“Now go home and get your ******* shinebox”. So said the ill fated Billy Batts in Martin
Scorsese’s classic mob drama Goodfellas. Played by Scorsese regular Frank Vincent,
Billy Batts makes his fatal mistake by winding up volatile mobster Tommy DeVito,
and he is subsequently beaten up, stabbed, and shot to death.
The late great Frank Vincent, who died at the age of 80 in 2017, is one of the most recognisable
faces of mob cinema. Vincent had notable roles in The Death Collector, Raging Bull,
Casino, The Sopranos, Chicago Overcoat, and numerous Grand Theft Auto games,
but in spite of a career which contains in excess of 80 credits, no film, no scene
has followed Vincent around more than the shinebox one. Go to any article mentioning Frank Vincent,
any youtube video featuring him, even if it’s got nothing to do with Goodfellas,
whether it be clips from The Sopranos or Vincent getting revenge and beating
Joe pesci to death with a baseball bat in Casino, there will be tons of shinebox jokes.
It’s actually kinda weird in a way, that people always say things like say Phil Leotardo, Frank
Vincent’s character in The Sopranos, needs to go home and get his shinebox, because ironically,
he’s the one who said it. He said it to Joe Pesci, so you would think people would go around saying
Joe Pesci should get his shienbox. Maybe everyone’s too shit scared to do that,
but it shows that there isn’t an exact science when it comes
to what is engrained into pop culture, what becomes a meme.
But what we do know is that Vincent will be forever remembered for that shinebox
line way back in 1990. But what does the actor himself think of the almost cult like mentioning
of shinebox everytime he appears. Surely he was aware of his legacy before he passed on.
With some actors, they get really pissy about these kinds of things, but with others, they tend
to embrace it. I’ve been doing a bit of digging, and have collated a few extracts from different
Frank Vincent interviews over the years, and it looks as though he really didn’t mind it at all,
in fact he actually took advantage of it and it seems the line made him a few extra bucks.
Interestingly, Vincent originally wanted to play Paulie in Goodfellas,
Henry Hill’s mentor, but Scorsese convinced him otherwise.
It just goes to reiterate Scorsese’s geniuns. Vincent said once in an interview:
When Marty was doing GoodFellas, he called me in and asked me who I wanted
to play. I said I wanted to play Paulie. He said, 'You're better off playing Billy
Batts. It'll really mean something to you.' You don't argue with Marty.
"To this day, it's the most memorable thing I've done in film. People come
up to me every day and say, "Go home and get your shine box." So I went one step further.
On my Web site [www.frank vincent.com], you can get a Billy Batts T-shirt that
says 'Go home and get your shine box.' You wouldn't believe how fast people buy them.
In another interview in 2013, 23 years after Goodfellas was released,
Vincent said that people still quoted the Shine box line to him, and joked that he could buy
a new Mercedes if he got a dollar everythime that happened. He also cashed in on the line’s
popularity, selling mugs as well as T shirts with Billy Batt’s photo and the Shinebox line on them.
In the same interview, he downplays his skill at
delivering the line and instead plays up the brilliance of the line itself.
"It hit me as a great line," he said. "When lines are great,
they're easy to do. You just find the essence of it, and you do it."
Vincent was close to his Italian roots and was aware that some Italians and Italian Americans
did not appreciate the stereotype of the Italian American gangster,
as well as those who shout out get your shienbox in public to Vincent.
"I know some people say it makes Italians look bad," he said,
but "every character you play is only a person. Mobsters are people. There's political mobsters,
there's cops that are bad, there's priests that are bad—anybody can be a mobster"
It’s wonderful to know that Frank Vincent was not only aware of the shinebox jokes
but took it all in good humor, and was intelligent enough to even make money off it.
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