Scorsese/De Niro: Casino(Dir. Martin Scorsese, 2h58m, 1995)

Casino and Goodfellas cannot help but be compared. It is in their very nature to be compared. Both are colossal depictions of true-life crime centred around the Mob, largely set in the 1970s and early 1980s, both based on books by, and co-written by, Nicholas Pileggi, both starring Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. Whilst his films from here on out (with the exception of the odd-duo Bringing Out the Dead (1999) and Shutter Island (2010)) take on the form, as with the work of latter-day Spielberg, of ensemble pieces, often with a biographic or historical bent, so close together are these films that we must consider them together.

Between Cape Fear and Casino lies another uncharacteristic Scorsese piece, The Age of Innocence, adapting the Edith Wharton 19280 novel into a sumptuous, if slow-paced depiction of 1870s New York society. De Niro, meanwhile, remains busy, appearing in films as varied as comedy-drama Mad Dog and Glory (1993), Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), in which De Niro played the doctor's creation, and his own directorial debut, A Bronx Tale (1993). Bringing them back together would be an adaption of Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas, by Pileggi, a sweeping retelling of Las Vegas' control by the Mafia, via bookmaker Frank Rosenthal (fictionalised as Sam "Ace" Rothstein (De Niro) and mobster, Anthony Spilotro (fictionalised as Nicky Santoro (Pesci).

Casino, in the round, is a familiar form; the film begins with Rothstein narrowly surviving a car-bombing, only for the film, once Saul Bass's sumptuous titles, the decadent neon of the Strip, and the harsh light of the explosion, and the final work by this unsung master craftsman of cinema, fade. We  cut back a decade, to Rothstein's arrival at the Tangiers Casino. This is no mere business trip; the casino is largely funded by the mob, who rake off their cut from the regular counts, and have it delivered to them in the American Mid-West, and Rothstein, a sports handicapper, and childhood friend to their enforcer in Vegas, Santoro, work in tandem to maximise the profits of the casino.

This is easier said than done; Santoro is an unabashed thief, and a violent and unpredictable figure that makes Pesci's previous work with Scorsese seem tame, a man who stabs a fellow patron in a bar in the throat with a pen, crushes a fellow criminal's head in a vice, and whose "Hole in the Wall" gang run rampant through Vegas, eventually becoming open enemies of Rothstein. For his part, Rothstein must contend with the problems of running a casino, including the forces of the Nevada government who eventually seek to revoke his license, the ever-circling mobsters, and the figure of his girlfriend and later wife, Ginger (Sharon Stone), whose chaotic relationship with Rothstein dominates the second half of the film.

So begins a familiar pattern of vignettes, jumps in time over weeks, months, or occasionally, years, largely narrated by Rothstein but also Santoro; the rude mechanics of the Mafia's plot, in which the money is quite literally skimmed off the top of the count, is another masterfully done single tracking shot, whilst the opening half of the film is peppered with montages, ranging from Stone's introduction, in which her role in the Las Vegas scene, as hustler, good luck charm, and integral figure who seems to cut across the social divides, tipping everyone from the highest rollers to the valets, to the multiple segues to introduce everyone from an infamous (and very real) Japanese gambler) to the superb ratcheting of tension in Ace unmasking a pair of hi-tech cheats, and the brutality he proceeds to inflict on one.

Like Goodfellas, there is one standout montage, and this comes in the form of the extended sequence in which the film, and Santoro, take us through the criminal underbelly, as the Hole in the Wall gang form, wreak havoc across Vegas, and the mobster pools this money into seemingly legitimate businesses. It may lack the finality, the pathos of Goodfellas' "Layla" sequence, but, cut to the fuzzed out jam of "Can't You Hear Me Knocking", from the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, it's just as stylish, and understatedly cool. Much like the rest of the film, it's also overblown, to the point of Bacchanalian excess; why three and a half minutes of tight editing in which the bodies pile up, when over seven, over meandering tales of wealth accumulated and ill-gotten gains piling up in Joe Pesci's bedroom, will do?

This "why not" attitude rather colours the whole of Casino, as though, like the Stones, Marty just wants to jam, or kick out the jams, on making a mob movie-indeed, he wouldn't make another one until 2006, and wouldn't make one featuring the Italian mob till 2019. Why not put everything on black, or red? Why not punch in "Gimme Shelter" twice on the soundtrack, once for a montage of slayings, once for drug-taking? Why not multiple montages, the final elagic and cut to "House of the Rising Sun"? Why not an entire subplot in which Rothstein runs up against the local Clark County Commission, headed by a memorable extended cameo by L. Q. Jones; a conflict begun by an inept relative finally being fired by Ace, where he eventually, briefly, becomes a TV star, challenges the Vegas Govt. in court, and ends up in a war of words with them? Why not.

Even when the film gets to the true meat of its narrative, the three way struggle between Ace, Nicky and Ginger feels bloated. Whilst Stone on her own and with both De Niro and Pesci have some of the best chemistry and rapport in any Scorsese movie, and the deteriorating status quo between them is riveting, leading to Ace and Nicky confronting each other in the desert, and an ever-higher stakes game of cat and mouse as Nicky and Ginger carry on their affair, for every minute of tension and drama, there are five or six where these scenes seem to repeat themselves. Goodfellas may be only twenty minutes shorter, but it feels like an hour; the former is impressively lean, the latter overladen with the excess of Vegas.

Nevertheless, Casino is admirable-for all its decadence, it is Scorsese's farewell to the gangster movie for nearly a decade, and a film at an admirable and impressive scale, dominated by De Niro, Pesci and Stone's triple-hander performances; whilst it may not quite compare to Goodfellas and Scorsese at his best, it's yet another worthy chapter in the director's chronicling of American crime and its relationship to an idea of American masculinity.

Rating: Highly Recommended.

Casino is available via streaming on Amazon Prime, and on DVD and BluRay from Universal.

Next week, we conclude our adventures with Scorsese and De Niro as we enter our final month of Scorsese with the colosally scaled, and stark Killers of the Flower Moon.

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