The Las Vegas Story: A Few Thoughts

The 1952 Howard Hughes-produced, Robert Stevenson-directed RKO production The Las Vegas Story was apparently not much regarded at the time of the release, and subsequently slipped into obscurity rather than gaining esteem with time. This is not wholly without reason, the film a far cry from what such noir is like at the crafted, gritty, taut, biting best an Orson Welles, for example, could deliver.

Still, The Last Vegas Story (whose behind-the-camera goings-on really do assure it a place in cinematic history by way of its place in the ugly history of the Hollywood blacklist) does have its points of interest as a movie. Among them is the titular setting--Las Vegas in its early days, for which the film would seem an ad years before Ocean's Eleven came along (1960) (Hughes, who would be so famously identified with the city in later years, having already taken an interest in the place years before).

Likely reflecting another Hughes interest, aviation, there is an ahead-of-its-time and still quite effective set piece involving the then-novelty of a helicopter in a chase through the desert at the story's climax. Seemingly reflective of the slowness of critics to catch on to the use of such set pieces as anything other than slapstick, Bosley Crowther called it "Keystone"--while the more general audience proved more responsive to the kinds of thrills they offered. (Or French audiences were, at least. In his own review of the film soon-to-be-legendary filmmaker Francois Truffaut remarked that "[e]veryone in Paris" was "talking about" the chase scene, to his apparent annoyance.)

And of course there is the film's cast, above all longtime Hughes star Jane Russell, as memorable a presence as ever in a film in which one is reminded of the many reasons why old-fashioned cinematic stardom no longer exists. Not the least of these is that movies have to have room for a movie and its star to breathe for that to happen, something films that were even less than perfectly crafted back then, but which is a lot less likely to be found in our high concept era with its relentless, frenzied, cutting among close shots that are so often its only kind. ( As Andrew Sarris put it "There was always a technical floor under movies . . . a kind of restraint," which vanished in that "blind worship of 'energy" that has "[a]lmost any old movie look[ing] classical today.")

Notable too in a very, very different way there is a bit part for Hoagy Carmichael, playing piano in a hotel lobby.

I suspect no one then imagined that Carmichael's would be the face accorded the character who was to become the most famous of fictional secret agents when Ian Fleming started cranking out a novel also set in a town notable principally for its casino scarcely a year after the film's release. ("He reminds me of Hoagy Carmichael" the Vesper Lynd of the novel said in a line that, of course, was like a great deal else not part of the 2006 film version of Casino Royale.) Did this movie play any part in that? Perhaps not. Still, Vegas did feature prominently in Fleming's fourth James Bond novel, Diamonds Are Forever (just the beginning of a long tendency to associate Bond and Bond-type spies generally with that town and its casinos), while the same book not incidentally featured a set piece involving a helicopter as its big action finale . . .