Name: Casino
Director: Martin Scorsese
Released: 1995

Casino is the second film Martin Scorsese made from a Nicholas Pileggi book about people Pileggi had interviewed at length, and it is far more accurate than its reputation for excess suggests. The verdict here is dramatised rather than faithful for three specific reasons, and they are worth separating from the general impression that a loud film must be an unreliable one.

Frank Rosenthal becomes Sam "Ace" Rothstein, Anthony Spilotro becomes Nicky Santoro, and Geri McGee becomes Ginger. The names changed for legal reasons and the events largely did not.

What it gets right

The mechanism. The film explains the skim — the count room, the scales, the men with keys, the suitcases going east — more clearly than most written accounts, and the arrangement it describes is the one the Kansas City indictment described in 1983.

The licensing fight, the television show, the sports book, the barring from every casino in Nevada, the car bomb that Rosenthal survived because of a steel plate under the seat: all of that happened, in that order.

Where it departs

Three things

The cornfield. The film shows the Spilotro brothers beaten to death in the field where they were buried. The 2007 Family Secrets trial established, on the testimony of a member who had turned, that they were killed in a basement in Bensenville, Illinois, and driven out afterwards. The film could not have known this in 1995.

The compression. Four casinos, a decade of prosecutions across four cities and fifteen convicted defendants are folded into a single narrative of two men and a marriage.

The ending. The film closes on the implosion of old Las Vegas as though the corporations arrived because the mob left. The sequence runs the other way: the federal cases and the licensing regime removed the hidden interests, and the corporations bought what was left.

The verdict

Dramatised, and unusually honest for the category. The film changes names, compresses a federal prosecution into a personal collapse, and shows one killing in a place it did not happen — while getting the money, the machinery and the reason any of it ended almost exactly right.