Blog
Harry Hill – a tribute to Slippery People
Written by Jimmy
Flying from London to DC, reading the Times, and found an article announcing the death of Henry Hill… quietly in his bed, a victim of a 2 pack a day habit, not the Mob. Henry Hill was the mobster who turned informer and was probably the most wanted man in Mob history – every mobster needed to kill him to make him an example. And he died in bed.
Ray Liotta played Henry Hill in Scorsese classic film, Goodfellas. It starts with one of the greatest lines in movie history, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” The movie features the famous ‘steady cam’ shot, the single camera shot through about 10 rooms and 500 extra’s:
And, the movie has Tommy, the Joe Pesci character, who remains one of the scariest mob guys ever. Simply because he is seriously deranged. The Tommy shoots Spider, Tommy kills Spider scenes are iconic:
The sound track for the film was a work of art, with Scorsese having two rules: the song being played had to be of the era of the scene (the movie covered a lot of years) and the lyrics had to be relevant in some way to the dialogue or the action. Layla plays throughout the famous burying scene where they’re trying to kills/bury a ‘made men’ before going back for pasta with a mama.
Now all roads in movie music lead back to the Talking Heads as you know. In movies, there is six degrees of separation back to Kevin Bacon. In music in movies, it is simple. Most roads lead to Married to the Mob or Something Wild – the two movies with the best soundtracks, directed by Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) who also directed Stop Making Sense. Let’s stick with Married to the Mob, which featured an amazing soundtrack, including my favourite Sinead O’Conner’s track, Jump in the River:
And, You Don’t Miss the Water by Brian Eno, the great lost track:
And the Feelies, Too Far Gone:
The Feelies appear again in Something Wild, as a bad high school band in the most definitive use of a song in a movie in history. But all this is nothing compared to Denne’s work on Stop Making Sense. And by far, the greatest song, of the greatest concert movie, directed by the greatest director to use music is Slippery People:
We started this blog talking about an informer to the mob and end it with Slippery People. I think the circle is closed, grasshopper, the circle is closed.
Jimmy
(Washington DC)