LAS VEGAS — It's a quintessential gangster movie scene taking smoky shape here: A back room thick with Stone Age cigar waftings. A nearly ancient Italian American character actor passing down orders so ominously vague that Nixon would approve. The portent of bad things about to happen to bad people.
Fasten your seat belts, and whatever you do, don't let them stick you in the trunk. Courtesy of Martin Scorsese, you have just re-entered the whack zone.
FOR THE RECORD
Los Angeles Times Sunday February 12, 1995 Home Edition Calendar Page 83 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 29 words Type of Material: Correction
"Casino" actor--In last Sunday's cover story on "Casino," Tommy Smothers was incorrectly included in a list of comics doing dramatic turns in the film. His brother, Dick Smothers, plays the role of a senator.
"Frankie!" barks venerable actor Pasquale Cajano--eighty-something, and still as intimidating as the day he was, er, made--to a Mafia flunky, somehow managing not to choke on his own fumes as he makes points in the air with the business end of a stogie. "I wanna know the names of all the other people he had with him! And I don't care what you have to do to him to get 'em! . . . Va !"
That's Italian for go . And here comes Scorsese, satisfied with the framing of the wide-screen close-up he has been studying on the monitor in an adjacent room but not quite yet getting exactly what he needs from the subject. Five months and nearly a hundred shooting days into production, no tiny transitional scene or unheralded supporting player is too small for the director to not get it just so.
As Scorsese coaches Cajano, two crew members--both veterans of Scorsese's shoots--pass each other in the doorway to the tobacco den of a set and share some kidding about the work in progress.
"What, you're not gonna stay in and watch this?" banters the one headed in, mindful of Marty's multiple takes.
"Nah," says the other, headed for the craft services truck, waxing blase. "I've seen this wiseguy act before."
Might moviegoing America say the same?
To be sure, the Scorsese epic in progress, "Casino," offers much that is familiar, at least on paper: The screenplay, written by Nicholas Pileggi with Scorsese, is a fictionalized retelling of a true-life organized crime saga, based on Pileggi's own nonfiction book, a la their "GoodFellas." The drama centers on a quasi-crooked antihero determined to go straight (or at least straighter) but burdened with a hothead pal helping to keep him tethered to his shady past, a la "Mean Streets." And the male leads in this dance of doppelganger machismo are Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, a la--well, you get out the filmography and abacus.
For most of the Scorsese faithful, familiarity breeds contentment. These legion may or may not have fully appreciated the director's detour into mystery and manners with his uncharacteristically genteel last picture, "The Age of Innocence," but it's back in the land of expressive venality and explosive Sicilians that he is counted on to produce his most personal masterworks. The age of sheer, shameless guilt equals home turf.
But there will be those fed up with bad fellas, who will inevitably sniff: Another mob movie?
"Well, this isn't really mob," says scripter Pileggi, who knows mob. "This is dreams."
He's only being perhaps a tiny bit disingenuous. "Casino" is a gangster picture by any reasonable genre standard, but a Las Vegas gangster picture--and there represents a significant enough departure, perhaps, from Scorsese's oeuvre of neighborhood-lashed losers. Here, the stakes are raised and the up-from-the-streets leads will at least lose big, lusting after not just unlimited creature comforts but also civic respectability and (in the most celebrated left-field casting twist) national dream girl Sharon Stone.
This is the movie in which Johnny Boy gets his wings--Icarus wings.
Scorsese knows he might be accused of going back to the gangster well once too often. He takes care to point out the differences between the characters in this underworld project and his previous, less-upwardly-mobile antiheroes, but remains unapologetic about the thematic preoccupations clearly connecting his lowlifes and high-rollers.
"I have other projects lined up that do not deal with this milieu at all," Scorsese is quick to preface, catching some fresher air in his trailer while the crew clears the set and the smoke. He mentions a John Guare script about the life of George Gershwin he's long wanted to shoot as a hoped-for departure from meanness and streets.
"But this one feels familiar and is more comfortable, there's no doubt," he says. "The big themes I'm attracted to seem to play out more easily for me in characters and situations like this. 'Mean Streets,' 'Raging Bull,' 'GoodFellas' and this, they're all along the same lines.
" 'Mean Streets' took place in that world on a nickel-and-dime level. Small-time guys, not made guys, not people who moved that organization, except the uncle. 'GoodFellas' was a level above the 'Mean Streets' characters, (with) a soldier who worked all the levels of that organization. Here, De Niro's character comes from the same streets, but it's another tier entirely.
