Martin Scorsese
Casinò

When the demigod of Little Italy, as well as one of the greatest living directors, unleashes one of the most lethal combinations of actors the seventh art has ever conceived, mixing the blinding glare of a hellish city like Las Vegas with the cocaine-induced adrenaline of a truly heart-pounding story, the result can only be extraordinary, fucking astonishing.

Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, who already set the scenes ablaze back in the days of Raging Bull, amplify the uncontrollable success of the Jimmy Burke - Tommy De Vito duo from Goodfellas, slamming in our faces the masterful execution of a new, terrible symposium, no longer consisting of mentor and disciple, but of equal bosses, burning shards that sear while tormenting the same flesh.

The beginning of the film is epic. Calm and devastation merge into a long, symphonic, and uncontrollable blaze. Sam "Ace" Rothstein gets into the car, turns the ignition key, and a stormy cloud of fire engulfs the screen. The phrase he leaves to posterity is as sweet and heartbreaking as anything that can come out of a gangster's mouth.

Las Vegas is the place of tremendous wonder that builds before our astonished eyes, a Las Vegas different from the usual Hollywood fairy tale, not joyful and welcoming but confused and horrible, a splendid whore that fucks you to death, that violates you leaving you a corpse, as if it were the last night of this world.

And it is precisely a prostitute we will admire, the hottest and most terribly fascinating courtesan ever to appear on the big screen, a Sharon Stone worthy of a hundred thousand awards. Not only...

After creating the controversial religious fairy tale of The Last Temptation of Christ and the chilling dream of blood and revenge of Cape Fear, the Titanic and sooty entertainment industry, Universal, wants back the costly artistic favor, demands from the New York director a peremptory redemption comprising two more films, of unconditionally this time a raging commercial trend.

So the one of Casino for Scorsese was supposed to be a bureaucratic matter, a task to be handled between making a film and dealing with an idea, the elementary fulfillment of a clear and unequivocal contractual obligation. A chore. A fucking commission.

It resulted in a masterpiece.

Rough, elegant and brutal, refined, overwhelming and wild, complacent, fast and lashing, the film unrolls the chaotic and blood-soaked story of the Spilotro brothers, founding members of the "Hole in the Wall Gang," particularly the elder of the two, the fierce Anthony "The Ant" Spilotro, a malevolent and lush guardian angel of the expert gambler Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, and the criminal ascent they undertook in Sin City surrounded by the golden and dazzling sands of purgatory, the dissolute and terrifying citadel lit by the ominous artificial light of vice and depravity, and flayed by the delusion of omnipotence of money flowing like rivers and by arrogance, the acclaimed and dazzling Las Vegas, a stormy and underground stretch of world for damned souls and exiles of every kind.

It was the Seventies. The golden age of the American Cosa Nostra was beginning, pushing the accelerator to the maximum of its money-grinding, meat-grinding machine, like the Cadillacs driven by Sam Rothstein and Nicky Santoro in their frenzied race, especially Nicky's, which will end in a mix of gushing blood, dust, sand, debris, and shattered bones in the middle of nowhere in a cornfield.

"Always dollars, always those fucking dollars," Nicky Santoro will say just before receiving the supreme and animalistic sentence from Frank Marino's baseball bat (an excellent Frank Vincent, fresh from the Billy Batts carnage in Goodfellas and now ready to don the uniform of the absolute mafia boss of New York in The Sopranos), and it is money that decides the destinies of the protagonists, those damn dollars that poured into the Tangiers, the sublime casino and hotel run by Sam "Ace" Rothstein, and exited inside an anonymous dark leather briefcase that carried its wonderful journey into the pockets of the Midwest's crime-soaked Italian-American bosses, drenched in crime and oil-laden sauce.

The style is that of Goodfellas, as is the starting basis, the anorexic and evil chronicle by Nicolas Pileggi, "Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas," but here there is more color and intensity, more emotion and warmth, even if the destructive schizophrenia and the level of raw spectacle of the previous and unparalleled masterpiece by Scorsese can never be reached. By any work.

Inside and outside Martin.

Rightly, the clear uniqueness of Goodfellas lies in its genuine meanness, in the rapid and inexorable narration of a mafia represented in a way never so low and ignoble, never so reckless and petty. The crime workers who attempt the climb to the mafia hierarchy and end up destroying everything.

Everything is death, in Las Vegas. The best of the worst possible deaths.