10+ / 10
Casino is one of the greatest films ever made. Seen it four times across multiple decades. The 10+ rating is honest evaluation of a film operating at the highest level cinema has reached. Martin Scorsese directing De Niro, Pesci, and Sharon Stone through three hours that never feel long. Las Vegas mob history during the period when the mob actually ran Vegas. Source material by Nicholas Pileggi, who also wrote the book Goodfellas came from. Every craft element working at peak.
The Setup
Sam “Ace” Rothstein (De Niro) is a Jewish handicapping expert the Chicago Outfit installs to run the Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas during the 1970s. The casino is a skim operation. Money comes off the count room before it reaches the gaming commission. Cash flows back to Chicago and the other Mafia families who hold pieces.
Nicky Santoro (Pesci) is sent to Vegas to protect Ace and the operation. Nicky has no impulse control. He builds his own crew, robs jewelry stores, beats people half to death over insults. He becomes the problem he was sent to prevent. Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone) is a Vegas hustler. Ace marries her against the explicit warnings of his Chicago bosses. She is still in love with her pimp Lester Diamond (James Woods).
The three relationships destroy the operation. The Chicago bosses sent these people to make money. The people made disasters instead. The film documents the destruction through Ace and Nicky’s overlapping voice-over narration across approximately twenty years of Vegas history.
The Real Story Behind The Tangiers
Frank Rosenthal ran the Stardust, Fremont, Hacienda, and Marina casinos for the Chicago Outfit between 1968 and the early 1980s. Anthony Spilotro was sent to Vegas in 1971 to enforce the Outfit’s interests. Both men were friends from childhood. Rosenthal’s wife was a former showgirl named Geri McGee, a one-time Vegas hustler who never got over her previous boyfriend Lenny Marmor.
The Tangiers is a fictional composite. The skim operation, the Black Book gaming exclusions, the car bomb, the cornfield killings, the Chicago end of the operation, and the eventual federal indictments are real. Pileggi interviewed Rosenthal and dozens of others over years. The book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas came out in 1995, the same year as the film. Pileggi co-wrote the screenplay with Scorsese, the same arrangement they had on Goodfellas five years earlier.
Geri McGee died of a drug overdose in 1982 in a Los Angeles motel room at age 46. Anthony Spilotro and his brother Michael were beaten to death by associates and buried in an Indiana cornfield in 1986. Frank Rosenthal survived a car bomb that detonated under his Cadillac outside Tony Roma’s in 1982. He died of a heart attack in Miami Beach in 2008. The film tells real history. The names change. The story does not.
The Three-Hour Pacing
The film runs three hours and never drags. Every scene contributes. The dual narration handles exposition that would otherwise require dramatic scenes that don’t earn their runtime. The audience gets the count room operation, the institutional structure of the Outfit, the way the Gaming Control Board works, the corporate takeover that ended mob Vegas, and three character studies that build over decades.
The structure is what makes the runtime work. Scorsese is documenting a system, not following a plot. The system grinds people up. The three protagonists are the latest people getting ground. The audience sees the machinery operating across years, which requires years of screen time to show properly. The runtime is the point.
For Writers
Casino shows how to use voice-over narration without turning the film into an audiobook. Ace and Nicky alternate the narration. The two voices have different attitudes toward the same events. Ace narrates the casino operations, the institutional structure, the Chicago end. Nicky narrates the street stuff, the crews, the violence. The split lets the film cover material that would otherwise require multiple expository scenes. The narration also dies when characters die. Nicky stops narrating after the cornfield. The narration becomes a stylistic event rather than a documentary device. The lesson for writers is that narration can be character work if you assign it carefully. If your narrator just describes what we are seeing, your narration is decoration. If your narrator has a specific point of view on the events and competes with other narrators for the audience’s interpretation, your narration is doing work nothing else can.
The De Niro Performance
De Niro plays Ace as the most disciplined criminal in the film. Ace is a numbers man. He thinks in odds. He installs Nicky in Vegas because Chicago told him to, not because he wants Nicky there. He marries Ginger because he calculated the odds of getting her to love him eventually. He miscalculated both decisions.
