Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Well-known songs from the film include: "Heigh-Ho", "Some Day My Prince Will Come", and "Whistle While You Work". Joe Pesci received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Tommy DeVito in 1990. The movie was also nominated for Best Music, Score. In 2000 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first full-length animated feature made in English and Technicolor, and won an honorary Academy Award for Walt Disney "as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field." Disney received a full-size Oscar statuette and seven miniature ones, presented to him by Shirley Temple. The film is #94 on the American Film Institute's list of 100 Years, 100 Movies and is consistently in the top 30 on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films. In fact, for a short time, Snow White was the highest grossing film in American cinema history; it was removed from that spot by Gone With the Wind in 1940. Now he is a "nobody"; as he laments in the film's closing lines, "I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.".

RKO Radio Pictures put the film into general release on February 4, 1938, and it went on to become a major box-office success, making more money than any other motion picture in 1938. He and his family enter the federal Witness Protection Program, disappearing into anonymity to save their lives. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater on December 21, 1937 to a widely receptive audience (many of whom were the same naysayers who dubbed the film "Disney's Folly"), who gave the film a standing ovation at its completion. Convinced he and his family are marked for death, Henry acts swiftly and decisively, spilling the beans on his former criminal cohorts to the FBI, sending them away for long prison terms. Snow White is also looked upon as a triumph of storytelling skill in animation. After Henry's drug arrest, Cicero abandons him, and the rest of his mob cohorts fast follow suit. Many animation techniques which later became standards were developed or improved for the film, including the animation of realistic humans (with and without the help of the rotoscope), effective character animation (taking characters that look similar--the dwarfs, in this case--and making them distinct characters through their body acting and movement), elaborate effects animation to depict rain, lightning, water, reflections, sparkles, magic, and other objects and phenomena, and the use of the multiplane camera. (The rest of the film also uses the same sort of scoring strategy, where the music provides not only an emotional backdrop but a sense of historical context.).

Snow White, which spent three years in production, was the end result of Walt Disney's plan to improve the production quality of his studio's output, and also to find a source of income other than short subjects. The editing and scoring of the sequence have been acclaimed as some of Scorsese's best work, with a montage of popular songs such as The Who's "Magic Bus" and Harry Nilsson's "Jump Into the Fire" forming the soundtrack. He even had to mortgage his house to help finance the film's production, which eventually ran up a total negative cost of just over $1.5 million, a whopping sum for a feature film in 1937. He must coordinate a major cocaine shipment, cook a meal for his wife, children and paraplegic younger brother, placate his drug-addled, emotionally unstable mistress, cope with his clueless, superstitious babysitter/drug courier, avoid federal authorities who, unknown to him, have had him under surveillance for several months, and satisfy his sleazy customers, all the while a nervous wreck from getting too little sleep and snorting too much cocaine. Both his brother Roy Disney and his wife Lillian attempted to talk him out of it, and the Hollywood movie industry mockingly referred to the film as "Disney's Folly" while it was in production. In an extended, virtuoso sequence named "Sunday, May 11th, 1980," all of the different paths of Henry's complicated criminal career catastrophically collide. Walt Disney had to fight to get the film produced. Worse, after promising to welcome DeVito into the Lucchese family as a "made man," the elder members of the family instead kill him as retaliation for Batts's death.

The film was supervised by David Hand, and directed by William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, and Ben Sharpsteen. At the same time, in December 1978, Jimmy Conway and friends plan and carry out a record six million dollar heist from the Lufthansa cargo terminal at JFK airport, but Jimmy soon grows disgusted and paranoid when his associates foolishly flaunt their gains in plain sight, threatening to draw police attention, and begins having them gradually eliminated. The movie was adapted by Dorothy Ann Blank, Richard Creedon, Merrill De Maris, Otto Englander, Earl Hurd, Dick Rickard, Ted Sears and Webb Smith from the fairy tale Snow White by the Brothers Grimm. Although Paul Cicero tolerated Henry's prison drug deals, he has sternly warned him not to deal drugs on the outside and to inform him of those who do, but Henry ignores Paul and gets Tommy and Jimmy (as well as his wife, and new mistress (Debi Mazar), and babysitter) involved in an elaborate smuggling operation. Snow White was the first major animated feature made in the United States, the most successful motion picture released in 1938, and, adjusted for inflation, is the tenth highest-grossing film of all time. There, Henry deals drugs to keep afloat, and by the time he returns to his family he has a lucrative drug connection in Pittsburgh, one which he had established while still in prison. It was produced by Walt Disney Productions, premiered on December 21, 1937, and was originally released to theatres by RKO Radio Pictures on February 8, 1938. Based upon the fairy tale Snow White by the Brothers Grimm, the film's plot has a jealous queen attempt to have her stepdaughter murdered, but the girl escapes and is given shelter by seven dwarves who live deep in a forest. After beating up a debt-ridden Florida gambler whose sister works as an FBI typist, Henry and Jimmy are caught and sent to prison for six years.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the first animated feature in the Disney animated features canon. (This scene serves as an example of the movie's black humor.) During this time, Henry's marriage deteriorates when Karen finds he has a mistress; Karen threatens the other woman so violently that even Cicero has to mediate. Stuart Buchanan (Humbert, The Queen's Huntsman). Henry, Conway and DeVito place Batts's bloody corpse in the trunk of their car, stop by DeVito's mother's house to pick up a shovel and a knife, finish killing Batts upstate, bury him in an abandoned plot of rural land – and then discover six months later that the land has been sold to a real estate developer and the (badly decomposed) body has to be re-excavated, moved and reburied. Roy Atwell (Doc). DeVito's violent streak reaches a crest in June 1970 when he bludgeons to death one Billy Batts (Frank Vincent), a "made man" in the competing Gambino crime family, a major offense that could get them all killed by the Gambinos if discovered. Scotty Mattraw (Bashful). In one of the film's most controversial scenes, DeVito thoughtlessly shoots dead an innocent and unarmed young man (Michael Imperioli), first for not bringing him his drinks fast enough, and then for talking back to him.

