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    Nostalgia Central
    Home»Movies»Movies by Decade»Movies - 1990s
    Movies - 1990s Movies - C 3 Mins Read

    Casino (1995)

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    This masterpiece from Martin Scorsese opens with the mob pushing into the casinos in the 1970s and the action centres around the fictional Tangiers Casino run by highly successful professional gambler Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein (Robert De Niro) and his psychopathic childhood buddy and enforcer Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci).

    Smart as Ace is, he falls for the alluring but trashy hooker, Ginger (Sharon Stone), who insists on keeping alive a longtime relationship with her seedy pimp, Lester (James Woods) after she marries the smitten casino operator.

    What makes Ace tick is the need to shave every edge of advantage as he fronts day and night for his bosses, who built the Tangiers with money stolen from the Teamsters’ pension fund.

    Ginger drinks, snorts lines of coke and starts going downhill in Sharon Stone’s bravest performance to date. Never has she allowed herself to appear so hard, so brittle, so overextended, so blatantly mercenary – and so touching in her inability to avoid self-destructiveness.

    Strip away the colour and the flash from Casino – it’s loaded to the brim with both – and we’re left with a picture of the high cost of doing the wrong thing. And even as Pesci’s loose-cannon enforcer entertains us with his outrageousness, he also frightens us with his essential stupidity and lack of imagination, which leaves him without any ability to connect deeds with consequences.

    What makes his Nicky Santoro so arresting is that he doesn’t look like a killer, with his stubby build and rubbery face. He doesn’t sound like one, with his squeaky, piping voice. But when he turns on a guy in a bar and starts stabbing the guy in the throat with his own pen, we’re not surprised.

    And from there, how much of a leap is it to slaughtering competitors, beating them bloody with baseball bats, or shooting them and burying them in the conveniently located desert?

    The subsidiary message, intoned by Ace in one of the voice-overs that drive the film, is that Las Vegas exists for one purpose only – to separate people from their money. Nobody knows this better than Ace (based on the real-life Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal).

    Casino is three hours’ long, but it’s never boring. The film isn’t perfect, but it’s inspired. It’s a nuclear reactor of a movie about the absence of love – and the pervasiveness of several kinds of death that are now being dished out in the sand by the corporate entities that have succeeded the mob in Vegas.

    Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein
    Robert De Niro
    Ginger McKenna
    Sharon Stone
    Nicky Santoro
    Joe Pesci
    Lester Diamond
    James Woods
    Billy Sherbert
    Don Rickles
    Andy Stone
    Alan King
    Phillip Green
    Kevin Pollak
    Pat Webb
    L.Q. Jones
    Frank Marino
    Frank Vincent
    Don Ward
    John Bloom
    Remo Gaggi
    Pasquale Cajano
    Jennifer Santoro
    Melissa Prophet
    John Nance
    Bill Allison
    Artie Piscano
    Vincent Vella Jr
    Piscano’s mother
    Catherine Scorsese
    Piscano’s daughter
    Cathy Scorsese
    Dominick Santoro
    Philip Suriano
    Vincent Borelli
    Joe Rigano
    Vinny Forlano
    Gene Ruffini
    Arthur Capp
    Peter Conti
    Lucky Larry
    Larry E. Nadler
    Ichikawa
    Nobu Matsuhisa
    Detective Bob Johnson
    Joe Lacoco
    Wiseguy Eddie
    John Manca
    Wiseguy Jerry
    Ronald Maccone
    Rocky
    Frank Adonis
    Moosh
    Joseph Bono
    Doctor Dan
    Daniel P. Conte
    Slim
    Paul Dottore
    Bernie Blue
    Max Raven
    Sal Fusco
    Clem Caserta
    Jack Hardy
    Jed Mills
    Charlie Clark
    Richard Riehle
    Tony Dogs
    Carl Ciarfalio
    Fat Sally
    Michael Toney

    Director
    Martin Scorsese

    Video


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