Actor Frank Sivero, who played the role of Frankie Carbone in the famous 1990 mob film Goodfellas, recently criticized a trigger warning AMC had inserted at the beginning of the movie. According to Sivero, the message of caution to the audience is an “insult.”
AMC is now cautioning viewers that “Goodfellas” may contain “cultural stereotypes” and fail to meet today’s standards of “inclusion.” The warning reads, “This film includes language and/or cultural stereotypes that are inconsistent with today’s standards of inclusion and tolerance and may offend some viewers.”
Sivero commented on the new warning, voicing his criticism of the move. “I’m kind of a little bit perturbed in a way, that AMC that even, AMC even cuts the movie completely, you don’t hear the language, they delete the language, so why are they so upset?” he told TMZ during a recent interview.
The actor further noted that Martin Scorsese, who directed the classic film, didn’t write a traditional script for the actors, but worked with them to develop the characters organically. “I’m a little perturbed because thank God I was able to do my job by improvisation, by bringing some dark humor into these people’s lives and not make them just make a violent scene, like a horror movie. Horror movie, you will have dreams off of it. You know, you’re not going to have dreams of like just that. You got to remember what the coffee box so you’re going to remember me warming up the car. ”
He continued, “I created that, I made those moments real, to take the tension away from those gruesome moments.” Sivero elaborated on how the move from AMC is insulting, given that he put so much work into developing his character in the film. “To me as an insult, because I created my own character,” he said.
He also described how the dark humor incorporated into “Goodfellas.” “So that whole humor moment that happened in that scene, it kind of captured one Scorsese, you know, was a genius, and I worked with Marty several different times. Obviously, all his movies have authenticity. That’s the kind of movies that he makes,” he added.
The American Tribune also reported on comments from Bo Ditel, a former NYPD officer who played the role of a cop in “Goodfellas,” where he slammed “political correctness” amid the trigger warning being placed on the film. Ditel suggested the warning was a way to “cleanse history.”
“The f–king political correctness has f–king taken everything away,” he said to the Post. “This is how life was back then. It was not a clean beautiful thing. You can’t cleanse history. If you want to tell true history, you gotta tell it the way it is,” he said.
According to a representative on behalf of AMC, “In 2020, we began adding advisories in front of certain films that include racial or cultural references that some viewers might find offensive.” The backlash from the “Goodfellas” trigger warning is part of a broader criticism toward warning statements about potentially offensive content throughout the entertainment industry.
Featured image credit: Frank Sivero, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frank_Sivero_in_2021.jpg
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