Casino (1995)

USA / France, 178 minutes

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writers: Nicholas Pileggi, Martin Scorsese

Photography: Robert Richardson

Music: Martin Scorsese’s record collection

Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker

Cast: Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, James Woods, Don Rickles, Alan King, Kevin Pollak, L.Q. Jones, Dick Smothers, Frankie Avalon, Frank Vincent, Don Ward, Melissa Prophet, Vinny Vella

I believe the general knock on Casino, the one I seem to hear a lot, is that it’s too much like Goodfellas—long movie, sprawling story, voiceovers propelling the action, big lively cast, Joe Pesci a terrifying ankle-biting purveyor of extreme violence. I guess that’s fair enough but I’m still a fan—maybe just a reflection of how much I like Goodfellas. For me, Casino is like getting seconds at the banquet, detailing another big story. Both are from books by cowriter Nicholas Pileggi. This time it’s the attempt of organized crime (aka the Mafia, etc.) to take over Nevada’s gambling industry in Las Vegas in the 1970s and 1980s—the attempt, and the failure. The big narrative arc of Casino was written up by Pileggi, director Martin Scorsese’s screenwriting collaborator here and on Goodfellas, and published the same year the movie came out as Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas. That’s the big picture context of everything going on here, but I suspect the plot points involving the characters are more on the fictional side.

The cast is undeniable, delivering on the high tragedy of a doomed love story, which feels like it comes from someplace ancient. Robert De Niro is Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a seemingly mild-mannered genius of a bookie. For much of the first two-thirds of the picture De Niro plays against type. We’ll get back to that. Joe Pesci is Nicky Santoro, childhood friend of Sam and a made mobster who sees Vegas as a vast opportunity for wealth by whatever means necessary. Sharon Stone is Ginger McKenna, a call girl who is beautiful (well, she’s Sharon Stone) but primarily into money. And James Woods is Lester Diamond, her one-time pimp. Sam falls hard for Ginger and marries her. Ginger just can’t quit Lester, but Sam says love will come in time. What could possibly go wrong?

The King of Comedy (1982)

USA, 109 minutes

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writer: Paul D. Zimmerman

Photography: Fred Schuler

Music: Robbie Robertson, Ray Charles

Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker

Cast: Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott, Sandra Bernhard, Ed Herlihy, Shelley Hack, Tony Randall, Martin Scorsese, Margo Winkler, Dr. Joyce Brothers

Director Martin Scorsese is famous for making great movies, but his best arguably fall into various types. This may be the last, for example, after Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, of his pictures featuring Robert De Niro as an unbalanced madman representing Social Decay. Another type is seen (at its best) in Goodfellas and Casino. The King of Comedy adroitly takes on celebrity culture and media criticism and does not feel 42 years old. One of the most surprising parts is that it was made decades before smartphones and social media, which now feel strangely missing from the action here. Another surprising and impressive part was snagging Jerry Lewis, who practically sold the movie on name recognition (to the limited extent it sold). He plays Jerry Langford, a late-night TV host modeled on Johnny Carson. And he is good, extremely low-key and self-contained. There’s no mugging or pratfalls, no loony voices. But you keep halfway expecting them, which creates an interesting tension.

Langford, like Johnny Carson, like any celebrity, has a lot of problems with fans and wannabes who won’t leave him alone. De Niro plays a wannabe named Rupert Pupkin. It’s an interesting role for De Niro because his signature rage is more subsumed under a slimy façade of someone who thinks he knows his way around show business. He wears natty suits with bold patterns and color schemes. He is soft-spoken and almost gentle. But the rage is there and so is the lunacy, once we get down to the basement of his mother’s place in New Jersey, where Pupkin lives. Everyone, including his mother (the bawling off-screen voice of Scorsese’s mother Catherine), plainly thinks he is a grating, pathetic loser. He wants to be famous and show everybody. The idea he comes up with to break through is to kidnap Langford and force him to let him do his standup in a prime spot on the show. In order to accomplish this Pupkin must enlist the aid of Sandra Bernhard as Masha, who proceeds to steal the whole show.

Mean Streets (1973)

USA, 112 minutes

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writers: Martin Scorsese, Mardik Martin

Photography: Kent L. Wakeford

Music: Martin Scorsese's vinyl collection

Editor: Sidney Levin

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, Amy Robinson, Richard Romanus, David Proval, Cesare Danova, David Carradine, Robert Carradine

Mean Streets is a landmark film in many ways, big and small—a powerful early picture by director and cowriter Martin Scorsese, a tale of New York street life and low-level gangsters, a sneaky coiling script, and a certain model of early jukebox movie, rolling out yet another way to do it, with The Graduate, Easy Rider, and American Graffiti advancing their own theories on the matter. And it may have been harder for me to see earlier through the welter of noise and violence, but Mean Streets is also the work of a self-conscious student of film, with self-conscious inflections as it barrels along toward the work of Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Francois Truffaut.

