Maestro Marty, page 2
Take the goodies contained in "Goodfellas" (Atlantic CD). On a basic level, they give a sense of period, whether it's the Moonglows crooning "Sincerely" or Cream's rendition of "Sunshine of Your Love." Still, these aren't your run-of-the-mill signposts, which another director might allow to drift out of a transistor radio for five seconds. They're often mixed up front, alongside or on top of the dialogue, and just as often they extend through two or more scenes. Scorsese's affection for this stuff is transparent. So is his awareness that even the shlockiest pop music can pack an emotional punch; that's what keeps his playlist from sounding nostalgic.At the same time, he's too shrewd to overlook the complications. "As far as I could remember," Ray Liotta recalls at the very beginning of "Goodfellas," "I always wanted to be a gangster." At once Scorsese cues up Tony Bennett's "Rags to Riches," in all its thrilling, goofy glory, and we see a succession of wiseguys disembarking from their Cadillacs. Forget that "Rags to Riches" is actually a love song. What we now have is an anthem to upward mobility, which anticipates Liotta's own ascent. The fact that he owes his riches to murder, extortion, and grand theft only adds to the irony; so does the film's conclusion, which finds a penniless Liotta in the clutches of the witness protection program.
A similar mixture of affection and irony envelopes the "Casino" soundtrack (MCA CD), which is crammed with nearly two hours of music. Again, Scorsese has picked certain items to give a sense of the Las Vegas milieu. We get Dean Martin ("You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You"), Tony Bennett ("Who Can I Turn To"), and a double dose of Louis Prima. Some tunes, like Harry Nilsson's "Without You," identify the mid-1970s time frame. Others, it's clear, were selected primarily because Scorsese and his musical co-conspirator Robbie Robertson liked them. And indeed, who's going to quibble with Clarence "Frogman" Henry singing "Ain't Got No Home" while De Niro's hopeless marriage to Sharon Stone falls to pieces?
Here, too, the musical ironies are thick on the ground. When Stone conspires with Joe Pesci to steal her husband's nest egg, B.B. King sings "The Thrill Is Gone"; when she runs off with her sleazeball lover, Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" plays on the car radio. Both tunes are appropriate to the onscreen action, but the fit is just imperfect enough to make us laugh. Scorsese -- and the audience -- manage to have it both ways.
Not always, though. "Casino" itself is a flawed piece of work, too long by a third and padded with recycled bits from "Goodfellas" (including Joe Pesci's turn as a second-banana psychopath). This doesn't prevent it from standing head and shoulders above most of the current Hollywood crop. But it does mean that Scorsese's iron control of his effects gets blurred from time to time, and that applies to the music, too. After all, the last song we hear as the credits roll is "Stardust" -- not the emotive Billy Ward performance that appeared in "Goodfellas," but a bleaker solo version by Hoagy Carmichael. Surely Scorsese means this expression of lost love to evoke De Niro's romance with Stone. But since even Rupert Pupkin would have been able to recognize the relationship as a predestined mess, Carmichael's tune sounds less poignant than obtuse. It's not clear who the joke is on, and I'm not sure that Scorsese knows, either.
In any case, the music itself doesn't suffer a scratch. You can slap the soundtrack on your home stereo, and what you get is another variation on Martin Scorsese's desert island list -- what he'd listen to if he were shipwrecked with nothing but a polyester suit and a bank of slot machines. And that, in my book, is a worthwhile purchase.
