You Love to See It: Casino (Patreon)

The soundtrack to Casino, Martin Scorsese’s 1995 gangster opus, is of a piece with much of the director’s other material about organized crime. It’s a collage of towering classical music, rock and roll, Rhythm and Blues standards, and everyone from Roxy Music to Otis Redding. The effect is kaleidoscopic, a moment in time crystallized through the sounds that swirled in and around it. All this changes the moment bookie and casino boss Sam “Ace” Rothstein drives to meet gangster Nicky Santoro deep in the Nevada desert. As Sam ponders whether or not he’ll make it out of their meeting alive, George Delerue’s ‘Theme de Camille’ from the 1963 Godard film Contempt swells as though out of the barren landscape itself, transforming the film for a fleeting instant from dense chatter and the short-sighted sins of venal people to something yearning and ethereal. 

The piece is everything the film’s characters aren’t. It soars, serene and melancholy, a lament for humanity’s imperfection, a grief-torn cry of love without expectation of release. As Sam’s car draws a trail of dust across the dead, empty expanse of the desert, the sky looming vast and empty above, it lends a quiet grandeur to these cockroaches we watch feed on filth and scuttle dumbly over one another. It marks a turning point in the film’s story as well. At that moment the relationship between Sam and Nicky is permanently ruptured. Their personal and criminal lives spin decisively out of control. Delerue’s music is, in a sense, the sudden entry of profound loss into their emotionally stunted lives. The two men lack the awareness to recognize that loss or to express it, but it becomes the leitmotif of their destruction.

By saving ‘Theme de Camille’ for Casino’s final third, just as he saves motion shots of the trackless desert, Scorsese manages a tremendous emotional shift with minimal effort. The film’s focus pulls back in a matter of seconds as the intricate clockwork of the mafia’s Las Vegas operation begins to come apart. We skip from scene to scene, plot to plot, character to character, as everything leads inevitably toward a flurry of vicious hits carried out against the film’s players by nameless geriatric thugs. The piece plays again as the film ends with Ace’s blinkered, embittered narration, as though the music is straining to express everything he’s never been able to feel or say, and all the things he never will.