Compare Goodfellas And The Godfather

Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather both depict life in organized crime, but where Goodfellas addresses criminals with little “morals” and their everyday life, The Godfather centers on the opulence of the mob bosses and the preservation of their power while holding the value of family and loyalty above everything. Francis Ford Coppola uses Soviet-inspired montage in the beginning and end of The Godfather as a means of commentary to draw focus on the fine line the Corleone family straddles when justifying their mob activities by claiming it is moral by associating it with family and loyalty. The characters in Goodfellas justify their sprees of violence with the thought that being a gangster gives them license to do whatever it is they please.

The Godfather opens to wedding reception of Connie Corleone and Carlo Rizzi where family and friends eat, drink, and sing together. While this extravagant party is happening outside the house of Don Vito Corleone, inside the house there is business being conducted. This mixture of family and business is the film’s major theme. The meeting in the house is between Vito Corleone and an undertaker whose daughter was beaten and raped by two young men. He asks Don Corleone to kill the two men to which he is refused. However, Vito agrees to alleviate the undertaker’s concerns on the fate of the two men if the mortician swears loyalty to Vito and promises he will help Vito when a favor is called upon. By bringing the undertaker into the Corleone “family”, Vito can then justify bringing violence down upon the two men who raped the undertaker’s daughter. After the meeting has concluded, Vito, whose moral code is certainly corrupt but not from saving, says to the oth...

... middle of paper ...

...o in nature and crimes are committed because these men find thrill in it. Unlike the calculated violence of The Godfather, in Goodfellas, Tommy DeVito killing a young waiter named Spider over nothing shows the rough, unstable, and volatile life many gangsters truly led. Neither of Henry Hill’s originally redeeming acts of loyalty, getting arrested for selling cigarettes as a teen and going to jail with Jimmy for beating a man, all the while telling the cops nothing, matter. This is because when Henry’s life is truly on the line at the end of the film, he caves in and gives away everyone he had ever worked with. Whereas Scorsese worked to create a more frantic and realistic portrayal of the gangster lifestyle than the romanticized version of mob life that Coppola created in The Godfather, both films at their core focus on the violence centered on the mafia lifestyle.