I rewatched Goodfellas recently and afterwards I tried to think of anybody Henry Hill had killed, but I came up blank. Does Henry Hill kill anyone in the movie, either on screen, or implied?
2 Answers
As far as we know, no.
However he is very capable of violence:
And certainly an accessory to murder:
And while he doesn't complain much about the job of burying Billy Batts, he does seem to lose his appetite for home cooking with the mans freshly made corpse still in the trunk:
He was lucky he didn't have to kill anyone personally. The outfit may as well have ordered him to kill his best friend, just to make it easier to get the job done. Henry Hill was in for a penny and there's no telling when a pound is needed.
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1Also, doesn't Henry know that Jimmy intends to have him killed when Jimmy asks Henry to kill someone because the request is unprecedented?– MmmHmmApr 3, 2017 at 19:23
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1It's been a while, but I seem to remember a situation where Henry's wife feels Jimmy is leading her into an alley to have a murdered. It is also around this time the DEA finally takes him. At this point Henry was strung out on cocaine and it is unlikely he would have been trusted with anything important.– DannieApr 3, 2017 at 19:31
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3Yes, Karen does get scared off too (not in the movie, but apparently in real life she was having an affair with Paulie and this may have been part of why Jimmy was going to kill her). In the restaurant where Jimmy and Henry meet for the last time there is a freeze frame where Henry realizes Jimmy would have him "whacked" if he agreed to do the hit. "Jimmy had never asked me to whack somebody before... That's when I knew I would never have come back from Florida alive"– MmmHmmApr 3, 2017 at 19:55
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Hill does not and cannot kill anyone during the course of the story.
Don't forget, this is a true story. The real Henry Hill didn't confess to murder -- he would have gotten a less cushy deal if he had -- and was still alive when the movie was released, so the movie couldn't portray him as having committed murder without the producers becoming the defendants in a libel suit they would very likely lose.
It is not impossible that the real Hill killed someone -- but since he hadn't 'fessed up and was not convicted, portraying him as a killer in 1990 was a practical impossibility.
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1That's actually valid. Henry Hill got himself expelled from the witness protection program by revealing his identity to BBQ guests on two occasions. Amazingly he died of a heart attack age 67. So I guess a libel suit wasn't at all impossible.– DannieApr 4, 2017 at 10:16
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1@Dannie -- Yeah, Hill was a self-aggrandizing doofus. More surprising to me than the fact nobody whacked him was that he was the subject of two fairly flattering biopics, released within a month of each other, this and My Blue Heaven. Apr 4, 2017 at 13:26