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Top 3 Movie Blackjack Scenes
Friday 17th January 2014 | Osh
Although casinos are a popular setting for movie scenes, it would be fair to say that blackjack is not the casino game that features in most of them. Poker and roulette tend to dominate these scenes, perhaps because they are the best known casino table games amongst non-fans of this type of gaming, and even prove more popular amongst Gaming Club casino games users. Nonetheless there have been a few really memorable movie casino scenes featuring blackjack – and these are three of the very best.
Rain Man
This 1988 drama, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman is probably the single most famous of all. The scene where Cruise’s character takes his autistic brother Raymond (Hoffman) to the blackjack tables of Las Vegas, in order to exploit the latter’s mathematics gift by getting him to count the cards, is the scene that most people remember from the film. It defined a (not always accurate) idea of autism in the minds of the public, but certainly worked as good cinema.
Licence to Kill
Casino scenes are a staple of the Bond movies, but traditionally Bond has favoured the games of baccarat and roulette. This was the case in the early films, while the most recent incarnation of the character has opted for Texas Hold’em poker (more gritty, apparently), but back in the now oft-overlooked Timothy Dalton era, Licence to Kill saw Bond dabble in blackjack, to take £250,000 in winnings from the casino owned by bad guy Franz Sanchez.
Ocean’s Eleven
The key scene with blackjack dealer Bernie Mac doesn’t even take place at the tables, in this remake of the Rat Pack classic, directed by Steven Soderbergh. Instead it happens behind the scenes, as Matt Damon’s character reveals Mac’s criminal past, leading Mac to accuse him of racism and deliver perhaps the best line in the whole film: “S-, you might as well call it ‘whitejack’”.
