When I rewatched some of the classic Scorsese movies a while ago, I noticed that there is a very obvious division of labor among the sexes: The men do the important work, and the women spend the money. Men make big, consequential decisions and women are either just there or they make dumb, small decisions that only indirectly but sometimes profoundly affect the main plot. In Goodfellas as well as Casino, you could even make the point that the criminal rackets the various men built only collapsed because of stupid decisions by women. These movies directly or indirectly put the blame on them. Nobody rose an eyebrow at the supposed “gender stereotypes” in Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995). Yet, there is a good chance that ten to fifteen years later, such plots would have faced significant opposition in Hollywood. Just look at Scorsese’s horrid Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) to see how much he bent over to placate Hollywood executives.

There are obviously some spoilers in this post. I assume that you are all familiar with Goodfellas and Casino. If not, then please watch these movies as they are among the best ever made. In Goodfellas, the pivotal moment is when a ditz whose task was to package cocaine speaks on a tapped phone line she was explicitly, and just moments before, asked not to use. She does not want to leave the house and go to a public pay phone, though. This gave the feds information they needed to bring down the whole crime syndicate. Of course, you could say that this was just a narrative element as the protagonist was so unreliable at this point that something else would have happened instead. Yet, it is the case that a highly unreliable woman is the catalyst for the downfall of a well-run criminal enterprise. Amusingly, later on, this ditz tried to defend her actions, showing not the slightest bit of remorse while refusing to take any responsibility. Such sexist stereotypes can no longer be put into movies anymore.

In Casino, we see a woman play a similarly negative role. The protagonist, played by Robert DeNiro, is married to a high-class hooker, played by Sharon Stone. He comes across as very reasonable whereas she betrays him endlessly, for instance by staying in touch with her pimp, fucking a close business associate of her husband, or stealing money. This woman completely fucked with the life of the protagonist, even asking the mobster she fucks whether he could do her a favor and murder her husband. She is nothing but a distraction and depicted in a highly negative way. On top, she even gets her just rewards at the end. It is only narrated instead of shown, though, that some low-lives take advantage of her, blowing her money, and eventually killing her with an overdose.

When you watch a more recent movie, it is exceedingly rare to come across women behaving erratically. Most often, they are pivotal for the plot as many Hollywood writers simply replaced the male lead with a female one. It is not at all common that the only competent characters in a movie are women. This may also explain why there is less of a need for male leads with masculine faces. Thus, I wonder if Scorsese could have pulled off Goodfellas and Casino in the 2000s. In a 2000s version of Goodfellas we would probably see a male doofus trying to sell cocaine to undercover policemen and in a 2010s Casino, the male protagonist would be depicted as deserving everything that was coming to him, and his wife would have been painted like an angel who had no choice but to cheat on her husband and steal his money.