“We’re the only winners,” Rothstein says “The players don’t stand a chance”. The customers are similarly fixated on money, and they are rightly treated with contempt by the casino owners.

“Look at this place,” Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) says “It’s made of money”.

The film is stacked full of visual images of wealth – piles of dollar bills, gambling chips, expensive jewellery, extravagant displays on the casino floor.

The account room is referred to as “The Holy of Holies”. The gangsters speak of their time running casinos with wistful nostalgia. Such flexibility is needed to keep the film interesting, as it clocks in at a bracing three hours. The film is not filled with non-stop action, so much as non-stop motion, and the effect is to absorb rather than exhaust the viewer. There are occasional slow-motion shots and freeze frames, but mostly there is constant movement and pace. The camera is more mobile than ever, as it glides across the casino, and follows its operatives around. Scorsese pulls out all the stops in his use of cinematography and editing. The casinos provided excitement for their customers, and made fabulous amounts of money for the mob. Everything looks brighter and more vibrant than it really was. The colours in Goodfellas seem grungy by comparison with the digitally edited photography employed in Casino. If Goodfellas portrayed the gangster life as one of glamour and success, then Casino takes this a step further. In this version of events, Rothstein boasts about the time that he spent running the Tangiers, the biggest casino in the area (not a real one, I might add). Events in the film were inspired by the life of Frank Rosenthal, who is here called Ace Rothstein (Robert de Niro). There was indeed a brief time in the 1970s when the mob ran the casinos. This is part of a four-part examination of three Martin Scorsese gangster films:įor a review of The Irishman, click here.Īs with Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese based Casino on real-life events.

Casino 1995 movie icon