Casino

Judged on structure, and the test finds both what is required and what is not. The frame holds: the car bomb opens the film and is returned to, so the whole is a fall already known. The first hour’s exposition is required, because the subject is a system and the count room, the suitcase, the front and the chain of watchers must be laid out before the chain can break; the hinge, a grievance in a wired back room, is small and right. But the second half repeats itself: Ginger’s breakdowns come in a run of scenes making one point, Lester Diamond’s scenes repeat his one function, and the television show and Santoro’s successive assaults add incident more than consequence. At 178 minutes the scale is permitted rather than compelled, and a film of two and a half hours would lose little of what this one knows.

Score: 7.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and holds: Las Vegas is a machine for taking money, and the mob that ran it was a precursor rather than an aberration, replaced not by the law but by corporations that run the same machine more efficiently. Under it lies a second disclosure, about trust: a system in which everyone watches everyone and the house still loses, because the weak links are appetite and love, which cannot be audited. Rothstein, who can calculate any odds, cannot calculate Ginger, who tells him plainly at the start that her love is money; and the chain is undone by a petty man’s grievance, not by a hero. Held at the figure because much of this is the reportage of a known history, because the gangster’s rise and fall is the genre’s condition before it is the film’s, and because the coda states its thesis more than it shows it.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The register is cold and glittering, and the elevation comes as dread. The summits: the opening, the car exploding and the Bass figure falling through flames to Bach, a damned soul over a passion chorus; Santoro’s first sight of the cornfield, the beating with bats and the burial of two men alive, filmed without music and without relief; Ginger’s death alone in a motel corridor; the desert meeting, Santoro arriving late among holes dug for other men; the overhead views of the floor, a cathedral of money; and the terrible momentum of the collapse montage. Held at the figure by frequency. The summits gather at the frame and in the last movement; the first hour is exposition, brilliant and level; the long middle of domestic quarrels flattens rather than rises; and much of the film’s force is speed and pressure, which is not the same as height.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The archetype is the fall from paradise, and the film builds part of it. Rothstein’s narration calls the town a paradise, and the frame enforces the shape: the body falling in flames at the start, the explosion at the start and near the end, the expulsion into a suburb at the close. Babylon in the desert, with holes in the sand for those who break its law, is load-bearing in the plot. The three principals fall by their own natures, as in a morality: Rothstein by control, Santoro by appetite, Ginger by greed and need. What holds the figure: the rise and fall is the genre’s inherited structure, the religious frame lives mostly in the titles and the music, and inside it the matter stays reportage, a ledger of procedures. The pattern is built at the frame and in the three falls, and evoked rather than built through the middle.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The inheritance is the American gangster film and, nearest, Scorsese’s own Goodfellas (1990), also from Pileggi: memoir in voice-over, a compilation score of popular records, freeze frames and whip pans, a crew’s rise and fall told from inside. Casino is in large part that form extended. The turns are real and modest: two narrators instead of one, and one cut off at his death; an hour of essayistic exposition that explains an economy, more like a documentary than a crime film; an epic length given to a system rather than a hero; a marriage at the centre of a gangster film. The stake was smaller than the scale suggests: a major studio picture from a director, a writer and two stars returning to a proven success. A wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve, and much of this one is the path itself.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is how a system looks from inside to those who run it. The two voice-overs are the instrument: men who explain everything, the odds, the skim, who watches whom, and understand nothing of what will destroy them. The narration’s managerial confidence is the measure of its blindness, and when Santoro’s voice stops the form itself shows the system’s cost. The montage repeats the casino’s chain of surveillance, so the viewer watches as the house watches. Held at the figure on two counts the film cannot escape. The form is largely inherited from Goodfellas, well used rather than remade; and in the long middle the narration becomes a container, telling what the image already shows, so that for a stretch of the film the form carries the matter instead of knowing it.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Evidence over thirty-one years, and the return yields in particular ways. Ginger, once read as a showcase, now reads as the one character outside the system’s logic, and Sharon Stone’s performance has been re-weighed. The coda has grown more pointed as Las Vegas and American finance have grown more corporate, and the film is now read as an essay on capitalism as much as a gangster picture. The Bach frame and the falling figure invite religious readings that the narration resists, and the editing yields on return: the alternation of voices, the cuts that take a procedure apart. What holds the axis: the readings largely converge; the literature on Scorsese gives more of its attention to Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas; and much of the yield is texture and procedure, which renews less than an open question.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the gangster film made the vehicle for an anatomy of an economy, with the narration as a mechanism of blindness. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is how much of that force was already spent: the film extends a form more than it reorganises what film can do, and the reorganisation belongs to Goodfellas, five years earlier, which is discounted here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Scorsese’s own later anatomies of money, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and The Irishman (2019), take up its doubled narration and its scale, though reach within one director’s line counts for less than reach across a field; later voice-over crime chronicles owe it something alongside Goodfellas; its images and lines are widely quoted. But its successors mostly took from the two films together, and few changed what they did because of this one.

