In the Italian-American sections of New York’s Lower East Side, where America’s best active filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, there were two avenues to power and respect. You could be a gangster or a priest. The mob guy who committed the sins or the father who heard about them behind the confessional screen.
Ultimately Scorsese chose a third route: making movies. And in the three decades that the 53-year-old writer-director has been churning out his brilliant, feverishly emotional classics–films like “Taxi Driver” (1976), “Raging Bull” (1980) and the masterful Mafia trilogy of “Mean Streets” (1973), “GoodFellas” (1990) and “Casino”–he has won himself a unique place. More than Woody Allen, Robert Altman or Francis Coppola–more even than Steven Spielberg, who calls himself “a bit in awe” of Scorsese–he’s the American studio filmmaker who’s given the most license to be an artist, to stretch boundaries and project a personal vision.
Yet the movies weren’t Scorsese’s first choice. As a child, small and asthmatic, often bedridden, his earliest ambitions were religious. An altar boy at old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Little Italy’s Mulberry Street–just down the way from classic old wiseguy haunts such as Umberto’s Clam House, where gangster Crazy Joey Gallo was whacked–young Marty could see right from the church steps to hell’s gateway. And, as critics have noted, that gangster-priest dichotomy–the pulls between sin and redemption, sacred and profane–has infused his work ever since.
In “Casino,” he’s still watching the mob from the church doorway. In the movie’s opening scene, Robert De Niro as Tangiers Casino manager Sam “Ace” Rothstein strides toward his Cadillac, switches on a car bomb and goes flying through writhing flames, with a chorus from Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” (conducted by Georg Solti) as majestic backdrop. And what follows is the kind of daringly rich, bloody and operatic tale of real-life corruption and catastrophe that only Scorsese and Coppola (in the “Godfather” trilogy) can do this well.
“My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else,” Scorsese has said.
But watching “Casino”–with its corrosive portrayal of the high noon and fall of the mob-run Las Vegas of the ’70s and ’80s–one might not immediately see its spiritual or moral underpinnings.
“Casino” is based on co-writer Nicholas Pileggi’s reportage of real-life events–a ferocious triangle among a casino manager (De Niro as Rothstein), his ex-hooker wife (Sharon Stone as Ginger McKenna) and his psychopathic childhood buddy and local crime boss (Joe Pesci as Nicky Santoro). All the characters are based on real-life figures, and Scorsese and Pileggi portray them with such truth and pungency, you can sense some critics (and audiences) cringing.
They should cringe. If films and Catholicism supply Scorsese’s reference points, crime and urban violence have always given him some of his greatest characters and most potent subjects. Whether he’s eyeing the boisterous antics of the low-level crooks in “Mean Streets,” following De Niro as alienated cabbie Travis Bickle through New York’s dirty byways in “Taxi Driver,” watching Pesci’s Tommy and De Niro’s Jimmy break heads and heist trucks in “GoodFellas,” or exposing chicanery on the Cosa Nostra’s highest levels in “Casino,” Scorsese connects with these psychopaths on the deepest levels. He exposes the shriveled soul beneath the swaggering surface.
“Casino” is a benchmark work for its director, a capstone for his careerlong collaboration with De Niro–and one of the few major Hollywood movies this year that takes real chances, that portrays the reality of America as well as its myths.
Does all that account for its curiously mixed critical reception so far? The hedges on “Casino”–which generally turn on queasiness about its bloodshed and its frank portrayal of the explosive Rothstein marriage–probably reflect a post-“Pulp Fiction” sensitivity to the old sex-and-violence debates.
But, in a curious way, the intensity of the response also reflects Scorsese’s stature. Though “Casino” has gotten far more praise than censure (or even mixed praise), it hasn’t received the near-universal paeans that greeted “GoodFellas”–a movie that won almost every major 1990 U.S. critics’ group prize before losing the best-picture Oscar to “Dances With Wolves.”
“Casino” is the eighth movie Scorsese has made with De Niro, the third with Pesci and the second with Pileggi. And, if you look at Scorsese’s three Mafia movies as a trilogy, the growth seems obvious. “Mean Streets” is about a low rung on the Cosa Nostra ladder: rowdy Little Italy cigarette thieves, punks and loan sharks who idolize the local don. These guys–especially Harvey Keitel’s Charlie and De Niro’s Johnny Boy–are more likable than the later wiseguys precisely because they’re youngsters. Half-baked. In “GoodFellas” we see one potential “made man”–Pesci’s crazy Tommy De Vito–and two non-Italian outsiders, Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill and De Niro’s Jimmy Conway.
But “Casino” deals with the higher levels–and just as the guys in “Mean Streets” might have aspired to reach the level of the “GoodFellas,” Jimmy, Tommy and Henry probably dream of making it to the casino, with Ace and Nicky. “Casino” is about a quintessential American dream: the twisted one dreamed by the lower-level hoods of the earlier films, the perverted paradise they all aspire to. And when we get there–and find nothing but empty glamor, bloodshed and temper tantrums–it’s like a slap in the face, the ultimate rude awakening. Why have some critics complained that Ace, Ginger and Nicky are unlikable? In fact, if we liked them any more, “Casino” would be a moral, as well as an artistic, failure.
But there’s another dimension to the way we respond to “Casino’s” characters. In Hollywood “star system” movies, which “Casino” definitely is, we never see the onscreen people as totally real anyway. They’re a synthesis of player and role. And we can like the actor who plays an odious part–Richard Widmark as giggling killer Tommy Udo in “Kiss of Death” (the role Crazy Joey Gallo copied in real life), Robert Mitchum as the murderous preacher of “Night of the Hunter,” Linda Fiorentino as the ice-cold schemer of “The Last Seduction”–not because we like or admire the character, but because of the relish and finesse with which the actor plays the part, exposes the evil. Movie villains, who operate with much less constraint than good guys, are often more fascinating to watch–which doesn’t mean they’re role models.
So it is with “Casino.” Yet there’s an interest in these characters that goes beyond our delight in the acting. We can accept their expertise, believe Ace, Ginger and Nicky are the top handicapper, chip hustler and killer in Vegas. And, as they’ve all ascended the criminal ladder, they’ve become colder, more enclosed. Success stiffens them. A world away from the hell-raising young turks of “Mean Streets” or the murderous soldiers of “GoodFellas,” Ace and Nicky have lost their souls, their dreams. We can see a process like this at work in “GoodFellas,” as the wiseguys grow greedier, as cocaine and bloodlust twist their minds and turn them against each other.
In “Casino,” we’re close to the top–and the top stinks. When we see the mob string-pullers, they’re almost a bunch of clowns. And Scorsese has cast as many standup comedians and entertainers here (Alan King, Don Rickles, Dick Smothers, Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows, Frankie Avalon, John Bloom a k a Joe Bob Briggs, Jerry Vale and Kevin Pollak) as he did in “The King of Comedy.” It’s a show-biz world, but it’s also a joke. And it’s an irrational network of passion–of Ace and Nicky for Ginger, and of Ginger for her ex-pimp Lester (James Woods)–that sends the mob house of cards crashing down, converting the city from a gangster’s haven to a cold, corporate amusement park.
It’s probably significant that Scorsese made his chilly and ornate film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 19th Century novel of Manhattan high society love and manners, “The Age of Innocence,” in the years between “GoodFellas and “Casino” because there’s a chillier distance here too: a sense of viewing this entire world as a complex and demonic machine, a killer toy.
Perhaps no filmmaker alive loves the movies with the pure, sensual intensity and devotion Martin Scorsese lavishes on them. But, because he maintains that curious double vision–as a moralist and artist examining the chaos of his times–his movies arouse and disturb us in ways other movies can’t. And they should. We should be shocked by their violence, offended by the brutalism, stung by their naked and unvarnished view of human cruelty and weakness. But we should always sense the frame around them. Scorsese shows us the blood on the streets from the streets themselves–but also from the Olympian detachment of the cathedral steps.
TEAMWORK
Films directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro:
1. “Mean Streets” (1973)
2. “Taxi Driver” (1976)
3. “New York, New York” (1978)
4. “Raging Bull” (1980)
5. “The King of Comedy” (1983)
6. “GoodFellas” (1990)
7. “Cape Fear” (1991)
8. “Casino” (1995)
WISEGUYS ON FILM
The great gangster movies of the past, in chronological order:
“Underworld” (Josef von Sternberg, 1927). Starring George Bancroft.
“Little Caesar” (Mervyn LeRoy, 1930). Edward G. Robinson.
“Public Enemy” (William Wellman, 1931). James Cagney, Jean Harlow.
“Scarface” (Howard Hawks, 1932). Paul Muni, George Raft.
“The Roaring ’20s” (Raoul Walsh, 1939). James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart.
“Kiss of Death” (Henry Hathaway, 1947). Victor Mature, Richard Widmark.
“Force of Evil” (Abraham Polonsky, 1948). John Garfield.
“Some Like It Hot” (Billy Wilder, 1959). Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, George Raft.
“The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond” (Budd Boetticher, 1960). Ray Danton, Warren Oates.
The “Godfather” trilogy (Francis Coppola, 1972, ’74, ’90). Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro.
“Once Upon a Time in America” (Sergio Leone, 1984). Robert De Niro, James Woods.
“GoodFellas” (Martin Scorsese, 1990). Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci.
