Jimmy Two Times

Long ago I made a connection between Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) and I convinced myself that the walk-on character 'Jimmy Two Times' in the latter move was an instance of Scorsese consciously (though presumably good-naturedly) poking fun at Coppola and his sister Talia Shire. Jimmy (Anthony Powers) appears only momentarily, introduced in the voiceover narration by protagonist Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), who says, ' And then there was Jimmy Two Times, who got that nickname because he said everything twice, like...'

Just a random, cute gag? Not if you consider one of the last speeches by a nearly frenzied Connie Corleone (Shire) in The Godfather, as she accuses her brother Michael of having murdered her husband in retribution for his betrayal of the family. She directs some of this rant to Michael's wife Kaye: 'You know how many men he had killed! Read the papers. Read the papers! That's your husband! That's your husband!'

We the audience may notice the repetition of two short sentences in the same meter (On the shores of Gitche Gumee / That's your husband! That's your husband!) and think it slightly jarring; but we generously write the oddity off to Connie's emotionally volatile state.

But it is jarring. And it's the fact that both in Connie's cathartic speech and in Jimmy's single line in Goodfellas, the repeated phrase has 'the papers' as the direct object. That is not, I think, a coincidence. I think Marty was doing a Curly Howard 'nyuck nyuck nyuck' at Fran.

But I can't find much evidence online that other folks think so. (I did find one Reditor who cites the same lines and attributes them to 'Connie Two Times').