It is also a return to the hard-guy life the director loves to chronicle, the specifically Italian American milieu of “GoodFellas” and “Mean Streets.” Plus it continues Scorsese’s deeper fascination with volcanic men inevitably exploding into deadly violence that encompasses films as diverse as “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull” and “Cape Fear.”

It stars two of his trademark actors, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, as boyhood friends Sam (Ace) Rothstein and Nicky Santoro, who end up controlling Las Vegas before a rivalry for Ace’s wife, Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), ruins the party. The other is that despite his dazzling ability, Scorsese is finding it increasingly difficult to make his personal obsessions accessible to an audience.īased on the fascinating nonfiction book by Nicholas Pileggi (who co-wrote the script with the director), “Casino,” at three hours and change in length, is clearly meant to be a major statement, a film whose dark vision of a society driven to disaster by money, violence and pride is supposed to echo in the American consciousness like “The Godfather.”įor Scorsese, “Casino” is familiar territory in a number of ways. One is that Martin Scorsese is a master filmmaker, so skilled in the manipulation of imagery he might be the most proficient of active American directors. “Casino,” the story of how the mob won and lost Las Vegas, proves two points so conclusively you can take them, so to speak, to the bank.