I don’t think this quite qualifies for either category, but remember the scene where they go to the restuarant and Morrie is going to get whacked, and Jimmy calls it off and Henry in the narration says, “He never realized how close he came to being whacked.” Then they go out into the parking lot and he gets whacked.
I thought that was to throw the audience off about how unpredictable Jimmy is, but also to show the fact that Henry was being cut out of the loop.
In real life Henry had everyone after him by the end. Vario withdrew his protection so anyone Henry fucked over wanted him. Jimmy wanted him dead for ties to the robbery. Vario wanted him dead for drug dealing. My assumption was that that scene was meant to show Henry was losing his inside track since his liabilities were adding up.
In his book he said something like ‘I was worth more dead than alive, and thats all there was to it’. By the end too many people had too much to gain by killing him.
Yeah, no continuity error. He was just narrating what he was thinking in the moment - how relieved he was Jimmy was calling off the hit and how lucky Morrie was not to be getting hit after he had harassed Jimmy like that. He didn’t realize that Jimmy had just decided not to include him in the murder, possibly because Jimmy realized Henry was against it and might keep trying to talk Jimmy out of it.
All of this was a bit before Henry was in trouble with the mob for getting busted with drugs and was unrelated. The Lufthansa killings mostly happened in 1979. Henry was busted in 1980.
Also it is worth remembering that Henry Hill was also an unreliable narrator. In both the book and as portrayed in the movie, Hill never got involved in actual hits. But by his own admission he was witness to 20 killings - again, unreliable, but it beggars belief that he had entirely clean hands. Not being that deep in the mob and being so close to a couple of known psychopaths.
I agree with both of the above, but I still think the line “He never knew how close he came to being whacked” is a mistake. Henry is talking about what Morrie was thinking, and he didn’t come close to being whacked, he was whacked. And if Scorcese was trying to throw the audience off, it doesn’t make sense to do that for 30 seconds. In Godfather II, the scene with Pantangilo in the bar -“Michael Corleone says hello” - that is a “what the hell is going on here” moment. We were sure until then Michael thought it was Roth. It is explained much later.
The line above from from Henry should have been something like "I was so relieved that Jimmy changed his mind. "
Anyway, minor quibble about one of my favorite movies. It’s like in Body Heat. Edmund Walker’s house doesn’t have air conditioning?
There is probably already a thread about this sort of thing.
Didn’t some time pass before they were killed? I don’t recall it being the same evening. Seemed to be part of the Jimmy’s cleanup timeline.
I thought this as well but I rewatched the scene and it’s as the OP described. I never thought about it but it is kind of weirdly stated unless there was a director’s cut or something that put some space in between the two events.
Edit: Scene in question
It was the same evening. Here’s the whole scene (NSFW spoilered):
Morrie is wearing the same green sweater, Jimmy has the same tie.
There’s a few possibilities - either Jimmy really did call off the hit because he was having a great time with Morrie, but when Morrie started busting his balls again about the money, Jimmy decided to whack him on the spot, and told Tommy to do it as soon as they got in the car. Or he changed his mind again after Henry had left, and planned to do it in the car.
Alternatively, Jimmy just changed the plan for the hit, and didn’t want Henry involved because Henry was obviously good friends with Morrie.
And the narration in Scorcese movies is really “in the moment”, not added by the narrator later. So at that moment, Henry really thought Morrie would never know how close he had been to being whacked. For the best example of Scorcese narration being what the narrator is thinking at the time, see the scene where Nicky gets whacked in Casino (NSFW):
He literally narrates the “Ah!” when they hit him with the baseball bat.
Henry is narrating the movie AFTER the fact; his narration is a recollection, not a running commentary in real time. If it’s supposed to be in the moment, a hundred other narration lines sound wrong. Even if at the point of Morrie’s dying he is not in the loop, it makes no sense for him to be unaware of it in retrospect.
If the purpose of the line is to imply Henry is out of the loop, it’s confusing and just not good writing. The fact was can have this debate at all is a sign it should have been better handled; this isn’t an area of cinema that really should have an artsy, nuanced approach with multiple interpretations.
So a bit after the Sunshine of Your Love scene and well before the Layla scene. Got it.
The clip uses a lot of past tense narration, as does the whole movie.
I wonder since Tommy kills Morrie if the word that it was off hadn’t gotten to Tommy. Or that Tommy was acting on his own. Frankie* seems surprised by it.
- AKA Young Genco.
Frankie Carbone? He’s surprised by everything. He honestly thought Tommy wanted him to bring teh coffee pot after he whacked Stacks. I bet he was really surprised when they put him on the meat hook.
It’s been a while since I read the book (or listened to the audiobook), but this part is something that appears in the Nicholas Pileggi book, with Henry Hill saying that he effectively talked Jimmy out of whacking Morrie right away. When Morrie IS killed, I believe it is quite a while later. The movie did take liberties with the book, after all. So the movie is “guilty” of telescoping the times of events, and this, I think, is what creates the apparent conflict of events. I the real world, accepting Henry Hill’s recollections as correct.
Regarding that, by the way, I’ve written on this Board that you should not accept anything that Henry Hill says on faith alone. Hill, after all, was a con man and a criminal. I’m sure he realized that he made a much more sympathetic character if he wasn’t so closely associated with actual crimes and violence, so in his recollections he’s often either away from the scene of the crime, or present while someone else beats somebody up or abruptly kills them, and there’s nothing he can do about it.
Right.
Did they even need to? Tommy could have made an offhand remark about hanging themselves on meat hooks and Carbone would be looking for a stepladder.
Some information on the real life “Morrie”, aka Martin Krugman.
Henry persuaded JImmy not to kill him. Then some time later he began making trouble again. He disappeared, presumed killed. His body was never found. As CalMeacham says, Information about what actually happened to him supplied by Henry Hill is not reliable. His wife wasn’t killed, as shown in the movie. The part where their two bodies are found in a car is fictional.
He wasn’t killed by Tommy, who was murdered *before *Krugman disappeared.
another example where they compressed time was when Billy Batts got whacked. That did not happen the same night Batts was breaking Tommy’s balls, it was later.
also that scene where Morrie was whacked was the only mention of the point shaving by Boston College that Henry was involved with. “Did you hear about the points we were shaving up in Boston”
The couple in the car in the car wasn’t Morrie and his wife, it was Johnny Roastbeef and his wife. They were in the pink cadillac that Johnny bought right after the Lufthansa heist, which pissed off Jimmy because he told everyone to lay low and not do anything flashy until the heat was off.
My mistake. I’ll take your word for it.
Hill did an interview with Howard Stern, I’m not sure if it was this one or another one.
But he said he personally did 3 hits for the mafia. I believe all when he was a teenager (When he was 16 and 19).
Yeah, I think it was that interview.
My mistake, I guess one was when he was a teenager, I think the rest were when he was older.
He talks about it more at the 32 minute mark.
the movie left out that Hill spent 2 years in the Army at Ft. Bragg in the early 60s, pre Vietnam. After he enlisted the mob guys told him they could cancel his enlistment but he told them no. While in the Army he stole food from the mess hall and sold it to make money. I thought Hill always denied killing anyone but I see he did admit to a few murders.
Actually, on reviewing the scene, it still looks more like Morrie than Johnny. Unless Johnny grew a beard in between scenes.
Here’s Johnnyand his wife explaining why they bought the car.
Here’s the dead guyin the car.
It looks to me like Morrie and Johnny’s wife in Johnny’s car. Which doesn’t make sense.