Double Feature: ‘Goodfellas’ And ‘My Blue Heaven’ Each Tell The Story Of The Same Mobster, But Could Not Be Any More Different

One of my favorite bits of movie trivia is that the same mobster inspired Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese’s crime drama masterpiece, and My Blue Heaven, a mostly forgotten and completely silly crime comedy. This is not an understatement; in fact, I’ve written about the subject once before for this very website. While I’ll do my best not to plagiarize myself, forgive me for going long on one of my favorite Hollywood stories that links to very different (and, of course, very similar) movies.

The real-life Henry Hill, member of the Lucchese crime family in New York City, left his life of crime behind him in 1980 when he became an FBI informant and entered the witness protection program. A charismatic and colorful character, Hill’s star ironically shined brighter after his testimony led to the conviction of 50 other criminals including high-ranking members of the mob. Immortalized in Nicholas Pileggi’s 1985 true crime book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, his crazy-but-true life of crime was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece Goodfellas in which his character was portrayed by Ray Liotta.

Organized crime is a well-tread cinematic subject, but Goodfellas might be the best depiction of the 20th century mob. My apologies to The Godfather trilogy; while that trio is epic and grand — even if you include the flawed third movie — you simply cannot beat the fast-paced rhythm of Scorsese’s film. With dueling narration from Liotta’s Henry Hill and his wife, Karen (played brilliantly by Lorraine Bracco, who earned an Oscar nomination for her role), Goodfellas is freewheeling and deeply subjective. When Hill says at the beginning of the film, “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a gangster,” you get the sense that what follows is less than a fact-based story and more of a tall tale from man who relied on the more salacious and over-the-top elements of his own crime story.

And yet Goodfellas works so well precisely because of Scorsese’s attention to detail and his refusal to shy away from the mob’s brutality. It may seem tame nearly thirty years after its release, but it was no doubt shocking when it was released in 1990. Its hero is a bad guy who does terrible things at the behest of other bad men, and he’s unapologetic about it. You can see why he wanted to be in league with these guys from the get-go; they have all the power in the world, and not only do they take advantage of it, but they do it with such zeal and braggadocio that you can’t help but feel a little envious of their self-confidence. At at the center of this story is the larger-than-life Henry Hill, guiding us along an unwieldy and unbelievable journey full of sex and drugs and heists and violence.

That’s pretty much the opposite of My Blue Heaven. Henry Hill isn’t a character, exactly; in Herbert Ross’s comedy, Steve Martin stars as Vincent Antonelli, a slick and charismatic former mobster who moves to suburban San Diego under a new name. He’s about to testify against his former colleagues, and is kept under the not-so-careful watch of FBI agent Barney Cooperstein (Rick Moranis). Playing the Italian stereotypes up as far as they will go, Martin’s crook with a heart of gold can’t help but get himself into more and more trouble —it’s in his nature— as he is a fish out of water in this drab and cookie cutter small town. Of course, that’s why it’s so damn funny: watching Steve Martin play an outlandish character means you get to see him do all kinds of physical comedy, talk himself out of a variety of nefarious shenanigans, and — like with Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill — it’s impossible not to like the guy.

Nora Ephron wrote the script based on her own conversations with Hill when he was collaborating with Pileggi on his book. Hill himself describes this in his own memoir, writing:

At night, I’d get half-gassed and call Nick in New York just to bullshit. It was like therapy for me. Sometimes Nick’s wife, Nora, would answer the phone and tell me, “Hey, Nick is sleeping. What’s the matter, Henry? This is Aunt Nora.” Meanwhile, she was picking my brain for a script she was writing. I had no idea. She was on the other end taking notes. She was a piece of work… In 1990, the same year my movie Goodfellas came out, she had a little movie released called My Blue Heaven, starring Steve Martin, about a New Yorker in Witness Protection out west — just like I had been in Omaha. When I saw it I flipped because she used some of the stuff I had told her on the phone for her movie scenes.

It’s almost unfair to compare My Blue Heaven to Goodfellas, but what’s interesting about this pair of films is how Ephron and Pileggi examined the same subject and took it in very different places. Pileggi went serious, looking at the dark underbelly of the Italian-American crime world. Ephron, on the other hand, wrote a classic (if underrated) Nora Ephron movie: it’s a screwball romantic comedy, with Vincent serving as a matchmaker for Barney, setting him up with an uptight local D.A. named Hannah Stubbs (an always perfect Joan Cusack). He’s not doing it out of the kindness of his heart, however, but to get both Barney and Hannah out of his hair while he launches a new crime syndicate alongside a bunch of other mobsters-in-hiding who were also placed to live anonymous lives in the California suburbs.

While My Blue Heaven was released in theaters a month before Goodfellas, the former almost serves as a sequel to the latter — answering the question, “What happened once Henry Hill went into hiding with his wife?” To watch them back-to-back is a real trip, as you can see the source material so clearly and imagine Pileggi and Ephron’s conversations with Hill (and their own creative imaginations running wild). After Goodfellas‘ two-hour-plus runtime, full of vulgarity and violence and a very angry Joe Pesci, My Blue Heaven feels like a parodic romp. If My Blue Heaven trucks in too many stereotypes, Goodfellas most certainly reset the board (and thus became the reference point for every movie about the mob that followed). But the biggest mindwarp is the idea that Steve Martin is playing a parody of Ray Liotta — even though the movies came out within a month of each other. Who knows if Martin and Liotta even knew about these respective projects, or their portrayals of the Henry Hill and his fictionalized counterpart Vincent Antonelli. I almost hope they didn’t, because the result —this unlikely pairing of movies— only makes it all feel so much more magical in a very Hollywood way.

Tyler Coates is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.

Where to stream Goodfellas

Where to stream My Blue Heaven