The Martin Scorsese movie everyone hated at first sight: “They got mad at us”
Even the most acclaimed filmmakers have found themselves on the receiving end of harsh critical reception and audience dissatisfaction at times, and even the great Martin Scorsese has experienced this various times throughout his career, but that hasn’t stopped him from becoming one of Hollywood’s most respected figures, a cornerstone of the era’s dramatically changing cinematic landscape.
I mean, look at one of his earliest forays into filmmaking, Boxcar Bertha, which was called a “trashy movie” by Gene Siskel, then there was The Last Temptation of Christ, the most controversial thing he’s ever made.
The religious tale, which took a rather explicit look at Jesus’ final days, led to a terrorist attack on a Parisian cinema from a group who were not happy with Scorsese’s depiction of him, in what was one rather extreme way of expressing dislike of a film, but you really can’t please them all.
It’s safe to say that Scorsese has had his fair share of moments where the reception from audiences just hasn’t been what he expected, but that’s what you have to brace yourself for when you make art. At the end of the day, what people think shouldn’t matter when you’re an artist, where a good reception is just a bonus.
Of course, this is a little trickier when it comes to cinema, because Hollywood is a multi-billion dollar industry, and if you’re making a movie on a massive budget, you owe a lot of people a profit, thus, Scorsese must have been nervous, when previews of one of his films went terribly, leaving him worrying that he had a huge failure on his hands.
After the success of Goodfellas, he moved on to a psychological thriller, Cape Fear, and a period drama, The Age of Innocence, but by 1995, he was ready to go back to his beloved gangster genre, so, he reunited some of his Goodfellas stars for the crime flick, like Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Frank Vincent, cast Sharon Stone as his leading lady, and thus, Casino was born.
The movie turned out to be a big hit with critics and general audiences, but the director wasn’t sure this was going to be the case for a start as the preview screenings looked like the movie was quickly heading towards disaster. Appearing at an anniversary screening of the film at Tribeca Film Festival, Scorsese revealed, “The previews were terrible. They got mad at us. The first ten minutes was like an exodus from Egypt”.
He couldn’t believe that his film, which was essentially a spiritual successor to the hugely popular Goodfellas, wasn’t going down well, but the filmmaker soon guessed why. “[They were] walking down the aisle like prophets were beating them out of the theatre. Well, to be fair, they hadn’t expected… I think they were really upset by… the dark humour of it. The humour and the violence together…”
Audiences are hard to please, and in this instance, the tone of the film threw many people for a loop and left them uneasy. A lot of brutal scenes can be found in Scorsese’s epic, from people getting stabbed to a head getting squashed in a vice, so it’s no wonder that some viewers just found it too much to handle.
