While the casino has long been a popular setting for movie scenes, a great many of these scenes tend to involve either poker or roulette, rather than blackjack. Nonetheless there have been a handful of great blackjack scenes in movies over the years – including these three.
Ocean’s Eleven
This Steven Soderbergh directed remake of the old Rat Pack movie is full of gaming and casino scenes – unsurprisingly, given that it is about a scheme to rob the casinos in that city. It could be argued that the blackjack scene is not particularly memorable in terms of the gambling itself (although given the liberties most Hollywood movies take when they portray casino gambling, this might be a good thing), but Bernie Mack’s angry blackjack dealer gets the film’s most memorable comic line: “Sh-, you might as well call it ‘whitejack’”
Licence to Kill
Bond movies have almost defined the movie casino scene, but typically they tended to feature other casino games instead of blackjack. The character created by Ian Fleming typically exhibited a preference for baccarat, along with the occasional game of roulette, while the grittier re-imagining of the character in the modern era has opted for Texas Hold’em poker, but there was one Bond film where he played blackjack. In Licence to Kill, the Timothy Dalton Bond won a quarter of a million at the blackjack tables owned by drug kingpin Franz Sanchez in a great scene – just a shame the movie has been undeservedly forgotten.
Rain Man
Possibly the single most famous and iconic blackjack scene ever was the one in Rain Man, where Tom Cruise’s character takes his autistic older brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) to the tables in Vegas to exploit his card counting abilities. Arguably this scene is the one that everyone remembers from this film, and it brought autism to widespread attention in a way that it never really had been before. If blackjack is your game,and these movies have inspired you. There are a great selection of websites such as www.gamingclub.com/au/casino-games that offer various different types of blackjack and other card games such as 3 card brag. It might not be as glamourous as the aforementioned scenes, but its a start.
