Let’s talk about the thing where the aggro-sensitive babies who get everything they want out of cinema via superheroes characterize Martin Scorsese as purveying the same group of tired phallocentric gangster clichés over and over. (After all, who could compete with making 20 superhero movies, then doing one starring a girl?) I’d be happy to dismiss this sentiment entirely, but I admit, there probably is a popular conception of Scorsese as a mob-movie guy. (A little odd, given how many of his movies actually made more money than Goodfellas, but there may have been a long tail on that one.) To the extent that you can locate some core of truth in that idea, it can probably be traced to the fact that five years after Goodfellas, Scorsese made another mob picture set in a similar time period with the same screenwriter and two returning actors — and no, Casino isn’t as great. It’s longer but less propulsive, chattier but not as funny, more violent but with less memorable context for that violence. And yet, in addition to being wildly entertaining in the way of dueling De Niro and Pesci voiceovers, Casino also feels more connected to several of the ambitious Scorsese movies that followed it, even though many of them are easier to differentiate from Goodfellas. Casino converges Scorsese’s crime chronicles with American history, something he would do even more forcefully in Gangs of New York, The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon. (Casino is basically those movies for the era of the two-tape VHS release.) The mob stuff is almost incidental, because once the house gets set up, it obliterates everyone in its path, even the ruthless capitalists who think they’re running the show. Sure, drugs and ego get in the way, too, but there’s a rapaciousness here absent even in Goodfellas, where made-man status bundles up with social capital (buy your status local!) that the characters here seem largely disinterested in accruing, beyond its ability to make them more actual money. If you thought Rupert Pupkin’s imaginary talk-show gigging was eerily joyless, wait until you get a load of the score-settling vanity project that is The Ace Rothstein Show! In some ways, this is less a reiterative gangster picture than his first true historical epic (albeit it from the cloistered vantage point of Vegas). After all, if you’re going to grapple with American history, you have to follow the money, whether that means profiling the mafia or finance sharks. Fitting, then, that Casino once held the all-time raw-number record for utterances of the word “fuck” in a fiction feature film, and has since been surpassed by The Wolf of Wall Street. – JH
