Casino (1995) directed by Martin Scorsese • Reviews, film + cast
Hi Mark -
That's a terrific list of Scorsese films you cite as your favorites. Not only does it highlight Scorsese's versatility (I love seeing THE KING OF COMEDY and AFTER HOURS and in the mix [the nicely evoked Bohemian atmosphere that appeals to you in After Hours certainly explains what attraction NEW YORK STORIES holds for you…in addition to Rosanna Arquette!]), but it's also nice that you bring up the variable appeal of Scorsese's movies.
How it’s possible to like the beginning of some (CAPE FEAR) or isolated aspects of another (RAGING BULL) without feeling the need to dismiss the entire film out of hand (However, I share your dislike of THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, film that perhaps better earns the “dreadful” I handed out to NEW YORK STORIES).
Also, I've never seen SILENCE. It never sounded interesting to me, but it appearing on your list makes me think I might reconsider and give it a look.
The violence in CASINO I still fast forward through is that baseball bat scene and the one with the vice. Yikes! Terrifying to consider it was more graphically violent before a preview audience reaction convinced him to trim it.
I enjoyed reading what you don’t particularly like about Scorsese as director, it being very illuminating that you are able to elaborate on your criticisms and pinpoint the ways in which he and his work can fall short for you.
I laughed at your reference to a “cineaste badge” because I know what you mean. I’ve had my share of the Film Twitter crowd who can never figure out how I can write about serious films (THE SERVANT!) and loveable trash (HOT RODS TO HELL!” side by side.
I don’t much hold to the idea that all film fans must revere the same filmmakers. The broad canvas of artistic voices and personal tastes repudiates what I tend to think is a “boys club” mentality surrounding which directors are most esteemed, and which ones inspire the most cineaste vitriol if criticized.
That you have parsed the pluses and minuses of Scorsese’s films for yourself, that you respond strongly to cinema --whether positively or negatively-- is something I’m sure Scorsese would applaud even if finding himself low in your esteem ranks.
I want to write about JUST TELLME WHAT YOU WANT someday. I really should have done it sooner. I liked the film a great deal when it came out, but found a recent revisit to the DVD hard going because King’s character and performance too often brought to mind a certain orange asshole.
Lastly, that’s a great Ken Russell-related question!
Thank you, Mark, for reading this post and sharing your Scorsese sentiments. Always interesting and always a pleasure.
They also decided to simplify the script, so that the character of Sam "Ace" Rothstein worked only at the Tangiers Casino, in order to show a glimpse of the trials involved in operating a Mafia-run casino hotel without overwhelming the audience. According to Scorsese, the initial opening sequence was to feature the main character, Sam Rothstein, fighting with his estranged wife Ginger on the lawn of their house. The scene was too detailed, so they changed the sequence to show the explosion of Sam's car and him flying into the air before hovering over the flames in slow motion—like a about to go straight down to .
With Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995), the 1990s saw produce two of his finest, most anxiety-riddled pieces of work and also saw a return to his best form after he had turned to different genres and themes in the preceding decade. Goodfellas is a scintillating and richly detailed crime film based on the true story of mob associate turned informant Henry Hill. It is seen by many as Scorsese’s best work and one of the greatest gangster films ever made, and that is hard to disagree with. Scorsese’s next crime epic Casino, which was released five years later in 1995, is almost inevitably overlooked when considering his filmography, but it deserves the increasing critical profile it has gotten in the 26 years since. It is an epic in every sense of the word, clocking in just shy of three hours with a 178-minute runtime, and gives us some of the best and most elaborate characters and stories Scorsese has ever put to screen.
Casino movie review & film summary (1995)
But just how much of the movie Casino was based on real life events? As with most movies that are based on a true story, there are always some extra bits added in for dramatic effect, or some parts that get changed – and Casino is no exception.
The 1995 movie Casino – directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone – was based on a true story.
Never before or since has there been quite so much fine jewelry shown on screen in one scene. The moment goes down when smitten casino king pin Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) presents his bride, hustler Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), with a trunk sized box filled with Bulgari jewels. While the couple cuddles on their big bed surrounded by diamonds, gold and all kinds of semiprecious stone pieces from the famed Italian jeweler, Stone coyly asks “Do you think it is too much if I wear these all on the same day?”
Hi Ken,
Casino is a Scorsese movie I've only seen once or twice. I should give it another shot (pun not intended); there is one scene (concerning baseball bats) that just might be the most brutal violence I've ever seen in a film. It makes the violence in Goodfellas (my choice for Scorsese's best) seem like playground fights!
Aside from Goodfellas, my favorite Marty movies are After Hours, Mean Streets, Shutter Island, The King of Comedy, The Irishman, Silence, the first hour of Gangs of New York and the first half of Cape Fear. I fluctuate on Taxi Driver. I admire and respect Raging Bull more than having an enthusiasm to rewatch it. I detest The Wolf of Wall Street. And, =gulp=, I quite like his "Life Lessons" segment of New York Stories which you label dreadful. After Hours is very dear to me and Life Lessons has a similar NY/Bohemian atmosphere. (And Rosanna Arquette!)
