#goofellas

and just now i convinced him to watch Reservoir Dogs with me.. and he loved that too

When On the Waterfront hit theaters in 1954, it was groundbreaking. Today, we look back on the film as the beginning of a new era in acting. This was one of the first films, certainly the first well-known film, in which the actors used “the Method” style of acting. No more were gestures to be unrealistically theatrical, facial expressions to be caricatures of true emotion, or the actor to be simply playing a part. From now on, the actors would dedicate themselves to finding the emotion of the characters and truly falling into their world.

Marlon Brando is the master of Method acting. The scene in On the Waterfront that always stands out is the scene in which Brando and Eva Marie Saint are walking through the playground, and when she drops her glove, he picks it up; instead of giving it back to her, slides it on as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. There is nothing otherwise remarkable about the sequence, but it is a brilliant example of the new age of acting. If anyone ever doubted that the Method was and is the best way to capture an audience, this scene alone will prove them wrong.

The reason the Method is so effective is that it’s so real. An audience needs to be able to relate to the characters in order to understand the feeling of a film. The characters need to be real and human, not jerky and robotic, nor simple line-deliverers. We relate to and sympathize with Terry Malloy, even though none of us is on the fringes of the mafia (probably), because Brando appeals to us on a level deeper that of just a face on a screen. Human emotions are something that everyone relates to no matter what the cause.

 The acting in On the Waterfront was so influential that the Method remains to this day the dominant style of acting and had changed very little, if any, by the time Martin Scorsese made Goodfellas in 1990. Instead, Scorsese took his risks in the editing room.

Instead of relying solely on traditional narrative to tell the story of Henry Hill, Scorsese uses a flashback narrative cut freeze frames and voice over narration. Other movies have used all these things before, but none has used them as a means of communication the way Goodfellas does.

Beginning with the freeze frames, we can see how Scorsese uses editing to build up

tension. The best example comes near the beginning, when Henry’s father beats him with both his fists and belt. We seen the scene from Henry’s point of view, his father fills the screen in a low angle shot, making him look dangerous and powerful. The cuts are sharp and fast, heightening the sense of chaos. Then, just as Henry’s father is about to hit him, the shot freeze. It feels as if we must hold our breath until the scene continues, and it’s the longest couple of seconds you’ve ever spent watching a movie. When it finally plays again, the tension is released, but the feeling it produced lingers until the next scene.

            Then, there is the voice-over. Many times, voice-over is used as a crutch on which to lean a weak screenplay or plot, so I was at first a bit apprehensive. Instead, it was used in Goodfellas to communicate ideas. It begins like any other voice over: Henry’s thoughts and feelings that give background and put the current scene into context. On Henry’s first blind date with Karen, we get her perspective, throwing the film into a more literary realm with a third person omniscient point of view. In the end the true purpose of the voice-over is revealed: Henry is testifying in a court case against his former friends, family, and boss. Those whom we had previously been rooting for turn out to be the bad guys, and we understand what is going on most fully only when the voice-over comes to life.

            This is also when we realize that the entire film has been a flashback narrative. Now it makes sense that the voice-over was in the past tense. It’s often easy to forget that a story is a flashback, but in this case it was completely unknown until the very end. In fact, Scorsese leaves many things until the very end, things we don’t even know we didn’t know until now: when the movie truly takes place (1970s), where the movie takes place (in a courtroom), Henry’s sate of being (alive), and why the story is being told (testimony).