“The dealers are watching the players,” he tells the audience. Scorsese is an inherently Catholic filmmaker, and as much as critics might argue that his films “ glamorize” violence, there is always a strong moral component to them.Īt one point, Ace explains how the system works in the casino. As the film builds to its climax, both Ace and Nicky discover that they are subject to the rules that they thought they could ignore. “But he was wrong.” It turns out that the authorities are watching Ace and Nicky.

“Nicky thought nobody was watching him,” Ace recounts. John Winthrop evoked this idea in his sermon in which he described America as “ a city upon a hill,” which Ronald Reagan repurposed in his invocation of a “ shining city on a hill.” Many of the early settlers believed that God had provided them with the continent as a mark of their exceptionalism. The American fantasy of manifest destiny is rooted in religious imagery and ideology. In broader religious terms, he followed Casino with Kundun, a film about the Dalai Lama.Ĭasino is not just a retelling of the classic western mythology. He is reportedly working on another movie about Jesus Christ. He would make Silence later in his career. The director spent most of the 1980s struggling to get The Last Temptation of Christ made.

Scorsese’s religious interest permeates his filmography. Scorsese is one of the great Catholic filmmakers. Ratner tries to raise the money for his debts but as his debtors interfere with his bets and the opal’s value turns out to be insufficient, he faces a one-way street to a very bad place.However, Casino ties this mythmaking into another of Scorsese’s recurring interests. He runs a jewelry store and believes that the gem can fetch him a princely sum he can use to pay off a deadly loan shark and his henchmen.īut he allows an NBA star to borrow the opal for good luck before a game and struggles to get it back. Bad luck follows a black opal that lands in the hands of gambling addict Howard Ratner.

Strange night at the casino movie