Goodfellas

Goodfellas is adapted from Nicholas Pileggi's book, which is in turn built from extended interviews with Henry Hill after he entered witness protection. The screenplay was written by Pileggi with Martin Scorsese, and it stays close to the source.

Hill was an associate, never a made man — his father was Irish, which under the rules closed that door permanently. That detail is the spine of the film and it is accurate. So is the arithmetic underneath it: a life of considerable daily comfort and no security whatsoever.

The record

The Lufthansa robbery at Kennedy airport in December 1978 took roughly five million dollars in cash and jewellery and is still the largest cash theft in American history at the time it occurred. The sequence of killings that followed, as the crew was reduced to people who could not testify, happened substantially as shown.

The film compresses timelines and merges some minor figures, and the trial testimony of a man trading his account for his freedom deserves the scepticism any such account deserves. Within those limits this is the most reliable portrait of the working life the genre has produced — largely because it is interested in the tedium and the paperwork as much as the shooting.