Mean Streets opens on a black screen and Harvey Keitel murmuring about sin and salvation (two years later Patti Smith would turn it upside down with "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" on her cover of "Gloria"). Then the drum hits and kicks from the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" go off and the song blares in all majesty for the titles, playing loud. Turn it up anyway—it's still one of the most inspired and thrilling mashups of song and images ever stitched together, and it's followed not long after with a red-light barroom scene to the tune of the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man" that's not far behind. There are other pop music high points like these (and some opera too)—for me, notably, "Rubber Biscuit"—but within 10 minutes Mean Streets already felt vastly different from anything I'd seen before.

The Irishman (2019)

Important facts to keep in mind when approaching director Martin Scorsese's lengthy end-of-career midcentury gangster epic and usual jukebox bacchanalia: Scorsese is 77. Robert De Niro, the star, titular Irishman, and practically in every scene, is 76. Al Pacino, who plays Jimmy Hoffa, is 79. Joe Pesci is 76. Harvey Keitel, whose appearances are so brief they practically qualify as cameos, is 80. Ray Romano and Bobby Cannavale are the spring chickens around here, 62 and 49, respectively, and they're not even in the picture that much. De Niro and Pacino dominate, with strong support from Pesci. Cannavale looks like a tween in this context. It's little surprise that The Irishman rocks along like a summertime porch scene and garrulous old men swapping stories they've all told and heard a million times. The stories are not bad, in fact, and they are often told well, though by now they are familiar. The Irishman is practically a nostalgia project by design and who can begrudge these various giants? Scorsese seems to be reaching here for the energy and sizzle of Goodfellas and Casino more than the strange poetry of Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, or Raging Bull (let alone any of those wandering in the desert but always interesting experiments such as The Age of Innocence, Kundun, or Bringing Out the Dead). It's sad when the panache is decidedly thirdhand—the rapid-fire cuts and swoops, the voiceovers, the brash flourishes like freeze-frames or random career biographies displayed as titles ("Angelo Bruno—shot in the head sitting in his car outside his house, 1980"), and all that midcentury music ("In the Still of the Nite," "Delicado," etc.). We've seen it before, and better. At the same time Scorsese remains a natural at these loose, freewheeling narratives so there's a certain amount of comfort to the movie that is unmistakable. It's like climbing into a barcalounger with a cigar and a glass of wine. You probably won't doze off. The rewards are here, notably for students of 20th-century gangster movies, even if you have to set aside the requisite amount of time—The Irishman is seven minutes longer than The Godfather: Part II. Speaking of The Godfather: Part II, the point for me where The Irishman slips over from interesting and into mere nostalgia is in the decision to cast the young Frank Sheeran with the same old Robert De Niro. He's supposed to be absolutely no older than 35 in some of these scenes but he never looks younger than 54 on a good day. De Niro, if you recall, was cast to play the younger Vito Corleone in Godfather II, partly because of contract hang-ups with Marlon Brando, but mainly because Brando, who was about 50 at the time, was plainly too old to play the part. No, in case you're wondering, the CGI in The Irishman doesn't come close to cutting it. If Orson Welles demonstrated in Citizen Kane that a young man can play on old one (actually a dubious proposition), then De Niro demonstrates here that an old man cannot play a young one. In theory, I don't have that much of a problem with handing the whole schlimoozle over to De Niro—he and Scorsese go way back, and they both deserve the retirement party. But it certainly takes down the ambitions of this movie a number of notches.

A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995)

USA / UK, 225 minutes, documentary
Directors/writers: Martin Scorsese, Michael Henry Wilson
Photography: Jean-Yves Escoffier, Frances Reid, Nancy Schreiber
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Editors: Kenneth Levis, David Lindblom
With: Martin Scorsese

I'm not always sure what others mean by "essay-film," but I know my own sense of it favors both an individual point of view, and movie clips—projects like Los Angeles Plays Itself and this long love letter from Martin Scorsese, his salute to the movies of America in the middle of the last century. As such, it is necessarily deep-dipped in the medium itself. Scorsese's Personal Journey was made in collaboration with the British Film Institute and originally aired on UK television in 1995 (making its way to the US some three years later). Scorsese is the host, with lots of voiceover explication. Organized by digressive rumination, it comes armed with—and this is the important part—copious film clips. You are usually looking at scenes from movies, occasionally broken up by archival interview clips with great film figures such as Clint Eastwood, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Gregory Peck, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, and Billy Wilder. It is the medium on the medium.

