Before Henry Hill: Ray Liotta in ‘Something Wild’ and ‘Field of Dreams’

When I first heard about the Martin Scorsese picture Goodfellas, which during its shoot was called Wiseguy, I was excited as everyone else. Scorsese was doing a full-on gangster picture — and this really was his first such film — reuniting him with Robert De Niro after a six-year layoff,  and with Raging Bull’s Joe Pesci to boot. But I was also excited for another reason that wasn’t registering with a lot of people: Ray Liotta, who was to play the movie’s central character, real-life gangster Henry Hill. Liotta was a name that a lot of people, including some seasoned film people, did not know.

Jonathan Demme eventually became one of America’s most revered and beloved directors, but in 1986 he was still something of a cult director, with quirky, unpredictable pictures such as Handle With Care and Melvin and Howard to his credit. There was also the classic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. His picture of 1986 was Something Wild, and it still lives up to the title. A road movie that’s confined to just a handful of states, it’s about Charles, a buttoned-up yuppie (young Jeff Daniels) who’s more or less kidnapped by a vamp named Lulu (Melanie Griffith) who, after handcuffing him to a hotel bed and showing him what her mama gave her, takes him to her all American Pennsylvania homestead, introduces him to said mama (who’s just a very nice lady) and brings him to her high-school reunion dance. Think Bringing Up Baby with no animals and more sex.

And way more menace. For at said high school reunion, Lulu, whose real name is Audrey, runs into her old boyfriend Ray Sinclair, played by the then 32-year-old Liotta. (On the Criterion Blu-ray, the chapter is titled “Enter Ray.”) As the lights go down at the dance, and the band — The Feelies, playing The Willies — begin their chiming, evocative song “Loveless Love,” Charles and Audrey melt into each other, their dreamy kiss matching the music. Another couple sidles into the frame from the left, floats past them, and moves to their side, bumping into them. Audrey looks behind her as Ray, spiky black hair and black jacket making a punky doomy impression, says, not even raising his voice, “Hi baby. Surprise.” And his dance partner wags a finger at Charles and Audrey as Audrey rushes her new friend out. As they leave, the whites of Ray’s eyes following them are terrifying. 

But when Ray comes out of the dance area in casual-seeming pursuit, he’s all grins and nice-to-meet-yous and “ain’t that something”s. Lit by the same red car lights that bathe his face in the opening scene of Goodfellas, he inveigles Charles and Audrey to join him and his own date to join them for just one drink. “He’s gonna get in trouble with those guys,” the exaggeratedly mousy wife of a work colleague of Charles (who’s at the dance by sheer coincidence) observes.

She doesn’t know the half of it. Liotta’s interplay with Daniels in this section is like the acting equivalent of the knife trick Lance Henriksen does in Aliens, stabbing the blade between his fingers faster and faster without drawing blood. But the time to draw blood comes soon enough. After holding up a convenience store, Ray bloodies Charles’ nose with a quick elbow to the face. And as Charles is trying to clean himself up, Ray brags about how slick he was back when he used to hold up stores “for a living.” 

What ensues then is another kidnapping — this time Ray absconding with Audrey — and Charles willing a transformation from milquetoast to avenger. Liotta is utterly terrifying throughout, even as he delivers his final line, which I can reproduce without a spoiler: “Shit Charlie.” And what he does when he then looks at himself in a bathroom mirror is a masterpiece of physical acting.

The movie’s galvanic tonal shift is right out of the Russ Meyer playbook. Yes, you read that right. Meyer’s nudity-filled drive-in classics were also films that went from goofy slapstick to stunning violence with no warning — and made you like it. Demme made his bones with the likes of Roger Corman, and he cast Meyer regular Charles Napier in almost all his pictures (here he plays a cranky chef at a fancy roadside restaurant). The grindhouse touches here are part of what make Something Wild such a beguiling picture. Liotta, though, goes for pure neo-noir realism in his performance. 

I asked my friend Stan Demeski, the drummer for The Feelies, if he had any recollections or impressions of Liotta, and he wrote me:

“What I remember about Ray is he seemed like a nice guy who was getting an early ‘big break’ but I did know he’d been in other things. And he was from N.J., although I think it was Union, which is barely N.J.. I did not know he was born in Newark and adopted until I just read his obituary in the Washington Post during dinner tonight.

What I really remember is him riding back from the set with us one night. He sat up front in the van, turned around to look at us a few times and managed to look friendly and threatening at the same time. I’m sure the threatening part was influenced by the role he had in the movie. 

I’ve enjoyed his acting and I’m very sorry to hear of his passing.”

Last week, when The Feelies played in Brooklyn, I went to see them, and Stan’s wife was sporting the authentic Something Wild cast and crew t-shirt. 

In 1988’s Field of Dreams, the ultimate fantasy baseball movie, Liotta does something wholly other. That is, genuine, wide-eyed, and befuddled innocence. He plays Shoeless Joe Jackson, the onetime White Sox outfielder who helped throw the 1919 World Series. Here reincarnated on Kevin Costner’s “if you build it, they will come” cornfield-turned-ballfield, he initially doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing there — but soon he does. Sizing up some bats, he avoids eye contact with Costner’s Ray Kinsella as he confesses: “Getting thrown out of baseball…was like getting a part of me amputated.” His line delivery is simple, unadorned, direct. How an actual athlete might talk. Liotta makes it even plainer as the dialogue itself becomes more poetic, a very smart move.

Here, too, his physical acting is superb: once he’s picked the right bat, Shoeless Joe get Kinsella to pitch to him. “Think you can hit my curve?” Costner teases. Not only does Shoeless Joe hit it, he almost beans Ray. And then Liotta fixes him with a glare that tells him not to make such stupid jokes. He IS Shoeless Joe Jackson, after all. Another soliloquy follows, this one delivered with a flickering half-smile. In a movie that goes for major-league (see what I did there) tear-jerking, Liotta’s introduction is the first thing to get the waterworks going, about 25 minutes in. 

Now for the sake of accuracy we have to report that these portents of greatness — no, let’s not be ungenerous, these are both achievements of greatness — are not Liotta’s sole pre-Goodfellas works. There is also 1988’s Dominick and Eugene, an earnest, well-intentioned film in which Liotta plays a med-school student with a mentally disabled brother. As said brother, Tom Hulce is persistently demonstrative, and Liotta underplays throughout to accommodate him. And his film debut, it turns out, was in 1983’s The Lonely Lady, the inadvertent guignol showcasing the talents of Golden Globe winner Pia Zadora, in which Liotta plays the character who rapes Zadora with a garden hose. I only mention it in case you ever reach a point in your own life when all hope seems gone — look at where Ray Liotta was able to get after that low point. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.