Scorsese is generally a good director, but for the most part comes off as too Hollywood rather than a great director. I'll probably be stripped of my "cineaste" badge, but, despite, his many fine movies, I find his overall career a bit disappointing. (I do like his championing of the Powell and Pressburger films, and if I could ask Scorsese one question it would if he believes Ken Russell was the inheritor of their British neo-romantic style.)
I forgot Alan King is in Casino. I just rewatched him in Just Tell Me What You Want in which he's amazingly rude throughout!
Mark
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But Casino is Scorsese’s great burn-it-down statement, the furthest end of his disgust and delight in everything seamy in American culture. He films Las Vegas in all its Technicolor glory and grotesquery, a symphonic swirl of lights, sex, currency, and gore. The film follows the true story of alleged mob tool Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Chicago mobsters Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, and Frank Cullotta, rendered here as Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro), Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), and Frank Marino (Frank Vincent). Sam and Nicky are boyhood friends, the closest the film gets to the “years ago back home” vibe of Goodfellas or Mean Streets. Sam is a great gambler, a scientist of chance, who has, up to the early 70s, made his living as a bookie at the behest of the mob. He leaps at the shot at managing the new Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas, theoretically controlled by developer Phillip Green (Kevin Pollak) who’s borrowed financing from the infamous Teamsters Pension Fund. This, of course, means it’s a mob-controlled development. The Mafia dons, headed by Remo Gaggi (Pasquale Cajano), won’t venture any closer to Vegas than Kansas City, the future of their cash cow requiring a squeaky-clean image whilst their finely calibrated skims bring in titanic revenue.
It gives the film some of its best lines
Recently critic Matt Zoller Seitz screened Casino at New York’s IFC Center in the presence of Pileggi. One viewer shared some interesting thoughts on Twitter, . He considered that, “the character of Ginger reminded me of General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. An unstable force that helps undo the system, but also represents the same spirit that created the system in the first place. The Doomsday device is meant to prevent war in a way that only warmongers could conceive of. And Ripper is exactly the kind of warmonger who could go too far and set it off in the most foolproof way. Likewise, the entire Casino operation is driven by nothing more than greed, however respectable its architects would like to be about it. But Ginger is driven by greed so insatiable that eventually even her initially respectable aura gives way to something just pathetic. And in the process, she is the edge-case that no foolproof system can ever account for. Ace was so used to predicting wins and losses, he assumed he could figure her out, but she was, for better or for worse (mainly worse), the most irrepressibly human of all of them. And that messy humanity that you can’t bet on or control for, is what helps pull the ground out from under all of them.”
Casino | Reelviews Movie Reviews
Scorsese's movie is technically impressive. There's even something inherently fascinating about the subject - the way Las Vegas, and the organised criminals who run it, have changed over the last couple of decades. What's wrong is the approach: virtuosity seems almost to have become an end in itself, and, as the film charts the experiences of Sam 'Ace' Rothstein (De Niro), a gambler the Mob places in charge of the Tangiers casino, Scorsese's dazzling, kinetic technique calls attention to itself so persistently that story and characters retreat into the background. Not that there's much story, anyway. The first two hours are so heavily voice-overed, so bereft of narrative drive, that the film initially resembles some bizarre, hyper-glossy drama-doc. Eventually, some semblance of plot seeps into the last hour, about Ace's disastrous dealings with his ex-hooker wife Ginger (Stone, fine in an underwritten role) and with the uncontrollably volatile mobster Nicky (Pesci), but even that's like a tired rerun of GoodFellas. The result, sadly, is that contradiction in terms, a dull Scorsese movie.
· In Vegas, everybodys gotta watch everybody else
Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci star in director Martin Scorsese's riveting look at how blind ambition, white-hot passion and 24-karat greed toppled an empire. Las Vegas 1973 is the setting for this fact-based story about the Mob's multi-million dollar casino operation where fortunes and lives were made and lost with a roll of the dice.
Cinemark Century South Point 16 Movie Theater in Las Vegas
Sam enjoys his apparent acceptance into elite circles, his status, wealth, and power, which he’s never been allowed before. “Vegas was like Lourdes. All our sins were washed away.” Yet Sam isn’t a happy pawn. He wants to be legitimized, gain a Nevada gaming license—requiring years of bureaucracy and bribery—and a wife. He sets his eyes on Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), the most beautiful, sexy, clever, greedy hustler in town. Sam uses the omnipresent surveillance system of the Tangiers to watch her bilking a gambler and steps in to save her when he gets uppity. Ginger is a virtual personification of the city, a mesmerizing surface over a heart of steel, greedy, dishonest, and perversely attached to sleazy beginnings. Sam proves his ardor with a nest egg of a million dollars’ worth of jewelry, which Ginger fawns over with childish glee before it’s locked in a safe deposit box at the bank. For Sam, it’s a pledge of trust and fidelity; for her it’s the golden egg from a goose ripe for the dinner table. He doesn’t marry her until they have a daughter together, Amy (Erika von Tagen), a sure way, he thinks, of binding her close.