4. Features Wall-to-Wall Music
Casino is not only a violent, action packed and dialogue heavy movie, it is also a bombastic wall of sound.
Scorsese purposely wanted music to dominate his film due to its setting and the erratic nature of his lead characters; anything could happen to them, and most times it did. He had a big chart on his wall of which music he was going to use during its editing. It’s soundtrack is wildly eclectic featuring contrasting pieces along with music he’s used before in previous works. For some filmmakers, the amount of music in Casino can be seen as excessive, but this music exists in a world without limits; this music is part of their world. They could take it, snatch it, throw it away, and do what they want with it. The most interesting musical arrangement of Casino comes in the form of Le Mepris and Devo’s version of Satisfaction harmoniously integrating. That’s a unique and skilful way to fuse totally singular sounding pieces of music without them sounding jarring to the ear.