Martin Scorsese’s Casino runs 179 minutes, and it spends most of them watching a man build something that was never his. Robert De Niro plays Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a sports handicapper the Chicago Outfit sends to Las Vegas in 1973 to run the Tangiers Casino. The film was released on November 22, 1995, by Universal Pictures. It is the eighth collaboration between Scorsese and De Niro.
Trailer, via UniversalMoviesINTL.
A Handicapper Takes Over the Tangiers
The setup is a business story before it is a crime story. Ace is good at the job. He doubles the casino’s profits, and a portion of that money is skimmed and delivered to the Midwest bosses. Philip Green, played by Kevin Pollak, serves as the casino’s frontman. Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro, Ace’s childhood friend, is assigned to protect both Ace and the operation.
That arrangement is the whole machine, and Casino is clear about how it works. The casino needs a face that can pass a licensing hearing. The money needs a route out of the building. Ace supplies the first, and the skim supplies the second.
Nicky Santoro Gets Blacklisted
Then the machine starts to eat itself. Nicky is blacklisted from working in Las Vegas casinos. He does not leave. He assembles a crew that includes his younger brother Dominick and his right-hand man Frankie Marino, and they carry out extortion and jewellery burglaries for their own profit.
The distinction matters, and the film draws it sharply. Ace’s operation is illegal but disciplined. Nicky’s is illegal and loud. The burglaries and the extortion bring media and police attention that the Tangiers cannot absorb. Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi, who adapted the script from Pileggi’s nonfiction book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas, treat that attention as the real threat — not the law, but the light.
Sharon Stone Plays Ginger McKenna
Sharon Stone’s Ginger McKenna is the film’s best performance and its most punishing one. Ginger is a streetwise chip hustler. Ace falls in love with her, they marry, and they have a daughter, Amy.
The marriage breaks under two pressures the film names directly: Ginger’s drug and alcohol addiction, and her relationship with Lester Diamond, played by James Woods, her former lover and a pimp. The Lester thread ends in one of the film’s ugliest scenes. Ace arranges for Nicky and his crew to beat Lester after catching him accepting $25,000 from Ginger at a café.
Stone does not play Ginger as a victim or a femme fatale. She plays her as a woman running out of exits. The performance is the reason the back half of Casino holds together.
The Don Ward Firing
The film’s cleanest piece of plotting arrives in 1976. Ace fires slot manager Don Ward, played by John Bloom, for incompetence. Ward is the brother-in-law of Clark County Commission chairman Pat Webb, played by L.Q. Jones.
Webb tries to persuade Ace to reinstate Ward. Ace refuses. In retaliation, Webb has Ace’s gaming licence application denied, which jeopardises Ace’s position at the Tangiers.
Ace’s response is the best scene in the movie. At the licensing hearing, he insults the gaming board and the local politicians, creating a spectacle for the news cameras. He cannot legally run the casino anymore, so he makes sure everyone watches him not run it.
Ace Starts a Talk Show
Unable to hold the licence, Ace starts hosting a local television talk show from the Tangiers. The Midwest bosses hate it. Every broadcast draws more attention to their operation.
This is where Casino becomes a movie about publicity. Ace’s talk show is not a scheme or a play for leverage. It is a man with no legal standing deciding that visibility is the only weapon left. Ace blames Nicky’s reckless criminality for the growing scrutiny, and that blame leads to a confrontation in the desert.
The Real People Behind the Story
The primary characters are based on real people, and the film does not hide it. Ace is inspired by Frank Rosenthal, also known as “Lefty,” who ran the Stardust, Fremont, Marina, and Hacienda casinos in Las Vegas for the Chicago Outfit from 1968 until 1981.
Nicky is based on mob enforcer Anthony Spilotro. Ginger is based on Geri McGee, a former dancer and socialite. That grounding is why the film’s smallest details — the skim, the licensing hearing, the slot manager’s brother-in-law — carry weight. They are not invented texture. They are the machinery of a real operation.
The Cast Around De Niro
The supporting cast is deep in a way that rewards attention. Don Rickles plays Billy Sherbert. Alan King plays Andy Stone. Frank Vincent plays Frank Marino. Dick Smothers plays a senator. Pasquale Cajano plays Remo Gaggi.
Rickles and King are the standouts, because both men are funny in a register the film never undercuts. They are not comic relief. They are the reasonable face of an unreasonable business, and Casino needs them to make the skim feel like accounting rather than murder.
Where Casino Falls Short
The film’s problems are structural, and they are worth naming. At 179 minutes, Casino repeats itself. The marriage collapses in stages that could be compressed. The Nicky subplot cycles through the same beat — violence, attention, more violence — more times than the point requires.
The voiceover is also heavier than it needs to be. Casino explains its own machinery constantly, and the explaining sometimes substitutes for the drama rather than supporting it. A viewer does not need to be told twice how a skim works.
And the film never quite solves Ginger. Stone’s performance is tremendous, but the script keeps her defined by the men around her — Ace, Lester, Nicky — even as it asks her to carry the emotional weight of the second half. She gets the best acting in the movie and the thinnest writing.
The Score
Casino earns a 7.3 of 10. It is a major Scorsese film with a major Scorsese problem: it is longer and more diffuse than it needs to be, and it mistakes explanation for momentum in its middle stretch.
But the parts that work are enormous. De Niro’s Ace is a control freak who loses control of everything he built, and De Niro plays the decline without a single false note. Pesci is terrifying in a role that could have been a retread. Stone is the reason to watch it again.
The tagline is “No one stays at the top forever.” Casino is a 179-minute argument for that line, and its best scenes — the licensing hearing, the Lester beating, the talk show — are as sharp as anything Scorsese made in the 1990s. It is not his best film. It is a film worth its runtime, and it knows exactly what it is about: a business that was never legitimate, run by men who could not stay quiet.
The Numbers
- Title: Casino
- Year: 1995
- Director: Martin Scorsese
- Writers: Martin Scorsese, Nicholas Pileggi
- Runtime: 179 minutes
- Genres: Crime, Drama
- Release date: November 22, 1995
- Distributor: Universal Pictures
- Score: 7.3 of 10
- Tagline: “No one stays at the top forever.”
| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| Ace Rothstein | Based on Frank Rosenthal |
| Nicky Santoro | Based on Anthony Spilotro |
| Ginger McKenna | Based on Geri McGee |
| Chicago Outfit skim | Delivered to Midwest bosses |
| Lester Diamond payoff | $25,000 from Ginger |
| Don Ward firing | 1976 |
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