High Stakes
Scorsese’s Casino at 30

2,074 words

Where I come from, although it was good, hard-working people trying to raise a family respectably, there was a lot of organized crime, and I saw a lot of violence where I grew up.
-Martin Scorsese

With the recent death of film director David Lynch, there has been much commentary on his place in the pantheon of American film directors. Lynch was a one-off, with a directorial CV including movies which bordered on horror without ever actually being in that genre. But, wherever Lynch comes in any league table of great American directors, there is one name which would be close to the top, if not in first place, in any avid film buff’s list: Martin Scorsese.

From his first student movie in 1967, The Big Shave (don’t watch it if you yourself are about to shave) to his first major distribution features, the impressive Boxcar Bertha and Mean Streets (reviewed by me on its 50th birthday here at Counter Currents), Scorsese’s resumé is studded with masterpieces: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York. He was one of the leading lights in the galaxy of “New Hollywood”, when the influence of European auteur directors came to Tinseltown. He courted – and got – controversy with The Last Temptation of Christ back in the days when anyone gave a goddam what the Church thought about art, and his movies have won both consistent critical acclaim and enough Oscars to fill a shopping basket, nominated over 100 times and bringing home 20 of the statuettes, including Best Director for The Departed in 2007. But, the 82-year-old says, “You don’t make movies for Oscars.”

Amidst his legendary roster of movies, 1995’s Casino had a tough act to follow in gangster-film terms after his 1990 masterpiece, the Mafia movie Goodfellas (Scorsese had directed the remake of Cape Fear and the mellow adaptation of Edith Wharton’s belle époque novel The Age of Innocence in between). Along with Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas has to be one of the most-quoted films in movie history by young men in bars. I know, I was one of them. What, you or your buddies never said “Funny how?” after a few beers? But Scorsese landed street-smart by using the same source and the same key actors – De Niro and Pesci – for his mob follow-up.

Whereas the opening scene of Goodfellas leaves you in no doubt that you are watching a mafia movie – “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster” – Casino opens with a line that could presage a love story; “When you love someone, you gotta trust them”. And, in a way, it does, but this is still a mob flick. Whereas Goodfellas took you inside the mafia, Casino shows gangsters at work from a different perspective, funding a huge scam in the Las Vegas of the 1970s.

The movie opens with an impeccably dressed Robert De Niro leaving his sumptuous house and getting into his expensive car, which promptly blows up. For we are beginning at the end. Who rigged his car with explosives, and why? De Niro plays Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a professional gambler offered the managership of a Vegas casino, the Tangiers, funded by “the only kinda guys who could actually get you that sort of money”; the Midwest mob bosses. Tired of being busted for illegal book-making, Ace takes the job, viewing Vegas “Like a morality carwash. It does for us what Lourdes does for humpbacks and cripples”. He is sharp and professional; his own man, but under no illusions about the world he is entering. As his childhood friend Nicky Santoro (played by Joe Pesci) wryly observes: “There’s a lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes.” The movie is based on a true story, and the screenplay is by Scorsese and ex-mobster Nick Pilaggi, who wrote the book Casino was based on, just as he had written Wiseguys, the original source for Goodfellas.

The film moves at a terrific pace, in terms of both narrative and direction, and one scene in particular illustrates the brilliance of Scorsese’s visual construction of verbal information. Rothstein’s voiceover is accompanied by shots of his staff in the casino itself:

In Las Vegas everybody’s got to watch everybody else. The players are looking to beat the casino. The dealers are watching the players. The box-men are watching the dealers. The floor-men are watching the box-men. The pit-bosses are watching the floor-men. The shift-bosses are watching the pit-bosses. The casino manager is watching the shift bosses, I’m watching the casino manager, and the eye in the sky is watching us all.

Instead of jump-cuts between these various observers, Scorsese uses swish-pans, whereby the camera doesn’t move steadily between subjects as with an ordinary pan, but flashes from one to another in a blur of movement. Scorsese also uses a unique lighting technique in some intense scenes, with a straight white spot brightly illuminating the actors from above. He is also a master of pacing, with the early romantic scenes between Ace and his girlfriend allowing the movie to pause for breath.

Nicky decides to move to Vegas, and Rothstein reluctantly takes him on as muscle – “protecting the golden Jew”, as Nicky calls it – despite knowing the mobster’s penchant for unpredictability and violence. But Nicky is a “made” guy, meaning the mafia have traced his family line all the way back to Sicily, and it is an offer Ace can’t refuse. Santoro soon starts raising hell in addition to his security duties, and things on The Strip soon take a turn for the nastier.

Ace, meanwhile, has fallen for hooker-cum-hustler Ginger, superbly played by Sharon Stone. She looks a million dollars, which is what Ace gives her, locked in a Los Angeles safety-deposit box to protect her bottom line if things go wrong between him and a working girl. Which they do. He puts aside a similar amount for himself, “kidnapping and shakedown money”, on the sound economic principle that “crooked cops and kidnappers, they don’t take checks.”

