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Thursday, October 3, 2013

Martin Scorsese: Casino (1995) Film


Source:Movie Clips- Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone, in Casino (1995)

Source:The Daily Post 

"If the Mafia didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

The same is true of Las Vegas. There is a universal need to believe in an outfit that exists outside the rules and can get things done.

There's a related need for a place where the rules are suspended, where there's no day or night, where everything has a price, where if you're lucky, you go home a millionaire. Of course, people who go to Vegas lose money, and people who deal with the mob, regret it. But hope is what we're talking about. Neither the mob nor Vegas could exist if most people weren't optimists." 

Source:Roger Ebert- Robert DeNiro as ace gambler and Las Vegas casino boss Sam Rothstein.

From Roger Ebert 

"CLIP DESCRIPTION:
Sam Rothstein (Robert De Niro) fights his old friend Nicky (Joe Pesci) and his wife Ginger (Sharon Stone) for control of his Las Vegas empire.

FILM DESCRIPTION:
The inner-workings of a corrupt Las Vegas casino are exposed in Martin Scorsese's story of crime and punishment. The film chronicles the lives and times of three characters: "Ace" Rothstein (Robert De Niro), a bookmaking wizard; Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), a Mafia underboss and longtime best friend to Ace; and Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone, in a role she was born to play), a leggy ex-prostitute with a fondness for jewelry and a penchant for playing the field. Ace plays by the rules (albeit Vegas rules, which, as he reminds the audience in voiceover, would make him a criminal in any other state), while Nicky and Ginger lie, cheat, and steal their respective ways to the top. The film's first hour and a half details their rise to power, while the second half follows their downfall as the FBI, corrupt government officials, and angry mob bosses pick apart their Camelot piece by piece." 
Source:Movie Clips- Robert DeNiro as ace gambler and Las Vegas casino boss Sam Rothstein.


Definitely the best Las Vegas Italian mafia movie all-time if not the best Italian mafia movie of all-time. It brought you into the world of the Italian mafia as well as the Jewish mafia that worked together to bring Las Vegas to organize crime in America, as well as the general public because Jewish gangster Bugsy Siegel saw Las Vegas as a goldmine back in the 1940s. Which is how the Las Vegas casinos got started and the Casino movie brought this story up to the mid and late 1970s and how the Italian mafia was involved in Las Vegas casinos. 
This movie is based on a true story about Las Vegas gambler Frank Rosenthal (played by Robert DeNiro) and others who worked in Las Vegas during this period and had to deal with the Italian mafia while they were in Las Vegas. It showed you how big time professional gamblers like Frank Rosenthal and others were brought in by organized crime officials both Italian and Jewish-American mobsters, to run Las Vegas casinos for them. 
The Sam Rothstein character (played by the great Robert De Niro) is based off of Frank Lucky Rosenthal, a real life Las Vegas professional gambler who is originally from Chicago. 
The Nicky Santoro character (played by the great and hysterical and one of the funniest people ever in Joe Pesci, who is also a great character actor) is based off of Tony Spilotro. A real life Las Vegas Italian mobster, who is also from Chicago originally and grew up with Frank Rosenthal. 
The movie Casino is based off of the book and screenplay Casino, that was written by Nicholas Pileggi. So the movie Martin Scorsese put together in 1995 was based of a lot of good and factual information that was in the movie. 
Casino is not a true story completely. The characters are different and some of the stories are different. But it is based off a true story similar to Nixon which came out the same year as Casino and The Doors in 1991, that were both directed by Oliver Stone. 
This movie does give you a great look inside of the world of the Las Vegas mob, both Italian and Jewish and what the lives were like for those people. And how people who certainly are not Saints, like the Sam Rothstein character played by Bob De Niro, which was based off of Frank Rosenthal, get caught up in illegal activity because of their associations.

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