The movie’s Vegas has flashy casinos bordering open landscape, in a city where many of the roads are still dirt. Set during the annual Helldorado Days, the movie stars Rogers as a Nevada Ranger on the trail of some money-launderers, with Rogers’ frequent co-star Dale Evans as a sassy socialite who fancies herself an amateur detective. But it’s also a fascinating document of a Las Vegas that was still part of the Old West. Like most movies starring singing cowboy Roy Rogers, Helldorado is shamelessly cheesy, with a plot designed primarily to showcase Rogers crooning and riding, joined as always by his trusty horse Trigger (who gets second billing). With the Las Vegas Film Festival coming up (April 28-May 5), here are iconic Vegas that, whether great, good, or bad, help paint a vibrant picture of our city on the big screen. In picking the 20 essential Las Vegas movies, I looked at films primarily set in and/or about Las Vegas, not just movies with one memorable Vegas sequence (which leaves out Swingers or the recent Gloria Bell). Las Vegas has been appearing in movies since at least the early 1940s, and the town’s onscreen image has evolved as the city itself has transformed and expanded.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |