Casino

From Nicholas Pileggi comes this tale of love, marriage, adultery, murder, and revenge . . . Mafia-style. It is at once a love story and a bigger-than-life business story, the business being Las Vegas’ multibillion-dollar casino gambling industry—and how the mob finally lost its stranglehold over it.
It is a real-life love story set in America’s favorite never-never land, a Mafia tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, as well as the inside account, in never-before-published detail, of just how the mob lost its control of the neon moneymaking machine it had created, in which everything ran like clockwork—except for the little fact that Tony Spilotro was sleeping with his best friend’s wife.

My Review of Casino

5—The Perfect Sundae

Scorsese blooms in soil that he knows best. In Scorsese’s hands, it was all aces.
—Tanja 

Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Robert De Niro as Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein · Sharon Stone as Ginger McKenna · Joe Pesci as Nicky Santoro · James Woods as Lester Diamond.

Brief Synopsis of Casino

Co-written with GoodFellas screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi and starring the perfect cast that included Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, this film was destined for success. With narration courtesy of Ace and Nicky, we learn their dance of how cash is won, lost, counted, and skimmed. In some cases, voiceovers can be as taxing as reading the back-story in the first chapters of a book; but in this situation, the rich dialogue, unrepentant violence of the well-portrayed characters, and themes of allegiance and duplicity mark Casino as unadulterated Scorsese. Although some feel that it was not the director’s best work, and that Casino seemed to derive from Goodfellas, these opinions didn’t lessen the overall impact (at least for me). As usual, Scorsese succeeded in skillfully interlacing envisioned sonnets out of twisted ambitions.

When you love someone, you’ve gotta trust them. There’s no other way. You’ve got to give them the key to everything that's yours. Otherwise, what's the point? And for a while, I believed, that’s the kind of love I had.
—Ace Rothstein 

Ace’s car explodes. There was no buildup, and it opened with a bang. Joe Pesci’s early scene shows him stomping down on some poor guy’s head in a dimly lit bar and screaming obscenities as a dazed Robert De Niro looks on with that famous pinched brow and curled lip expression. This scene introduced the gangster movie that Scorsese insisted, “isn’t a mob film.” Say what you will, Scorsese, as it makes no difference what you call it. Casino goes down smoothly; it is the exact cocktail of drama, violence, and greed. Now add a hot blonde into the mix and you can add lust to that list.

Sharon Stone received her only Best Actress nomination to date for playing Ginger, a prostitute who becomes the wife of the mobster Sam “Ace” Rothstein.

Sharon Stone playing Ginger Rothstein was the perfect touch in this already bloody great film. The bold wardrobe choices of floor-sweeping beaded gowns dripping in jewels, flawless makeup, and retro hair has her owning every scene. Ginger is an ex-prostitute/hustler with a weakness for her former pimp, Lester (James Woods). The first time Ace sees the gorgeous Ginger, she’s playing craps for a high roller, then throwing a hot tantrum, tossing the man’s chips in the air when he won’t give her a decent cut. The slow motion shots pan from the knowing glint in Ace’s eyes to Ginger’s instinctual, predator’s gaze—it’s enough to stop time. You just know that she’ll never love him; indeed, that doom is later played out when Ace fails to mold her into a worthy wife.

Ace’s marriage proposal to Ginger is as hard and plastic as a Vegas chip. That’s what made this story so great: their marriage is a business deal. Ace gets his dazzling trophy wife and Ginger gets the gold that keeps her painted in riches and glitter. Even when their daughter is born, that motherly instinct fails to click for her. Ace’s jealousy sends his wife back to hard drugs. She also returns to Lester, the seedy pimp, and finally, to Nicky, who sexually mistreats her but provides her with the means to get back at Ace. What was once a beautiful trophy wrapped in gold is scraped down to the hard metal and left out in the rain to rust. Ginger’s demise was the hardest to watch.

Ace’s calm narration that opens the film slowly slides into panic by the third hour. At the order of the mob’s Midwest bosses, Nicky’s crew drives him and his brother, Dominick, out into an isolated cornfield for, unfortunately for the Santoro boys, some batting practice. First up is Dominick, who’s beaten to a gory pulp with a metal baseball bat as Nicky is forced to watch in agony; then, it’s Nicky’s turn to have his forehead split open like a melon. Adding one last insult, the thugs roll his lifeless body into a ditch alongside his equally dead brother, and pour dirt over the fresh corpses. The morose narration informs us that Nicky and his brother were buried “while they were still breathing.” You knew it was game over.

The word was out. The bosses had enough of Nicky. They had enough. How much were they gonna take? So they made an example of him and his brother. They buried them while they were still breathing.
—Ace