prostitution, gambling, running numbers, extortion a little bit too-they could survive with that, but they knew, they just knew inherently, that there was something, that drugs was going to destroy them and their enterprise. One of the mobsters, godfathers, that was actually killed in the mid-seventies because he didn't want to do it, and other people said they wanted to. The way it has gone down, the power of these individual-the Gambino crime families and other crime families-have diminished is because of the messing around with drugs. And what happens is, you see Ray Liotta's character, he's supposed to be, you know-he's, yeah. He's using his dope. He's supposed to be-dealing it is one thing, but now he's using it, and that's what drugs do to you. It affects him in such a hard way, it brings them all down, so everybody ends up going to jail. You know? And remember, even Paul, Pauly-Fat Pauly, played by Paul Sorvino, said, "You don't mess around with that stuff. I don't want you messing around with that stuff." You know? And he ends up going to prison, just because he knew Ray Liotta's character. He goes to prison for that, and so does Robert DeNiro's character.