The movie “GoodFellas” (settling in today for a week-long revival at Film Forum) opens with a three-ply scene, set in 1970, of grotesque contrasts, with the easy camaraderie of three men in a car interrupted by their completion of a gory and flamboyantly casual murder, apostrophized by the famous voice-over of the protagonist, Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta): “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”

From the start, Martin Scorsese makes clear that his movie is about some very bad fellas; he has no delusion about the twisted moral fibre of the characters he films. But, in the section of the film that’s set in 1955, showing young Henry (Christopher Serrone) and his initiation into Mob life, Scorsese presents camera shots from Henry’s window into the street, where gangsters hold sway. These shots are suffused with the confessional tone of reminiscence, as if the filmmaker were recalling his own view from the window (he was, after all, an asthmatic child and frequent shut-in). Young Henry saw, in that scene, something to aspire to. Young Scorsese saw something to avoid, something to consider with horror. Yet Scorsese was able to consider the scene with an artist’s empathetic fascination for those viewers who would empathize with Henry’s admiration, and who find alluring the gangster dream of cruelly exerting power.

It’s the dream of money without working, pleasure without the bounds of conventional moralism. It’s also a dream of a code of conduct, binding mobsters together, horizontally and hierarchically, that offers a superficial air of aristocratic refinement and martial discipline to a crude and sanguinary business. Violence isn’t merely the price that young initiates pay in order to take part in the world of gangster power—it’s a crucial part of the experience. As in a Western, where the abstractions of modern bureaucracy don’t exist and all government is hands-on, the exertion of power in the Mob sphere is bluntly physical.

This violence obviously repels Scorsese, but also makes him want to know: What is a person like who can do such things? What does it feel like? And what does it feel like to be fascinated by such actions and such people, despite—or because of—the fear and revulsion that they inspire? When Scorsese depicts violence, he shows gore, emphasizing not only the moral horror of inflicting pain and taking a life but also the deep and primal bloodlust. He dares viewers to enjoy the scene—and presents this violence in a manner that is not at all judging or condescending but, rather, understanding and sharing the gangsters’ part in the animal element of human life.

There was a kerfuffle last week sparked by the ridiculous suggestion that women can’t appreciate “GoodFellas.” Scorsese builds into the film his own effort to understand what, in real life, women see in mobsters, and he does it with a shift that’s as jolting now as it was when the film was released twenty-five years ago. The first half hour of “GoodFellas” cruises along from the point of view of Henry Hill, amplified by his voice-over reminiscences and narration. Then, when Henry meets Karen (played by Lorraine Bracco), the woman who will ultimately marry him, her voice-over and point of view take over temporarily, and this technique recurs intermittently through the rest of the film.

Scorsese conjures the new world into which Henry, a talented young gangster, initiates her. It’s the scene of their first date; he brings her to the Copacabana, in Manhattan. There, leaving his car in the street in the care of an underling, Henry takes Karen by the hand and, cutting through the line of customers, they dip down a short stairway that leads to the basement. A single swooping Steadicam shot follows the couple from the street downstairs, through the corridors and the kitchen, and surfaces with them in the swank and velvety air of the night club. The sublime metaphor connects the public face of life—the street and the ballroom—with its hidden and private one, the subterranean work spaces (a literal underworld) where the gangster illusion for public consumption is produced.

Karen sees what others don’t, knows worlds closed off to others—and has no illusions about what she sees, which is precisely why she pretends to herself that she’s not seeing it (and claims that other Mob wives do the same thing). Rather than the public illusion, she gets a private illusion to take its place (which, she says, is fostered by the closed-in social world of Mob families associating only with each other).

Scorsese’s realism is a hallucinatory realism, and the most extravagant moment in “GoodFellas” captures the mind-bending force of violence on Henry Hill himself. The younger man’s bravado ultimately gives way to a middle-aged man’s paranoia, and, in a scene where he fears for his life (in an encounter in a diner with his partner in crime Jimmy, played by Robert De Niro), Scorsese creates an image—one of the most inspired moments in his career—that’s borrowed directly from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”

It’s all the more astonishing in its near-missability. In Hitchcock’s film, the protagonist, played by James Stewart, suffers from the malady of the title; when circumstances force him to climb the stairs of a church tower, he peers into the open column of space and Hitchcock distorts that space with a famous simultaneous track and zoom, in which the fixed position of the character is matched with a twist in his mind.

In “GoodFellas,” a similarly extravagant but slower and clearer effect is achieved in a shot of the two men sitting and talking at a table beside a window. Where Hitchcock emphasizes the character’s mental disturbance through heightened expressions, Scorsese keeps Henry neutral, his pose static, and conveys a moment of the deepest existential terror with a device so simple yet so uncanny that it may leave viewers wondering whether they’ve even seen what they think they’ve seen—which, of course, is the very subject of the sequence.

“GoodFellas” is a movie of those who do and those who watch—a theme that Scorsese would return to, even more radically, in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” A line from Woody Guthrie’s song “Pretty Boy Floyd” offers a hint: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” The gun and the pen can also be used to thrill. In “GoodFellas,” Scorsese is watching those who use the gun; in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” he’s doing more than watching those who use a pen—he places himself among them. The two films’ aesthetic is similar—but the stranger, riskier extremes of the later film match its more audacious challenge, to Scorsese and to the public alike.