Score: 7.1 / 10

Weighed on form, presence and fabric, across thirty-one years. The film as released survives whole, in the one version in circulation, with restorations as repair only. Presence has been continuous and wide: television, every home-video format, streaming, quotation, its images in common circulation, and a standing that has risen. The surface ages little, since a film of the 1970s made in 1995 as period dates its costumes and its Strip to the story rather than the making; the compilation score and the gloss of the photography now read partly as the mid-1990s too. A span of thirty-one years places it at about 8.5 to 8.6, and it stands at the lower figure because its presence, wide within cinema, is narrower than that of its director’s most present films and has not passed far beyond film.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in much of the film: Schoonmaker’s cutting, which lays out a system with the clarity of a diagram and moves the collapse at the speed of a fall; Richardson’s light, hot top-light haloing the gamblers and the floor, cold in the desert; Ferretti’s casino, a built world of carpet, mirror and neon; the score placed as commentary, with Bach at the frame; De Niro’s Rothstein, controlled to the point of comedy; Pesci’s Santoro, frightening; Stone’s Ginger, the film’s one open wound, rising across three hours from glamour to wreckage. The charges fall on a large share of the whole: the voice-over often tells what the image shows, the second half repeats its domestic scenes, Pesci’s Santoro reprises his Tommy from Goodfellas, and the length dulls the cutting’s edge through the middle hour.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Rothstein’s order that every muffin hold the same number of blueberries, and Santoro beaten with bats and buried in a cornfield. One law governs both: control against appetite, inside a system that rewards control until appetite breaks it. The muffins are control at its most comic; the cornfield is the bosses’ control applied to a man whose appetite has become a cost. The count room, the eye in the sky, the licensing hearing, Ginger’s hustle and the bosses’ back room obey the same physics: everyone watches everyone, everyone skims, and the house is a fiction of order over greed. The range runs from the comedy of Kansas City grievances to murder and overdose. It strains in three places: Lester Diamond is broader than the law needs, Ginger’s last stretch tips toward melodrama in a film otherwise cold, and the coda’s corporate satire is stated more than enacted.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Many orders are held in one structure: the economy, in the casino, the skim, the pension fund and, at the close, corporate finance; the state, in the gaming commission, the county commissioner, a senator, the FBI and the courts; organised crime, in the bosses, the crew and the chain of couriers; the family, in a marriage, a daughter and a father’s custody; consciousness, in two narrators and Ginger’s dissolution; labour, in dealers, slot managers and cooks, hired and fired; the city and its history, Las Vegas from the 1970s to the 1990s; the natural order, in the desert and its holes. They are integrated: the marriage, the licence and the skim fail in one sequence. What holds the axis: the sacred is present only as frame, in Bach and the falling body; consciousness is mostly self-report, the two men’s inner lives surfaces by design; and labour is seen from the pit boss’s chair.

Score: 7.9 / 10