CASINO

Welcome to the Grand Hotel of Las Vegas, where a dozen stories intertwine predictably in 4,000 guest rooms and the acre-sized casino itself under a titanic 26 floors. Heiress Lise Christian arrives from Paris where her mother has just died leaving her a fortune. Lise knows that her father is a big gambler who abandoned her mother years ago. But her father has been murdered, she learns--by morphine-addict Edward Roger Everett (read Howard Hughes), a half-crazed zillionaire who owns the Mecca and has not left its basement for years. Lise plans to kill him. Then there's Ahmed Ibn Sayd, who detests the Mecca's abominable travesty of Islamic symbolism and who is working a deal with Everett's second-in-command to take over the hotel. And there's John Morrissey who has just dumped his wife and jumped into his ancient Alpha Romeo--he arrives with only a few hundred dollars but falls hard for Lise and runs up a $90,000 win on the craps table. And there's Lucille Sheaffer, a third-grade schoolteacher, whose only recompense for a lusterless life is to come to Vegas and do kinky tricks as a whore--and finds herself bedding a member of the schoolboard. And so it goes, cynically and boringly, pasteboard scenes without a single original highlight anywhere.