I was flabbergasted to find out how much I did not know when I first saw Personal Journey several years ago, how much was simply unfamiliar. Yet even in those cases I was hardly prepared for all the daunting insight that Scorsese brings. The Band Wagon, Cabiria, Footlight Parade, 42nd Street, The Furies, Leave Her to Heaven, The Left-Handed Gun, Murder by Contract, My Dream Is Yours, The Naked Spur, The Regeneration, The Roaring Twenties, The Robe, The Tall T—some of them were vaguely familiar as titles. I furiously wrote down every one and immediately ported them to my Netflix queue. Those that are available anyway—a good many are not. I suspect I'm not the only one trying such an exercise, because many fall into Netflix's "very long wait" category.

Goodfellas (1990)

USA, 146 minutes
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writers: Nicholas Pileggi, Martin Scorsese
Photography: Michael Ballhaus
Editors: James Y. Kwei, Thelma Schoonmaker
Cast: Robert DeNiro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, Frank Sivero, Tony Darrow, Mike Starr, Frank Vincent, Chuck Low, Henny Youngman, Jerry Vale, Michael Imperioli, Illeana Douglas, Vincent Gallo, Catherine Scorsese, Debi Mazar, Samuel L. Jackson, Welker White

Goodfellas is the first movie since Mean Streets on which director Martin Scorsese took a writing credit. Somehow that helps me make sense of where I think it fits among his films—on the short list of his best. As brash and kinetic and sustained as anything he has done, it is personal, defiantly anti-formal (all rules delimiting voiceover narration and freeze-frames cavalierly tossed, for example), and a critical twist on the operatics of gangster pictures as we had understood them until then. If, like Pulp Fiction, it now has much to answer for in terms of setting in motion clichés and other noxious pop culture memes still calcifying (looking at you, retro lounge), this original suffers none of their deficiencies.

In fact, that is one of its great surprises again and again. I am always impressed by the pure crackling energy of Goodfellas. Somebody in the special features on the DVD remarks that no one flipping through TV channels and landing on Goodfellas has ever changed the channel again until the movie is finished. It's true that it is insanely engaging, with a powerful narrative current. Part of the trick is the shift in focus, which moves away from the wood-paneled and predictably corrupting counsels of power of the Godfather franchise (or even De Palma's Scarface) and instead concerns itself solely with the foot soldiers of the criminal enterprise, out hustling to earn. It's the same sickness of the soul, but now it's Chekhovian rather than Shakespearean.

Taxi Driver (1976)

#8: Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

It seems like I've been talking about Bernard Herrmann a fair amount recently—he wrote the scores for a good many of Hitchcock's best pictures, including Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. He wrote the scores for Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and for a dozen or so episodes each of "Twilight Zone" and the "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour." He even contributed to The Magnificent Ambersons and Citizen Kane. Taxi Driver is the last picture he worked on, shortly before his death toward the end of 1975, and that score is a doozy. The clip of the titles at the first link below suggests how important his work is here to setting the mood and creating the unmistakable feeling of stepping into a dark, mysterious place where not all of the usual rules are going to apply.

You will also, of course, quickly notice that some appreciation must apply to photographer Michael Chapman as well, whose brilliant and eerie first image of the cab from bumper level gliding through the fog is equally affecting, perfectly in synch with the music. And then the fuzzy, lurching, streaming, super-saturated look of the city streets at night that Chapman goes to as needed takes it up another notch. So that gets us approximately two minutes into a film that never once loses its way for nearly two hours.

Taxi Driver (1976)

USA, 113 minutes
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: Paul Schrader
Photographer: Michael Chapman
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editors: Tom Rolf, Melvin Shapiro
Cast: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Albert Brooks, Leonard Harris, Peter Boyle, Martin Scorsese

A good way to start an argument is to ask people what's the best picture by director Martin Scorsese. We have already seen that Raging Bull is the consensus favorite of critics, and there are cases to be made for Mean Streets, The King of Comedy, GoodFellas, and others. But it's not hard for me to see how Taxi Driver deserves to rank very high on this list. As strange and brave and unique and enthralling as it is from beginning to end, it's also one of the most influential movies from an influential period, and its reverberations continue to be felt to this day (most recent: Ryan Gosling's brilliant turn in Drive).

In fact, that image of Travis Bickle we all know so well now, the tormented loner waiting for “a real rain” to “come and wash all this scum off the streets” and who ultimately guns up and takes matters into his own hands, has recurred one way or another in film after film after film over the 35 years since its release. Matt Zoller Seitz listed some of them in a recent slideshow article for Salon: Mona Lisa, Evil Dead II, The Killer, The Fan, I Shot Andy Warhol, Fight Club, The Brave One, others. You can probably think of a few more yourself.

