It’s Time ‘Casino’ Took Its Rightful Place as a Scorsese Classic

Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” was released 30 years ago today (on Nov. 22, 1995), and I have no problem saying that I think it’s a Scorsese masterpiece. But I didn’t say that, or anything close to it, when I originally reviewed the film. And I was far from alone. When “Casino” first came out, it provoked a mixed response, on the part of both critics and audiences. And I think it’s easy to see why. Though packed with Scorsese’s virtuosity, the film seemed almost too conscious of its own bravura. For a lot of us, it was bedazzling in a slightly detached and even opaque way.

The movie marked Scorsese’s return to the glittering, fast-talk mode of Mob docudrama he’d pioneered five years before with “GoodFellas” (both films were based on nonfiction books by Nicholas Pileggi, with scripts by Pileggi and Scorsese). “GoodFellas,” for all its brutality, was a beloved movie, because people thought of it as a joyride to the dark side. “Casino” was colder, longer (three hours!), less relatable, more overstuffed with underworld information, and it had a hero, Robert De Niro’s implacable sports-gambler-turned-Vegas-casino-operator Sam “Ace” Rothstein, who wasn’t exactly easy to cozy up to. At the time, “Casino” struck a lot of people, including me, as both more than “GoodFellas” and less. It felt visibly top-heavy with Scorsese’s ambition to outdo what he’d done before.

And that’s how I’ve thought of it for most of three decades — at least, until I saw it again a few years ago, and what happened took me by surprise. The movie blew me away.

I was mesmerized from the opening moments: the hallucinatory lights-of-Vegas credits, the ironic surge of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” on the soundtrack as Ace, in his pink jacket, gets into the boxy ’70s car that blows up, and the hypnotic extended sequence in which Ace explains in voice-over how the casino operates, and Scorsese’s rushing camera…