are rules to be followed and a hierarchy to be respected, and those who break the rules are punished.
Translating this book into a film could have been accomplished in any number of ways, many of which would have been more conventional than the route chosen. Scorsese and Pileggi, however, were less interested in the chronological details of the story than in the sociology of criminality and in the overall impression that could be given both of this one man's life and of the world in which he lived. The script does a very good job of hewing to the material and so to the truth, and at the same time it has a style, an attitude, that is different from the book, in some respects less serious in tone, but just as critical of the criminal lifestyle and its consequences for those who indulge in it. By the end of the film, Hill has enmeshed his wife and family in his
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