But Ginger can’t tear herself away from her childhood sweetheart, which sounds sweet and a little hoaky until we see who he is. Ginger’s hustler boyfriend, Lester Diamond, is played by the great James Woods. It’s interesting to see Stone, De Niro and Woods acting and interacting together when you consider their respective politics 20 years later during Trump’s first Presidency. De Niro and Stone made prize asses of themselves with their public outbursts, with De Niro in particular seeming to think he was reprising his role as boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull when threatening to “punch Trump in the face.” Woods, on the other hand, effectively ended his Hollywood career by openly supporting Trump. It was desperately sad to hear Woods talking about almost losing his LA home in the recent devastating wildfires. The same conflagration was also, it has been suggested, responsible for the death of David Lynch due to the stress of having to flee the flames.

Back in Vegas, the wheels are starting to come off. Where there is money, especially free money, there you will always find greed tagging along. The skim which goes back to the bosses in Kansas City gets smaller and smaller until Frank Marino, Nicky’s bagman, “didn’t know whether I was going to be kissed or killed.” Added to this, the bosses suspect Nicky’s affair with Ginger after she goes to him for help, and the old mafia capos prove they have at least a very, very small moral compass as they disapprove of extra-marital infidelity. Nicky goes from being an asset to a liability, and the knives – or whatever comes to hand – are out.

But Rothstein’s eventual nemesis is not the gangster fraternity in Kansas City – “as close to Vegas as the Midwest bosses could go without getting pinched” – but Las Vegas’ elected officials. The County Commissioner, replete with cowboy hat and boots, instigates an investigation into the Tangiers’ gaming license, and the dominoes begin to fall. As the good ol’ boy tells Ace, “You’re all just our guests out here, but you act like you own the place. Y’all think you’re at home. Buddy, you ain’t home”.

When Nicky is finally banned from every casino in town, he puts together a crew and starts knocking over jewelry stores. As with Goodfellas, when cocaine is thrown into the mix, things fall apart. The sequence showing these heists, as Nicky and his “desperados” break through walls to get at strongboxes, is brilliantly accompanied by The Stones’ Can You Hear Me Knocking?

As with Goodfellas, the incidental music is an extra character in the hands of Scorsese. After Casino’s brilliantly pompous opening sequence, which sees De Niro falling into an inferno to the accompaniment of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, the movie’s soundtrack features 50s doowop, plenty of Rolling Stones, and even Devo. The use of music as more than mere incidental filler is a baton Scorsese would pass on to Tarantino. Scorsese has collected whole libraries of taped songs across the decades, and waits for a scene to suggest accompaniment. “The music is always tied to camera shots for me.”

Think mafia movie and you usually think guns, but Casino has a whole added arsenal of unconventional weaponry. Nicky reduces a big guy to a whimpering “little girl” by repeatedly stabbing him with a ballpoint pen. A gangster who won’t give up a name is persuaded to do so when his head is put in a vise and the lever turned to cracking point. A card-cheat at the casino – taken down with a cattle-prod – is threatened with the removal of his hand via circular saw, but De Niro shows clemency, and his goons merely break the man’s fingers with a ball-peen hammer. Who needs guns when there are such useful items lying around the house and garage?

The supporting cast is reliable and appropriate to Vegas. Rothstein’s casino manager, Billy Sherbet, is played by veteran stand-up comedian Don Rickles, who had plenty of experience performing in Vegas and hung around with Sinatra’s Rat Pack. Long before the likes of Ricky Gervais got the Golden Globes gig, Rickles was roasting celebs and earning his nickname “the merchant of venom.” Scorsese’s casting is always spot on, and never more so than when Ace gets his own TV show, and the first guest is Frankie Avalon. After her cameo in one of the funniest scenes in Goodfellas, Scorsese finds another small part for his mother, Catherine, and in a documentary about the director, she takes the starring role with her gorgeous Bronx-Italian accent.

Another genius scene is when Nicky demands to see Ace “a little further down the road” from their usual meet, that is, in the desert. As Ace drives to the lonely place, he broods. “Usually when I went to meet Nicky, I gave my chances of coming back alive as 99 out of a hundred. This time I gave myself 50-50.” These are high stakes for high rollers. Nicky warns Ace not to go over his head, and is attempting to seize control of the operation. The shot of his car screaming away and leaving the casino boss swathed in a cloud of dust is more brilliance from the maestro. On a jocular note, if you have seen the movie and you are a fan of the Muppets – come on, who isn’t? – you must not miss Bert and Ernie recreating the scene as De Niro and Pesci.

One of the bosses of General Motors was asked who he thought had the best business model in America. He replied unhesitatingly; “The mafia.” When things go wrong, however, whereas GM start laying off staff, the mafia’s hiring and firing policy places more emphasis on the firing. As the whole scam unravels, the hitmen are out in force, and it’s not so much Whack-a-Mole as Whack-a-Mobster. After the slaughter comes the destruction of the old Vegas so that it comes to resemble the Disneyland it is today. Ace’s car-bomb, which was where we came in, fails to kill him, and he winds up right where he started, betting on ball games and races, the best handicapper in town.

At three hours, Casino is a long watch, but worth the entrance money as Scorsese is at his best. The trailer is here, and I can’t sing the film’s praises highly enough. Is Martin Scorsese America’s greatest living film director? Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.