Like all of Martin Scorsese's best films, Casino (1995) is a parable. The stakes of the film are characteristically laid out through a combination of voiceover ("When you love someone, you've got to trust them, there's no other way") and montage, here structured around the combination of the concluding chorus of Bach's St. Matthew Passion (1727) and an explosion of shifting colors that succinctly encapsulates the allure of Las Vegas and of the medium Scorsese has used to represent it. 
     In both the opening credit sequence and the voiceover montage that follows, Scorsese makes it clear that his film is equally preoccupied with looking and with the willful submission to chance that defines the gambler. Both of the linked narrators uses parodies of sacred metaphor to describe Las Vegas ("paradise on Earth," a "morality carwash", "the Holy of Holies") and Ace Rothstein, the figure we first see and hear in the film, is repeatedly shown seated or standing with a seemingly total view of the venal proceedings below. Yet, as the opening line suggests, he understands love as involving the relinquishing of complete control.
     These two ideas are connected in the second extract below. As in the credit sequence, desire is communicated through the combination of movement and color (particularly the contrast between the gold and white Ginger is wearing and the green and red of the gaming tables).
    The St. Matthew Passion returns in the closing sequence, which makes the Sodom and Gomorrah implications of the story more explicit. Ace was introduced in the pre-credit sequence with a flamboyant suit that suggested his complete merger with the lurid but tantalizing environment of Las Vegas. The film ends not with his seemingly miraculous survival, but with a look back at the camera from a subdued survivor drained of color, like one of Dante's denizens of Purgatory.