10 Great Movies With ONE Terrible Element

Martin Scorsese's Casino is one epic meal of a movie - a three-hour masterclass in writing, direction, and acting from its ensemble cast, albeit one that requires getting over an outrageously awful moment in its opening 60 seconds.

The first shot of the movie shows protagonist Sam "Ace" Rothstein (Robert De Niro) walking to his car and getting in it just as a car bomb detonates, seemingly killing him.

Scorsese attempts to seamlessly cut between a shot of De Niro getting into the car and a locked-off shot of De Niro replaced with a dummy as the car blows up, except the dummy is hilariously obvious.

It doesn't help that the cut itself is surprisingly noticeable - an odd slip-up for legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker - but the blatantly plastic dummy sat in the driver's seat renders the whole sequence an unintentional howler.

It's an infamous enough gaffe that many fans have called for Scorsese to fix the scene with modern visual effects, as replacing the dummy with De Niro could be done with relative ease today. Hell, even a fan edit of the scene looks way better.

Part of the problem, as with so many other movies, is that nobody foresaw the visual fidelity of Blu-ray coming, and Scorsese likely assumed nobody would ever be able to freeze-frame the offending moment at a high enough resolution for it to be that noticeable.

All the same, in a film with so many note-perfect choices, this feels like pure amateur hour from a world-class filmmaker.