Growing up in Little Italy in New York's Lower East Side, Scorsese was an asthmatic child who, unable to play the games his contemporaries played, sought refuge in the movie theater and the Church. Santoro, a mobster who wants some of the seemingly limitless money floating around Vegas, doesn't care whom he has to rough up, or kill, to get it. Rothstein's doomed relationships with Ginger and Nicky eventually lead to his expulsion from his desert paradise. What is best about Casino is its cinematic pyrotechnics. From jump cuts to fadeouts, from panning to zooming, Scorsese films are visually arresting.
Casino is no exception.
Its opening half-hour brilliantly depicts casinos as secular churches. While the camera focuses on the glitz and greed that consumed Vegas in its heyday, Bach's glorious St. Matthew's Passion thunders in accompaniment. Casino would have been a far more powerful film if it were forty or fifty minutes shorter. But the flaw, and it has marred almost all of Scorsese's films, is not merely the film's running time. In discussing beauty, St. Thomas Aquinas noted that two of its characteristics are integrity and proportion.