Raging Bull (1980)

USA, 129 minutes
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writers: Jake LaMotta, Joseph Carter, Pete Savage, Paul Schrader, Mardik Martin
Photography: Michael Chapman
Music: Pietro Mascagni
Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker
Cast: Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci, Frank Vincent, Nicholas Colasanto, Johnny Barnes

With careful study I have come to some appreciation for Raging Bull, which critical consensus hails as Scorsese's best ever and also as the greatest film of the 1980s. But it hasn't been easy. I'm not typically opposed to film fare that revels in the grotesqueries of its characters and/or stories—I like both Glengarry Glen Ross and There Will Be Blood, for example, to name two off the top of my head that don't offer a lot of carefree qualities. Nor do I have anything against the fashionableness of Scorsese's critical adulation. In fact, I am aligned with the consensus on his next-highest ranked, my favorite by him, Taxi Driver (which we will be getting to in good time).

But I have to say that something about Raging Bull just puts me off. The brutality of the boxing, the ever pointless aggressiveness that animates everything in the life of Jake LaMotta (played by Robert De Niro with an intensity that virtually atomizes the entire school of method acting and its 30 years of history to that point), the seeming one-note preoccupation of the entire thing with the concerns of a wild, stalking animal in possession of barely an iota of impulse control. It's a kind of case for despair, implicitly asserting the foolishness itself of even attempting humanity or compassion, and all too convincing at that.

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005)

UK/USA/Japan, 208 minutes, documentary
Director: Martin Scorsese
Photography: Mustapha Barat, Maryse Alberti, Oliver Bokelberg, Anghel Decca, Ken Druckerman, Ellen Kuras, James J. Miller, James Reed, Lisa Rinzler, Michael Spiller

There is practically no end of mysteries when it comes to Bob Dylan, not least the matter of his appeal. Personally, I don't think any other figure, after James Brown, looms so imposingly significant in 20th century popular music, and yet I remain hard-put to articulate the reasons. But after 1997's Time Out of Mind, it simply became an article of faith, one easily renewed by constant and regular visits to the catalog, from the earliest classics of the '60s to his recent radio show on XM. Martin Scorsese's leisurely and wide-ranging documentary, a kind of generous prodigy even just for its ability to probe and get its hands on so much of Dylan's confusing early career, particularly the breakout, finds the way to raise the curtain on many of the mysteries, in the process making some of them more mysterious than ever. Focused on Dylan's origins in Hibbing, Minnesota, as Robert Zimmerman, and tracing the vicissitudes of his catapult to fame and unparalleled reign until a motorcycle accident put him out of commission in mid-1966, the documentary incorporates extensive interviews with many of the principles, most notably the man himself, who clearly retains much of his hostility to being interviewed, but here sucks it up and does his best. One result is that that element of Dylan's personality and life anyway is revealed once and for all as genuinely sincere. It's arguable that much of Dylan's early success stemmed from little more than the vivid imagination of someone trying to escape a dead-end small town life, manifested as often as not in a tendency to tell a lot of stretchers, in combination with something psychologists might label "poorly developed individuation"—he didn't, arguably perhaps even doesn't still, know who he is himself, at least not in relation to the rest of us. He is a man of action, albeit a peculiar kind of action. Once he managed to land a record contract with Columbia shortly after hitchhiking into New York City at the age of 19, that's when the miracles really started to occur. The first album was a dud, so he decided instead to write his own stuff rather than stick with the working plan to that point of unearthing and absorbing every last oddity of American folk music. Result: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, one of the great albums of the era, which has lost little of its charm or power in the 50 years or so intervening. And make no mistake, the material sounds better than ever playing in and around the interviews here, and captured in live performances of the time. That's pretty much the way it goes. The rise to fame and adulation is vindicated right down the line, certainly for many fans, as each impossible peak is followed by another. By the time Al Kooper is relating the story of how he came to play organ on "Like a Rolling Stone," followed immediately by the snare hit that kicks the song off and then a good two-minute blast of it, just the way it sounded on the radio back in 1965, or better, it's goose bumps time right down the line. Meanwhile, the whole drama is fascinating to follow, the absurdly spiteful vilification he endured from his folk/protest fans when he started playing with a band, the endless harassment he attempted to cope with from the press, the famous with whom he consorted—Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Joan Baez—and always, always writing songs and songs and songs. One of the most telling things about Dylan that occurs to me every time I look at this is that he has written so many of his songs, and so many of his best songs, on a typewriter. It was just pouring out of him. Joan Baez tells a great story here about stealing a song from him after she sat in a room with him while he worked it out, "Love Is a Four-Letter Word." Later, when Dylan hears her version of it on the radio in her company, he says (and here Baez goes into her terrific Dylan impression), "That's a really great song." She's gob-smacked. He's forgotten that he wrote it. "You wrote it, you dope," she says that she told him. Will this movie convert anyone who doesn't already appreciate Dylan for what he is? Maybe—just maybe. For fans, however, there's no question. It's absolutely essential.