Movie News

We move all in and hit the jackpot with this salute to our favorite Las Vegas movies

By Jim Emerson
Special to MSN Movies

"We came out here to find the American Dream, and now that we're right in the vortex you want to quit ... You must realize that we've found the main nerve."

"I know," he said. "That's what gives me the Fear."
-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (1971)

See also: Best New York Movies

The world has other gambling meccas -- Monte Carlo, Atlantic City, Reno -- but none as storied or mythologized as Las Vegas, an American dream-zone strategically located in the arid wasteland between Hoover Dam and Hollywood. The neon oasis is a concrete mirage: The closer you get, the more real the place becomes, but when you reach out to grab it, it slips through your fingers anyway. A surreal amalgamation of landmarks historical and imagined (Egypt, New York, Camelot), it rises out of shimmering heat and dust, a dazzling C.B. DeMille monument to profligate waste and the proposition that anything can be purchased or accomplished for a price.

Vegas is a Hollywood movie made corporeal, a surreal experience built on sand, powered by electricity, riches and promises of desires fulfilled. The electricity comes from the dam, the money comes from the odds that always favor the house, the desires come from the human heart (as well as a bit lower and to the right). But how sinful can sin be in a place called Sin City, where everything sinful in the outside world is overtly or tacitly permitted?

Like Disney World, it's hard to imagine anybody actually living there. For most, it represents a transitory state, impossible to sustain. Few care to wonder what happens to all that money, all that lust, any more than they wonder how much of that water from pools and fountains simply evaporates into the desert air. Win or lose, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. It's where dreams, realized or unrealized, evaporate as soon as you leave town.

It's also a place Hollywood loves to set stories, including the upcoming drama "21." Until that hits the table, here are several other Vegas movie favorites to keep you busy ...

"Bugsy" (1991): The original Vegas dream, or the movie version of it according to Barry Levinson's elegant gangster picture, belonged to Bugsy Siegel (Warren Beatty), the mob boss who thought of himself as a movie star. With his business partner Meyer Lansky (Ben Kingsley), he set out to recreate a desert Eden on a strip of highway that would later become the Strip. The Flamingo Hotel was Siegel's "Greed." His ambitions went ruinously overschedule and overbudget, plagued with costly obstacles and delays -- not unlike his turbulent relationship with Virginia Hill (Annette Bening), the bit actress he met on the set of a George Raft movie. "Look," he explains to his financial backers, "What do people always fantasize about: sex, romance, money, adventure ... I'm building a monument to all of them ... I'm talking about a place where gambling is allowed, where everything is allowed." All of it based on the miracle of cheap electricity and air conditioning. It was visionary.

"The Godfather, Part II" (1974): Arguably the most important speech in all of the "Godfather" pictures, and one of the most moving, comes from Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), a character based on Meyer Lansky, speaking about another character, based on Bugsy Siegel, killed under Michael Corleone's orders at the end of the first film: "There was this kid I grew up with; he was younger than me ... Later on he had an idea to build a city out of a desert stop-over for GIs on the way to the West Coast. That kid's name was Moe Greene, and the city he invented was Las Vegas. This was a great man, a man of vision and guts. And there isn't even a plaque, or a signpost or a statue of him in that town! ... Someone put a bullet through his eye ... I didn't ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!"

In "Part II," Las Vegas is as much a symbol of the New World as the Statue of Liberty was to young Vito Corleone. It's a domestic version of what Havana could have been were it not for Castro's revolution, an informal pleasure dome where the inept brother, Fredo, can be exiled without doing too much damage. But it also represents the future. Half legitimate, but fully rigged, Vegas is the interim step between old-style gangsterism and the Catholic redemption/corporate legitimacy Michael yearns for.

"Casino" (1995): It begins with a dazzling lesson in how a big-time casino operates. It ends with a series of implosions, as the classic casino-hotels of Las Vegas legend return to dust. Deposed casino king Sam "Ace" Rothstein (Robert De Niro) laments in voice-over: "The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over. Today it looks like Disneyland. And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior's college money on the poker slots ... Today, it's all gone." Dreams, corpses, the ruins of ancient civilizations, all entombed beneath the shifting sands. And this movie was made before many of the iconic bodies were buried: the Sands (1996), the Aladdin (1998), the Desert Inn (2001), the Stardust (2006), the New Frontier (2007) ...

"Ocean's Eleven" (1960) / "Ocean's Eleven" (1999): In "Casino," "Ace" Rothstein says: "Running a casino is like robbing a bank with no cops around." There are two ways to win in Las Vegas: break the bank, or rob it. Maybe the latter offers better odds -- at least according to the movies. The Rat Pack version of "Ocean's Eleven" was basically a CinemaScope home movie made by the Sands headliners (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford -- and by all means Angie Dickinson) in their off hours. It's a tongue-in-cheek heist movie, but nobody remembers the heist because it's really about the camaraderie and the cool these guys embodied in their acts, and in their public personae. Steven Soderbergh's version is actually a better movie, with style and comedic grace personified by George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle. Their scheme is to rob three of Terry Benedict's (Andy Garcia) megaresort casinos simultaneously: the Bellagio (on the site of the old Dunes), the Mirage (formerly the Castaways) and the MGM Grand (the ultimate name-brand fusion of movie studio and casino-hotel). Both films are swank and stylish excavations of Vegas archaeology.

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