Martin Scorsese keeps making these insanely long epics. I understand that his latest The Irishman is three and a half hours long. I will have to watch it eventually but the length is just so daunting. This one is a more modest three hours and while we did watch it over two days, it proved to be a slick, fast-paced watch because it’s packed full of details about how the Las Vegas casino scene in the 1970s really worked.
Sam Rothstein recounts his rise and subsequent fall as the manager of a mob-run casino in Las Vegas. He made a name himself as a successful gambler in Chicago due to his obsessive attention to detail, helping mob bosses earn plenty of money that way. They then picked him to setup and run a casino behind the scenes though someone else acts as the front man. The casino makes lots of money and the bosses skim cash from it, though Sam is uninvolved in that part of the business. He becomes a respected figure in the city and marries a hustler and former prostitute Ginger McKenna. His downfall begins with his childhood friend and former bodyguard Nicky Santoro decides that Las Vegas is untapped territory and moves there. Sam warns him that the casino itself makes enough money but Nicky is unsatisfied and brings in his own people to engage in extortion rackets and robberies, This draws the attention of law enforcement. Sam himself seems to grow arrogant and offends the local authorities when he fires an employee related to the chairman of the county commission while his relationship with his wife becomes untenable as she keeps going back to her former pimp.
Personally I’m a little bored of crime dramas and mob boss characters. They’re so overrepresented in film and television and I dislike how mobsters tend to be glamorized and glorified in fiction even if things end badly for them. There’s plenty of that in this film and more gangster characters than you will probably care to remember. There’s violence, pure dumbness and betrayals, all the usual crime drama stuff. It’s all very well done but I just can’t get excited about that. What I can get excited is the sheer wealth of detail in here about how everything works. How Sam is able to ace sports bets by paying close attention to the personal lives of the athletes involved, how the casino is funded and how the bosses recoup their investments, how he spots cheaters and makes them pay, how he uses petty tricks to get whales who have won big to come back and gamble more so they can lose it again. It’s incredible how much information there is and it’s all endlessly fascinating. You get a powerful sense that this really was how things were run under the hood and makes this a very satisfying film to watch.
Even though this film reveals so much, some of the things that it leaves unsaid or unexamined can be frustrating. For example it is clear that for all that he keeps talking about trust, he never does trust his wife so it’s perplexing why he gives her sole custody of emergency cash. I believe that this is a piece of fiction that Scorsese added to raise the stakes but it doesn’t actually add much drama to what is already there. It also isn’t clear to me why the Chicago bosses allows Nicky so do as he likes for so long, putting the much more lucrative casino at risk for no good reason. Perhaps it’s because Nicky is a made man and one of them while Sam remains a Jewish outsider no matter how much money he makes for them. I do wish the film had been clearer if that were the case. It’s actually kind of amusing to how fundamentally incompetent the mob bosses are, failing to enforce proper discipline on their underlings and protect their investment.
The film ends with Sam lamenting that something has been lost when the casinos stopped being controlled by organized crime and became part of big corporations. But it should be obvious to everyone that the only ones who would lament the passing of that era would be the gangsters and this sanitisation of the industry is much better for ordinary tourists and gamblers. In any case, this truly is a fantastic crime drama film and is incredibly informative. Too bad I’m not really a fan of the genre.