Otis Harlan (Happy). As the years go by and Henry earns Cicero's trust, his compadres become more daring (and therefore dangerous)--Conway's excessive love of truck hijacking and grand theft is bad enough, but DeVito is nearly psychotic in his need to prove himself through violence. Pinto Colvig (Sleepy/Grumpy). Henry also meets and falls in love with Karen (Bracco), although there is conflict between families since Karen's parents are prosperous and Jewish and Hill is himself poor and half-Irish and half-Italian. (Because of his and Jimmy Conway's own mixed ancestry, they can never be actual "made men" – full members of an Italian crime family.) When Karen learns firsthand about what Henry actually does for a living, she is fascinated instead of repelled; it impresses her that Henry has the nerve to steal instead of just "sitting around, waiting for a handout.". Billy Gilbert (Sneezy). They help out in a key moneymaking heist, in 1967 stealing over half a million dollars from the Air France cargo terminal paying Cicero his percentage of the take as per the mafia's code of tribute. Moroni Olsen, (Magic Mirror). As an adult, Henry and his friend Tommy DeVito (Pesci) conspire along with Conway to steal much of the billions of dollars in cargo passing through Idlewild Airport (later JFK).

Lucille La Verne, (The Queen/Witch). When Henry is arrested for selling stolen cigarettes, he wisely tells the police nothing and is lauded by his superiors for "being a standup guy.". Harry Stockwell (Prince). The local Lucchese mob captain, Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino), and Cicero's associate Jimmy Conway (De Niro), help cultivate the boy's developing criminal career. Adriana Caselotti (Snow White). As a boy, Henry idolized the Lucchese crime family gangsters in his blue-collar New York City neighborhood, and in 1955 quit school and went to work for them at a local cab stand, much to the dismay of his working-class parents. More on this (http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/drugs.htm). In the film, Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, becomes involved in the mafia at a young age: as he says in the film, "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.".

In one theory, Snow White is cocaine, which causes exhaustion (Sleepy, Dopey), mood swings (Happy/Grumpy), allergies (Sneezy) and alteration of personality (Bashful). The film stars Robert De Niro as Jimmy Conway, Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, Lorraine Bracco as Hill's wife, Karen Hill, and Joe Pesci as the irascible Tommy DeVito (based on Tommy DeSimone). Other ideas are less philosophically complex, such as correspondences to the altered states of consciousness inherent in the use of certain drugs. It is based on the novel Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, which is itself based on a true story. For example, one theory holds that the seven dwarves correspond to the seven chakras (or cakras), and that Snow White represents consciousness moving through them. Goodfellas is a 1990 film about the mafia directed by Martin Scorsese. There are numerous popular ideas as to the presence of occult significance or symbolism within the movie, mostly centered around the Dwarves themselves.

The song, "Someday My Prince Will Come" has become a jazz standard that has been performed by numerous artists, including Buddy Rich, Oscar Peterson, and Miles Davis. Upon seeing the film, Russian director Sergei Eisenstein called it the greatest ever made. A version with live actors based on the film, titled Snow White: The Fairest of Them All and starring Kristin Kreuk, was made in 2002. There are three emotions (Happy, Grumpy, Bashful), two D's (Dopey, Doc), and two S's (Sleepy, Sneezy).

There is an easy way to remember the names of the dwarves. Both plural forms have been used interchangeably since then. The movie's title uses the word "dwarfs" which was the traditional plural of "dwarf". The Lord of the Rings by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, published in three volumes from 29 July 1954 to 20 October 1955, instead popularised the spelling "dwarves". The names of the dwarves (Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy and Sneezy) were created for this production, chosen from a pool of about fifty potentials.