The Riviera had opened in 1955 as the first of the high-rise complexes that went on to dominate the Strip – before that, Strip resorts were still pretty much traditional roadside motor courts. The crew was given access to the hotel's penthouse, restaurants, kitchen, casino, ballroom, La Cage Showroom and also the holy-of-holies – the Counting Room.

It wasn’t possible to close down the Riviera, so the production had to cope with filming through the night for six weeks, while the ceaseless activity of the Vegas punters was at its quietest. Vegas has a breathtakingly fast turnover and the Stardust (the place at which I stayed on my first visit to the city in 1987) closed for good in 2006, and was imploded in 2007.įor the most part, the Riviera Casino, which stood at 2901 Las Vegas Boulevard South, stands in for the 'Tangiers'. To avoid legal complications it was fictionalised as the ‘Tangiers’ – though frequent bursts of Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust on the soundtrack provide a cheeky clue. The centre of the real story was the Stardust Hotel & Casino (which was still thriving in 1995 when the film was made). Based on Nicholas Pileggi’s non-fiction account of the fall of the old-school mob control of Las Vegas casinos in the 1970s and the takeover by faceless corporations, Martin Scorsese’s epic suffered a little by coming hard on the heels of the peerless Goodfellas with a similar style and some of the same cast members.

Casino film cast