The wardrobe is part of the performance. Ace owns thirty-six custom suits in pastel colors no other man in 1970s Vegas was wearing. Each suit appears once. Costume designer Rita Ryack assembled the wardrobe from period sources and original constructions. The wardrobe is character. Ace is a man who chose his identity precisely and now cannot deviate from it. When the Chicago bosses tell him to keep his head down, he gets a television show. When they tell him to settle his beef with the gaming commission, he sues the state. De Niro plays a control freak who keeps losing control through choices he made on purpose.
The famous scene of Ace yelling at the kitchen staff about the unequal number of blueberries in the muffins is the character in one set piece. The blueberry count does not matter. The control matters. Ace cannot control his wife, cannot control his bodyguard, cannot fully control the casino floor. He can control how many blueberries go in the muffins. So he does, and the kitchen hates him for it, and Ace does not care.
This is one of De Niro’s last great performances before he entered the late phase where he stopped picking carefully. The craft from Mean Streets through Taxi Driver through Raging Bull through Goodfellas comes to bear on Ace Rothstein. Subsequent De Niro work has not matched this level consistently.
The Pesci Performance
Pesci as Nicky operates as the gravity Ace cannot escape. Nicky is funny. Nicky is also a sociopath who tortures a man’s head in a vise to find out who sent him. The film does not soften either side of the character. Pesci handles both registers without breaking.
The Nicky-Ace dynamic operates on history. They have known each other since childhood. Nicky is Ace’s protection. Nicky is also the thing destroying Ace’s operation. Ace cannot fire Nicky because the bosses sent Nicky. Nicky cannot leave because his own ambitions require him to be in Vegas. They drive each other to ruin through inertia they could have prevented.
Nicky’s narration takes over from Ace’s at the cornfield. Pesci speaks the line “There’s a lot more to this story” and the film cuts to Nicky and his brother Dominick being beaten to death with baseball bats and buried while still breathing. The crew is the men Nicky thought he had earned the loyalty of. The scene is brutal because the relationships were real before they ended this way. Scorsese stages the killing in daylight in a real cornfield in Indiana. The casualness of the location is the horror.
The Sharon Stone Performance
Sharon Stone as Ginger McKenna is the film’s open wound. Ginger is a Vegas hustler who married up for security and never stopped loving the pimp she came up under. Stone plays Ginger across approximately fifteen years of decline. The early Ginger is sharp, beautiful, expensive. The late Ginger is a woman who cannot stop ruining her own life with cocaine and Lester Diamond.
The performance earned Stone the Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. It should have won. Stone had been working for years in productions that did not respect her capabilities. Casino is the film that proves what was always there. Her Basic Instinct work three years earlier is competent. Her Ginger work is real acting.
The scene where Ginger calls Lester from a payphone and lies to Ace about who she is talking to is the marriage in one shot. Ace knows. Ginger knows he knows. The conversation continues anyway because neither of them can stop. Stone plays a woman who is sober enough to know she is lying and addicted enough not to care.
The hotel room sequence late in the film, where Ginger has tied herself to the bed and is begging Ace for money and pills, is one of the most uncomfortable scenes in 1990s cinema. Stone plays Ginger as fully gone. The makeup department let her look bad. The blocking let her physical control slip. The performance has no vanity. Stone was thirty-seven during filming. Most major actresses of that age in 1995 were not getting roles that allowed them to look like this on camera. Stone took the role and went the distance.
For Writers
Sharon Stone’s Ginger shows how to write a character’s degradation across a long timeline. Ginger does not have a single fall sequence. She has dozens of small slips that accumulate. The first slip is keeping in contact with Lester after the marriage. The next is taking the diamond gift from Ace. The next is the safe deposit box. Each individual slip is forgivable. The cumulative effect is catastrophe. The lesson for writers is that decline is more believable as accumulation than as event. If you want a character to fall, do not give the character one big fall. Give the character thirty small ones across the runtime. The audience absorbs each one as plausible. The final state arrives as something the character earned without realizing she was earning it.
