The one movie that greatly inspired Martin Scorsese’s ‘Casino’
Most filmmakers would be grateful if they could muster up just one masterpiece over the course of their respective careers. However, for someone like Martin Scorsese, creating culturally significant gems stopped being new territory a long time ago. The creative visionary behind seminal movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, Scorsese is among the most renowned pioneers of the New Hollywood movement who redefined the landscape of American cinema.
Last year, the Goodfellas director proved that he still had the ability to mesmerise audiences with his latest feature, Killers of the Flower Moon. Starring the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, the historical epic delved deep into the bloody history of the oppression experienced by Native American communities in the US, focusing on the horrific Osage massacres that took place in Oklahoma during the early 20th century.
While Scorsese has retained his stylistic flairs and other cinematic identities that distinguish him, the American auteur is slowly adapting to other modern elements inherent to contemporary film communities, like social media. Last year, to the delight of cinephiles around the world, he created a Letterboxd profile, which he uses to curate lists of his favourite movies. In record time, it became the most followed account on the site.
In one such list titled Companion Films, the Taxi Driver filmmaker constructed a comprehensive breakdown of all his features and linked them to cinematic influences that informed his artistic vision during their productions. While talking about his 1995 crime epic Casino, Scorsese interestingly linked his work to one of the most celebrated westerns in history, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.
Scorsese began: “First of all, it’s a matter of style. I wanted GoodFellas and Casino to blast out of the screen and come right at you, just like in Peckinpah’s picture. We’re in the outlaw universe: swaggering, lawless, steal and steal more, kill or be killed. The guys in The Wild Bunch have a code of honour: at the end, they have to go back to get their friend Angel, and they know it’ll be a bloodbath.”
The director added: “The guys in Casino? Like one of the mob bosses says, ‘Why take a chance?’ In a sense, they have their own code of honour and their own system, and it originates far back into the Sicilian past. But unlike the outlaws in Peckinpah’s picture, the mob bosses aren’t glorified by their sense of honour—it’s something that’s just between them.”
The Wild Bunch is a particularly fascinating example because it deviated from the standard frameworks of the genre, depicting expicitly violent sequences that generated a lot of controversy when it was first released. Made at a time when American cinema was redefining its own identity, Peckinpah’s unforgettable revisionist western paved the way for other such future projects.
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