Goodfellas

Meirelles has spoken about Scorsese while describing how the film was cut, and the borrowed grammar is easy to list: a narrator who was there and survived, a freeze frame that stops to introduce somebody, chapter titles, a decade crossed in a montage, and a child's admiration for men who will not live long. What City of God adds is that its narrator never joins: Rocket wants a camera, not a gun, and that is the film's exit from the form it borrowed.

Steven Knight has named the American gangster films as his reference rather than British crime drama, and the show is shot like one: slow-motion entrances scored to anachronistic music, a family business treated as a corporation, and violence that arrives without a change in tempo. The specific Scorsese inheritance is the refusal to moralise, letting competence read as glamour for four seasons before the bill arrives.

Scorsese made the un-operatic version on purpose, and has said so for thirty years: he wanted the day job rather than the dynasty. Point for point against Coppola:

• No family as a tragic institution. Henry Hill's crew is a workplace, and the film is about what it pays and what it costs
• No shadowed formal compositions; a restless camera, freeze frames, pop records over the violence
• Murder is neither ceremonial nor a decision. It is sudden, stupid and badly cleaned up
• The last act is not a coronation but witness protection and a suburban house

Filed as a reaction against rather than an influence because the debt is real and negative: Goodfellas is legible as an argument only because The Godfather is what everyone had in mind.