Martin Scorsese has directed musicals, romcoms, documentaries, psychological thrillers, and biopics. Gangster movies make up a fraction of his decade-spanning career. Yet ask the average moviegoer to name a Scorsese flick, and Goodfellas, Casino, or The Irishman will spring to mind. Finding someone who chooses The Aviator or Hugo might take a while.
He’s not the only director who regularly returns to the criminal underworld for inspiration. However, unlike Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Mann, Scorsese is obviously fond of outlaw characters and their lifestyles. This rubs off on the audience, and we end up enjoying the time spent with self-interested, psychopathic mobsters.
It has also earned Scorsese criticism throughout his career. Many argue he glamorizes criminals rather than showing them in a negative light. So, is this true? Does it matter? And why do his villains have such a cozy quality?
Mean Streets and Establishing a Formula
Scorsese’s third feature is the first to cement his fascination with gangsters. It also set the pattern that’s repeated in a few of his other underworld movies. In terms of making him one of the great directors, Mean Streets is instrumental.
In it, we meet the honorable criminal Charlie (Harvey Keitel) and his loose-cannon pal Johnny (Robert De Niro). Charlie’s circumstances draw him down the path of crime, and Johnny is selfish and self-sabotaging. They share a bond of friendship, and Charlie gets hurt by his obligations to his unhinged associate.
Scorsese wants us to feel this same warmth for Johnny. He’s that hot mess of a friend we all know from childhood. Making excuses for their bad behavior and bailing them out of bad situations is relatable. Charlie being a gangster is almost incidental, so putting ourselves in his shoes is easy.
Another essential element of Mean Streets is the charisma of dangerous characters. Plenty of other films paint gangsters as pure evil. They smoke cigars and bark orders at their entourages. Scorsese makes his murky characters fun. Johnny is a charming womanizer and gambling addict. Charlie is a smooth talker with a sensitive side. This makes us root for them, even if they’re up to no good.
Goodfellas and Getting in Bed with Gangsters
Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) has a chaotic, violent life as a mafia member. He commits murder, deals drugs, and eventually becomes an informant to escape assassination. In the end, he’s a nobody in witness protection.
Rather than telling Hill’s story in a hardboiled way, Scorsese presents it almost lightheartedly. An attempt to dispose of a body becomes a farce. Gangsters get celebrity treatment wherever they go. Characters kill and crack wise in the same breath.
Plenty of people find this tasteless, which misses the point. We’re supposed to understand that for gangsters, life is cheap. When Tommy (Joe Pesci) shoots Spider (Michael Imperioli), it’s as if he’s swatted an insect. He shrugs, it’s no big deal, he’ll dig the hole to bury the body, it’s not his first time.
There are terrible moments of tension among the laughs. Tommy, in particular, is a source of good humor who’s also simmering with a rage that’s quickly unleashed. He’s that childhood friend with a short fuse that Henry feels responsible for, like Johnny in Mean Streets.
This time, the coziness also comes from how exaggerated everything feels. Mean Streets had larger-than-life characters, but its low budget kept it grounded and gritty. Goodfellas is Scorsese unleashed, with the lavishness of high-level criminal life separating it from the everyday.
Henry, Tommy, and Jimmy (Robert De Niro) verge on being caricatures. They’re endlessly enjoyable to watch, and their stories are episodic. This makes the movie easy to dip into again and again, like a warm bath. Exceptional editing from Thelma Schoonmaker, one of the leaders in her field, is the glue that holds it all together.
Casino and Coming Full Circle
The overlap between Goodfellas and Casino is significant. De Niro and Pesci are back, the gangster lifestyle gets a glow-up, and violence is never far away. The bright lights of the Las Vegas strip only amplify the impact of every compelling scene.
It’s also a movie we can relax into because it’s about decline. It opens with the main characters telling us that this is the story of how they messed up a good thing. So when bad things happen, we’re expecting it.
The sprawling, decade-spanning scope of these movies makes them even more comforting. We watch the rise and fall of mobsters and forgive their flaws because they’re a small part of the bigger picture.
In Casino, Sam (De Niro) might have distressing clashes with his wife, Ginger (Sharon Stone). But we get to see the good times that came before. Nicky (Pesci) might go off the rails and pay the ultimate price. But we’re won over by his cockiness, his confidence, and his main character energy. He seems unpredictable on the surface, but we see how calculated this is through Pesci’s performance.
Scorsese has the luxury of being able to spend time building characters and showing us them inside and out. This helps them escape the fate of being one-note stereotypes. We warm to them further because we get to sit with them through snapshots of their lives. Again, it’s episodic. Tyrion Lannister says and does despicable things in Game of Thrones, but we still root for him. It’s the same for Nicky Santoro in Casino.
The Wolf of Wall Street and a Different Kind of Crook
Not every Scorsese villain comes from Little Italy. The Wolf of Wall Street features real rotters from the world of finance. Yet once again we’re won over by their over-the-top personas, superficial charm, and excessive lifestyles.
When it was released in 2013, contemporary criticism focused on how the film glamorized illegal behavior, showing that crime does pay. To which the obvious retort is, “Well, yeah, it does”. Jordan Belford (Leonardo DiCaprio) really did make a fortune from scamming investors in the 90s. If you think his behavior is immoral, the movie won’t change your mind. It might even convince you that more film censorship is needed to protect impressionable audiences.
Because Belfort’s life is such a pantomime, we can step back and laugh at his eventual fall from grace. He behaves monstrously and gets punished. It’s only glamorous if there are no consequences. As an unapologetic bad guy, his downfall is cathartic. This eases off the tension and keeps us interested in his fate. When he crashes his Lamborghini in a drug-addled daze, we’re glad, not sad. The fact that Scorsese is still being asked to defend himself from the film’s critics is the real tragedy.
The Irishman and the End of an Era
Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and Casino form a loose trilogy, marking Scorsese’s evolution from indie upstart to household name. The Irishman is arguably his swansong for the gangster movie genre. He uses it to address some of the criticisms of his earlier works and reflect on his career as well.
At 209 minutes long, it is epic in scale, which makes it cozy by default. Like Once Upon a Time in America, it is perfect Sunday afternoon viewing. Grab a blanket, keep snacks close by, and immerse yourself in a tale of mafia dons, hitmen, union bigwigs, and corrupt politicians.
The characters have flaws and endearing traits that Scorsese fans know well. Frank (Robert De Niro) is impressionable, unafraid of violence, and fiercely loyal. Russell (Joe Pesci) is a crime boss with many palms to grease and problems to solve. It’s a partnership built on an imbalance of power. But there is mutual trust and respect, which takes them to some dark places. The movie ends on a melancholy note, with old age doing what the long arm of the law and rival criminals could not. Of its many themes, regret is one of the most enduring.
Scorsese’s Gangster Movies as Modern Legends
Ultimately, we can take comfort from watching and re-watching Scorsese’s back catalog of crime dramas because they’re the myths and legends of the 20th century. Inspired by true events, they take liberties to make reality far more entertaining.
Jordan Belfort is a warped Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to himself. Johnny does the same in Mean Streets, siphoning cash from loan sharks and never intending to repay them. In Goodfellas, Henry Hill has a rags-to-riches transformation worthy of Cinderella. His carriage-back-into-pumpkin moment is moving from a mansion into a dinky witness protection condo.
We want to revisit all of these epic, fantastical stories because we can relate to the characters. Our lives and experiences are massively different from theirs, but so what? Whether we root for them throughout or cheer when they falter, the shape of the narrative is satisfyingly familiar.