The Scorsese Direction
Scorsese shot Casino as a companion piece to Goodfellas. Same writer in Pileggi. Same star in De Niro. Same secondary star in Pesci. Same voice-over narration structure. Same period soundtrack approach. The two films are not identical projects. Goodfellas is about street-level New York mob life across twenty-five years. Casino is about institutional mob commercial operations during a specific six-year period.
The Vegas footage is the cinematography achievement. The count room sequences. The gaming floor at night. The desert outside the city. The cars in the lot of the Riviera. Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson shot Las Vegas as a real place with operations and labor and money flow, not as the neon backdrop most Vegas films use.
The car bomb opening is the technical achievement of the film. Ace gets in his Cadillac in the Tangiers parking lot. The car explodes. The film cuts to a Saul Bass title sequence of flames over a desert landscape with Bach’s St. Matthew Passion playing. The sequence runs over three minutes. Scorsese establishes the entire shape of the film in the opening. The audience knows Ace survives because Ace is narrating. The audience knows Vegas burned because the title sequence is fire. The remaining three hours fill in how it happened.
The Soundtrack
The soundtrack is one of cinema’s great needle-drop achievements. Rolling Stones. Devo. Roxy Music. Hoagy Carmichael. The Velvettes. Cream. Mickey & Sylvia. Each song is placed exactly. The car bomb opening over “Contempt” by Georges Delerue. The Las Vegas gambling montage over “Stardust” by Hoagy Carmichael. The vise scene over “House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals.
Scorsese pioneered the needle-drop soundtrack approach in Mean Streets. He refined it through Goodfellas. Casino is the third major iteration. The technique allows the music to comment on the action without underlining the comment. The audience receives both meanings, the literal and the ironic, in the same beat. Scorsese personally selected every track. The soundtrack rights cost approximately $5 million of the film’s budget. The investment shows.
The use of “Long Long While” by the Rolling Stones over the late-film fallout sequence is the technique at full power. The song is from 1966. The lyrics are about waiting for someone to come back. The images are Ace and Ginger pulling away from each other. The marriage is over. Stones nostalgia plays over divorce footage. The audience reads both layers simultaneously.
For Writers
Casino shows how to write criminals who are also professionals. Ace Rothstein is not depicted as a gangster who happens to run a casino. He is depicted as a casino executive who happens to work for gangsters. His professional decisions are the drama. His professional failures, when they come, are the consequence of personal choices contaminating the work. The lesson for writers is that criminals work better as characters when their work is the focus and the crime is the context. If your criminal protagonist is constantly committing crimes, your protagonist is thin. If your criminal protagonist is constantly running operations and crimes are how those operations get conducted, your protagonist has dimension. Ace is more interesting watching kitchen staff than watching gangsters because the kitchen staff are the actual job.
The Ending
The ending is Ace alone. Nicky is dead in the cornfield. Ginger is dead from an overdose in a motel room. The Tangiers has been blown up to make room for corporate casinos. Ace is back working for the bosses as a handicapper, the job he had before Vegas. He is alive because he was professional enough not to ask the wrong questions when the bosses decided to clean house.
The closing voice-over is honest. The mob lost Vegas to the corporations. The corporations turned the city into Disneyland with slot machines. The professionals who knew how the operation worked are dead or retired or doing handicapping work in back rooms. Ace did not survive because he was good. Ace survived because he was useful and obedient at the right time. The line “And that’s that” is Ace’s verdict on his own life.
The closing sequence intercuts shots of the old Vegas casinos being imploded with shots of the new corporate towers going up. The Sands. The Hacienda. The Aladdin. All gone by the late 1990s. Scorsese filmed actual implosion footage that occurred during the production. The ending is documentary as much as drama. A specific city died during the period the film depicts. Casino is partly an autopsy.
