Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), Jimmy Conway (Robert DeNiro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) take a drive through the country. Henry wakes Jimmy and Tommy when he hears a knock in the car. He’s told to pull over, and popping the trunk, reveals a bloodied corpse still alive and kicking. Tommy stabs it with a meat cleaver and Jimmy shoots it. Henry slams the trunk and in voice-over says, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”

In 1955 Brooklyn, young Henry is enamored by the men who congregate in a cab stand across the street. It’s operated by Tuddy, whose brother Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino) provides protection for the neighborhood. Henry is so devoted to running errands for the cab stand that he stops going to school. His father beats him, but instead of letting him quit, Tuddy threatens the mail carrier with time in an oven if he delivers another letter from the kid’s school.

Henry meets Tommy when they’re put to work selling stolen cigarettes. He’s introduced to Jimmy – already one of the most feared criminals in the city – when he tips Henry $20 for bringing him a drink. As adults, Henry, Jimmy and Tommy frequently rip off cargo moving through their territory, which includes Idlewild Airport. Henry agrees to go along on a double date with Tommy, and meets Karen (Lorraine Bracco). When Henry ditches her on the group’s next date, she has Tommy drive her to the cab stand, where she yells at Henry on the street.

Henry is Irish/Sicilian, Karen is Jewish, but they’re soon married. Highlights of their relationship include Henry pistol whipping a guy who assaults her, and Karen waking Henry up with a gun in his face when she finds out he’s cheating on her. Jimmy puts together what was – up to that time – the biggest heist in American history, assembling a crew that steals millions in untraceable bills from Lufthansa Airlines.

Tommy’s psychopathic behavior – beating and even killing indiscriminately – culminates when he beats a gangster (Frank Vincent) from another family. Henry and Jimmy help dispose of the body. The men also start trafficking cocaine, despite Paulie’s order that they’re not allowed to. Henry and Karen’s drug habit gets so bad they start seeing helicopters following them. The law closes in, and Henry’s only alternative is to turn informer on everything he knows.

While shooting The Color of Money in 1986, director Martin Scorsese read a review in the New York Times for a book called Wiseguy: Life In A Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi, a contributing editor for New York Magazine. Pileggi, who’d been covering law and order since the late ’60s, based his book on the life of Henry Hill, a gangster who turned gang informant after being arrested in 1980.

There had been books done about mobsters before, many of them full of boasts about their exploits, but when he interviewed Hill, Pileggi wasn’t interested in that. He wanted to know how it worked inside, the details. That turned out to be exactly what Scorsese was looking for, and he adapted the screenplay with Pileggi.

I go back and forth between which Scorsese picture is the greatest – Taxi Driver or this one – but GoodFellas is about as perfect a movie as can be humanly made. Script, casting, direction, editing, music, everything works together in perfect sync. Unlike a lot of gang related movies and TV shows, Scorsese and Pileggi had little interest in crime (the Lufthansa heist takes place entirely off-camera). Instead, it’s language, the seductiveness in which these guys tell their stories, that pulls you in.

Ray Liotta’s voice-over narration may be the best ever heard in a film. Recorded after filming had wrapped and his throat was hoarse from smoking, Liotta patiently guides us through the scams, the nightlife, the court proceedings and his own downfall with a wry detachment that sounds better every time I listen to this.

The cast is one of the greatest ever assembled, and there are too many classic scenes to list. Pesci’s “Do you think I’m funny?” bit – improvised by Pesci in rehearsal, written into the script by Scorsese – is a brilliantly timed piece of stagecraft. My favorite scene is a simple dialogue in a backyard between Liotta and Paul Sorvino, where the boss tells the man he thinks of as a son why it’s important to him personally that he stay away from trafficking junk. It dawns on us that Henry isn’t going to listen.

Visually, the movie has no peer. A tracking shot that follows Liotta & Bracco through the bowels of the Copacabana lasts three spectacular minutes without a cut. The climax follows a coked out Liotta as he tools around on what becomes his last day as a wiseguy, with George Harrison’s “What Is Life,” Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy,” The Who’s “Magic Bus” and The Rolling Stones’ “Monkey Man” on the soundtrack. The creativity and energy level here is often cited by other filmmakers, but I’ve never seen it duplicated.

GoodFellas was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Pesci won Best Supporting Actor, and gave one of the shortest acceptance speeches ever (he later said he didn’t think he was going to win). At decade’s end, the AFI ranked it #97 on their list of “100 Years, 100 Movies”, but the cultural impact the film made goes way beyond that. My favorite reference is probably in Swingers, where the guys agree that the Copacabana tracking shot is the greatest shot in a movie ever.