Excess in the clothes, excess in the sets, excess music, excess voiceover.

Sort of like a casino.Īs Scorsese says, it was all about excess. Yet the film mostly manages to distract you, with all the colors and lights and the ever-present music. Watching the film now, the opening is so breezy and rhythmic that you almost don’t notice that a full 30 minutes are devoted to straight-up exposition. Pileggi was writing new narration and actors were recording and re-recording new voiceovers long after principal photography had wrapped. The early scenes, of De Niro and Pesci explaining the skim, originally existed without narration, until test screenings convinced Scorsese that it needed voiceover to help explain it. Scorsese and Pileggi were still trying to figure out Casino‘s structure right up until release. With Casino, it was still like a pile of notes,” says producer Barbara De Fina. Where Goodfellas was adapted from a published book, Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, with its narrative structure left largely intact, Pileggi worked on the book and movie versions of Casino simultaneously. There are some logistical reasons for that. It’s not as tight as Goodfellas, it’s less fun, and it’s not quite as funny or quotable. I’m not here to argue that Casino is better than Goodfellas. It’s not. But was also fascinated by the top world of the mob, and that of course was Casino.”

Goodfellas, it was like the kids from Mean Streets growing up, the middle class. Casino was a sequel in everything but name. “It’s like a trilogy,” Pileggi says on the film’s DVD commentary. Released five years earlier, Goodfellas also starred Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, and also had Scorsese and journalist Nicholas Pileggi adapting a Pileggi book about the mob. (She lost to Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking, a classic Oscar robbery.) Then, as now, it seemed destined to be overshadowed by its older brother, Goodfellas. At the time, it was a (very) modest success, opening fifth at the box office, but going on to gross $116 million worldwide and earning a Golden Globe win and a Best Actress nomination for Sharon Stone. To this day, one of those movies that I’ll leave on whenever I come across it on cable. It was 20 years ago last week that Universal released Casino, Martin Scorsese’s eighth film collaboration with Robert De Niro and his second with writer Nicholas Pileggi.

Casino reviews movie