Craft: A Foundational Achievement
Craft Note
Casino is foundational mob cinema. The De Niro performance, the Pesci performance, the Sharon Stone Academy-nominated performance, the Scorsese direction, the Pileggi screenplay, the three-hour pacing, the period soundtrack, the cinematography by Robert Richardson, and the actual Las Vegas locations all operate at peak. Few films assembled this much talent and got every element right.
The Pileggi-Scorsese collaboration across Goodfellas and Casino represents the deepest engagement with American mob life cinema has produced. Goodfellas covers New York street operations. Casino covers Vegas casino operations. The two films together document the mob across two decades, two coasts, and two operational levels. They are the project Scorsese and Pileggi spent the decade making together.
The 10+ rating reflects honest evaluation across four viewings spanning decades. The film rewards repeat viewing. The performances deepen. The structural choices become clearer. The aggregate film operates at the level of cinema’s foundational achievements regardless of genre. Casino is what Scorsese could do at the height of his powers with the best collaborators of his career. The film has not aged.
The Verdict
A 10+. Casino is one of the greatest films ever made. De Niro as Ace, Pesci as Nicky, Sharon Stone as Ginger. Scorsese directing. Pileggi screenplay. Three hours of Vegas mob history that never drags. The film belongs in the conversation about the greatest films ever made.
FAQ
Is this based on real events?
Yes. Ace Rothstein is based on Frank Rosenthal, who ran multiple Vegas casinos for the Chicago Outfit in the 1970s and early 1980s. Nicky Santoro is based on Anthony Spilotro, the Outfit enforcer sent to Vegas during the same period. Ginger McKenna is based on Geri McGee. Pileggi spent years interviewing Rosenthal and dozens of others for the book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas.
How does the three-hour runtime work?
The film documents a system across approximately twenty years. The runtime supports the scope. The dual narration carries exposition. Every scene contributes. The runtime is the point of the film, not an obstacle to it. Scorsese needs the time to show how a city operates and how the operation eventually ends.
How does Sharon Stone’s performance work?
Stone plays Ginger across fifteen years of decline. The early Ginger is the hustler Ace falls for. The late Ginger is a woman destroying herself with cocaine and her old pimp. The hotel room sequence with Ginger tied to the bed is one of the most uncomfortable scenes in 1990s cinema. Stone earned the Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. She should have won.
How does this compare to Goodfellas?
Same writer in Pileggi. Same director. Same stars in De Niro and Pesci. Same period soundtrack approach. Goodfellas covers street-level New York mob life. Casino covers institutional Vegas casino operations. Neither is better. Together they document mob America across two coasts and two operational levels.
How important is the Las Vegas history?
Central. The film is about the period when the mob actually ran Vegas through casino licenses held by clean-faced front men. The corporate takeover at the end of the film is real history. The Riviera, Tropicana, Stardust, and other mob-controlled casinos were eventually displaced by corporate operators. Casino documents the transition. The closing implosion footage is real footage of actual casinos coming down during the production years.
How does the soundtrack work?
Rolling Stones, Devo, Roxy Music, Hoagy Carmichael, Cream, The Animals. Each song placed for narrative and ironic effect. Scorsese personally selected every track. The technique is his signature, developed in Mean Streets and refined through Goodfellas. Casino is the third major iteration of the approach. The rights cost approximately $5 million of the budget.
How violent is the film?
Severely. The vise scene. The cornfield burial. The pen attack in the bar. The film does not soften the violence. The cornfield killing of Nicky and his brother is staged in daylight in a real Indiana cornfield. Casualness is the horror.
How does this compare to other Scorsese crime films?
Casino sits alongside Goodfellas, The Departed, and The Irishman as Scorsese’s major crime works. Each operates at a different scale and time period. Casino is the institutional commercial operation. Goodfellas is the street operation. The Departed is the police-mob interpenetration. The Irishman is the retrospective. All four belong in any serious crime cinema conversation.
Should I watch this if I am not a crime cinema fan?
Yes. The film operates as a workplace drama that happens to be about the mob. The Ace performance, the Stone performance, the Vegas history, and the soundtrack all reward attention regardless of genre preference. Audiences who avoid crime films may find Casino works as historical fiction or character study.