4 Iconic Needle Drops From the Martin Scorsese Film ‘Goodfellas’

No movie director has ever used music as effectively as Martin Scorsese. Perhaps the pinnacle of his soundtracking came on his legendary gangster movie Goodfellas, released in 1990 to universal acclaim and now hailed as one of the greatest movies ever made.

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We could have tripled the length of this list and still come up way short of naming all the memorable musical moments in the film. But these four needle drops certainly stand out as iconic.

“Rags To Riches” by Tony Bennett

Great movies often come adorned with memorable credit sequences. And they don’t get much more impactful than what takes place in Goodfellas. Right after Henry Hill closes the car trunk on a dead body, he makes the unforgettable admission, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” The credits then come speeding into the picture, accompanied by the buoyant brass of Tony Bennett’s “Rags To Riches”. Written by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Bennett had taken the song to No. 1 in the pop charts back in 1953. There’s something about the innocence of the song juxtaposed against the violence of the scene that’s just brilliant. And the lyrics also subtly commented on Hill’s journey.

“Atlantis” by Donovan

In terms of pop hits, “Atlantis”, released in 1969, stands as one of the most unusual in terms of structure. The opening section features Donovan reciting poetry about the mythical land under the sea. From that, the song opens up into a repeated, “Hey Jude”-like refrain where the narrator pines to be “way down below the ocean.” That structure certainly served its purpose in Goodfellas. The quiet part underscores the simmering tension of the scene. Once the chorus hits, Tommy DeVito conducts his brutal attack on Billy Batts. That’s when you get Scorsese’s unforgettable floor-view shots of Joe Pesci and Robert DeNiro conducting the beating. The scene wouldn’t hit quite the same without the music.

“Layla” by Derek And The Dominos

Arguably the peak of his recording career, Eric Clapton’s Derek And The Dominos’ side project found him in blues-rock heaven playing alongside Duane Allman. “Layla”, which laid bare his feelings for Olivia Boyd, acted as the centerpiece. After the main part of the song, it opened up into an extended, piano-driven piece composed by drummer Jim Gordon. (It’s long been contended that Rita Coolidge, Gordon’s then-girlfriend, helped to write that part. But Coolidge never received official credit.) In Goodfellas, only the sorrowful coda is needed. It plays underneath a montage of all the dead bodies racked up as Jimmy Conway eliminates the crew who helped him with the movie’s defining heist.

“My Way” by Sid Vicious

Goodfellas ends with a bit of an anticlimax. Henry Hill moans about having to live his life in boring anonymity while in witness protection. Scorsese easily could have gone with the grandiose version of “My Way”, which became a kind of signature song for Frank Sinatra. Paul Anka wrote the lyrics over the melody to an established French song. Instead, Scorsese dug out the version done by Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols in 1978. That version begins with Vicious attempting a Sinatra-like warble. Scorsese leaves that part out in the movie and begins once the guitars kick in and we get fully into punk mode. Vicious turned the song into something more irreverent and defiant than anything Sinatra could have imagined.