50 Greatest Movie Scenes Ever
10. The Tracking Shot - Goodfellas
From a purely technical point of view, putting together a single, super-long tracking shot is a major act. It’s like juggling multiple balls while you walk down a corridor navigating obstacles as someone keeps throwing more balls at you.
That alone marks out the incredible tracking shot in Goodfellas as pretty great, but it’s the narrative importance that makes it really count. This single long shot is a distillation of everything that Henry Hill aspires to be. When he opens the film talking about his desire to be a gangster and says he saw it as better than being the President, this is the response to that fantasy.
We get to see a microcosm of his entire life: he breaks the rules by going in the wrong way, he’s treated like a celebrity or royalty. we see hints of the violence that defines it all (in the shadowy hulking figures dotted around) and it all ends with a simple lie of how he got it all. And then later when his life has fallen apart and he’s forced to be that worst of all things - normal - it’s this scene that he’s lamenting most.
[SG]