Scorsese's 1970s Las Vegas epic. The third part of an unofficial mob trilogy with Mean Streets and Goodfellas.
1970s Las Vegas. Sam 'Ace' Rothstein, a handicapping genius, is sent by the Chicago Outfit to run the Tangiers Casino as a front for skimming. His childhood friend Nicky Santoro arrives shortly after with permission to enforce, then without permission to begin a parallel jewellery-theft operation. Ace marries Ginger McKenna, a hustler whose ex-boyfriend Lester Diamond is a continuing drag on her loyalty. The film tracks the slow disintegration of all three relationships — Ace and Ginger, Ace and Nicky, the Outfit and Las Vegas — across roughly a decade.
Scorsese tells the story through dual voiceover. Ace narrates the casino operation; Nicky narrates the muscle work. The two voiceovers occasionally interrupt each other; one of them stops, abruptly, when Nicky is killed. The film closes on the dynamiting of the old casinos, the corporate-era Vegas, and Ace's narration explaining what was lost.
Casino completes what is sometimes called Scorsese's mob trilogy — Mean Streets (1973) on the lower-tier Little Italy figures, Goodfellas (1990) on the New York-Lufthansa crew, Casino (1995) on the upper-tier Outfit operation in Las Vegas. The films can be watched in any order; together they form the most-detailed depiction of post-war American organised crime in any narrative cinema.
What separates Casino from the earlier two is the scale. Mean Streets is a neighbourhood film. Goodfellas is a New York film. Casino is, by structural necessity, a film about a city — and a city, specifically, where the Mob's permission was the operating condition of a multi-billion-dollar industry. The film's argument is that Las Vegas was the Mob's paradise and that the corporatisation of the gambling business in the 1980s ended the paradise.
The film's most-discussed scene is roughly 40 minutes in: Nicky Santoro tortures a bookmaker, Tony Dogs, by clamping his head in a workshop vice and tightening it until one eye pops out of its socket. The sequence runs roughly 90 seconds. Scorsese reportedly shot it twice — the first time obscured, the second time with the violence fully visible. He used the visible take.
The choice has been argued about. The defence is that Scorsese is refusing the soft cinematic depiction of mob violence — making the audience understand what 'enforcement' actually involves. The critique is that the sequence, by its very vividness, becomes a kind of pornography of violence. Both readings are textually defensible. The sequence remains one of the most-disturbing in 1990s American cinema.
Sharon Stone's Ginger McKenna is the film's structural pivot. The marriage between Ace and Ginger is the film's emotional centre and its slow collapse is the film's tragedy. Stone plays Ginger as a woman who has spent her entire adult life as a hustler and cannot stop hustling even when she has been given everything she wanted.
The role required Stone to play extended drug-addiction sequences, marital screaming matches, scenes of physical degradation, and what is — Scorsese's defenders argue — one of the most-realistic depictions of a woman destroying her own life through addiction in any American film. Stone was nominated for Best Actress; she lost to Susan Sarandon for Dead Man Walking. Most subsequent critical opinion considers the omission a significant Academy mistake.