As for Pesci’s Nicky Santoro-Ace’s main enforcer and an erratic, impulsive cousin to the actor’s signature role as Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas, minus the psychopathic cackle-his completely avoidable error is interjecting himself into the middle of a fractured marriage. For Ace, the mistake was offering up such a doomed bargain in the first place.

For Ginger, an inveterate and expert gold digger who prizes independence, the fatal mistake was buying into a counterfeit notion of domestic bliss. Self-destruction is one of Scorsese’s great themes, and Casino offers up not one but three characters whose outsized ambitions get the better of them in different ways as casualties of Las Vegas’s addictive atmosphere. That said, one of the subtler points of Scorsese and Pileggi’s screenplay is that her husband is equally, if not more, to blame for their mutual misery. Stone is indeed superb in Casino as Ginger McKenna, the statuesque hustler who wins-and subsequently betrays-Ace’s love and trust to the point of obliterating his high-rolling lifestyle. Reviews were respectful, but the consensus was that Scorsese was retreading familiar territory, and the only Academy Award nomination the film received was for Sharon Stone for Best Actress. The film was unveiled with a flourish in November 1995, which was a choice awards-season release date that positioned it as a major Oscar contender. In a moment when violent, profane criminality was in vogue thanks to the breakthrough of Quentin Tarantino-one of several millennial auteurs indebted to Scorsese -Casino looked like a monster hit in waiting.

The film was packaged as a sort of spiritual sequel: another organized crime epic from a fact-based book by Nicholas Pileggi-this one based on the life and times of casino executive Frank Rosenthal-and prominently featuring two of Goodfellas’ goodfellas (De Niro and Joe Pesci, completing a collaborative trilogy begun in Raging Bull). More specifically, it was the healthy return on investment of Goodfellas-which penetrated the popular consciousness and grossed more than $46.8 million in the United States-that prompted Universal to sign off on Casino.

Casino or goodfellas