Which he frankly doubts it will be able to do. Scorsese saw Vegas as a metaphor for Hollywood: an industry obsessed with a blockbuster mentality, making bigger and flashier pictures until cinema will eventually be forced to reinvent itself. To some extent it’s a grandiose way of thinking that applies to the movie business as well. It’s a story with universal appeal, no matter how pathological it is at heart. They want the world and everything in it. Well, to some extent that’s the gangster ethos. It’s the same tragic arc that he found in the story of Howard Hughes in The Aviator, and which Scorsese poses as the question of “what happens to you when you have no limits?” Sam, Nicky, and Ginger all want so much. For Marlowe the tragic hero is undone through his desire to do whatever he wants to do, to live a life without limits, and this has increasingly become Scorsese’s theme. His later movies are tragedies, meaning stories of spectacular rise and fall, but are less indebted to classical models or Shakespeare than they are to Marlowe. I think this is part of a larger evolution (I won’t say advance) in his career: from Mean Streets to The Wolf of Wall Street. Few directors can rip through three hours as quickly as Scorsese, but it’s still a lot. It’s a slick and glitzy movie about slick and glitzy lifestyles, but also a movie with a bloated running time. Scorsese himself refers to it as at least being a sequel to Goodfellas, taking us into a world of even greater excess: more money, more colour, more drugs, more music, and just more. Some people see this as the third part of a trilogy of gangster movies Scorsese made, the first two parts being Mean Streets and Goodfellas.

Casino 1995 running time