(There’s a reason why film-makers are routinely drawn to the glaring, garish lights of Las Vegas: in its spangliest strips, it feels more movie set than city, the kind of place it’s hard to imagine people living everyday lives 24/7. Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl – streaming on Mubi from 18 April – is quite rare in its focus on one such person: Shelly, a dancer in a long-running revue on the Vegas strip, now pushing 60 and at a crossroads when said revue announces its imminent closure. Short and light on plot, it’s a character study built on a poignant night-and-day contrast, as Shelly literally performs a glitzy Vegas dream that all looks a bit shabby by daylight in her modest bungalow in the desert suburbs. Pamela Anderson affectingly brings her own career baggage to the role of someone who takes her art more seriously than anyone takes her, in a film intent on stripping the city of some varnish.
It certainly gives Vegas showgirls a better name than, well, Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s tacky (and, despite the critical mauling it received in 1995, vastly entertaining) tale of a young dancer intent on working her way up a slippery pole – with all manner of exploitative svengalis and sharp-clawed rivals standing between her and her showgirl dream. If she saw Coppola’s film, she might not be so keen.
Not that any Las Vegas film winds up showing the city in a wholly glowing light. The Ocean’s 11 films – whether you prefer the 1960 Rat Pack original, or Steven Soderbergh’s trilogy of casino-world escapades – are about as close as you can get to good clean fun in a location literally built on underworld activity, which is to say their various cheery heists mostly amount to crime without consequences. (Soderbergh would get more seamily under the skin of Vegas in his wonderfully rueful, richly detailed Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra.) For long stretches of Diamonds Are Forever, meanwhile, Vegas just serves as a gaudier-than-usual backdrop to the usual James Bond derring-do: it suits his interests rather well.
You can’t think of Vegas without thinking of Elvis, of course, and his 1964 starring vehicle Viva Las Vegas is a romp so bright and bouncy it may as well have been made by the city’s tourism board – even the marketing pitched the place as “the fun capital of the world”. The film itself, co-starring a game Ann-Margret and mixing standard Vegas hedonism with grand prix action, is jaunty nonsense, which puts it at the upper end of the Presley filmography. Baz Luhrmann’s whirling, thrilling biopic Elvis (Netflix), however, rather sours the icon’s association with the city: behind its feverishly cut Vegas performance montages and eye-popping production design is a sprawling sadness.
Flying Elvis impersonators are the signature sight gag of Honeymoon in Vegas, an appealing fizzy, scatty 1992 romcom that might be the most upbeat of all romance-in-Vegas movies: Nicolas Cage and Sarah Jessica Parker’s love is tested by the manipulations of James Caan’s older Vegas high-roller, but all comes right in the end. (Weirdly, Adrian Lyne’s ludicrous Indecent Proposal played pretty much exactly the same plot for melodrama, in Vegas to boot, the very next year.)
Mostly, Hollywood has taught us that the city isn’t really conducive to everlasting love: see recent Oscar champ Anora, with its harshly updated Cinderella story that all starts to go south with a hasty Vegas chapel wedding, or Francis Ford Coppola’s underrated, iridescent musical One from the Heart, in which a Vegas-dwelling couple drift apart on the night of their fifth wedding anniversary. It’s a melancholy affair, but feelgood viewing compared to Mike Figgis’s shattering Leaving Las Vegas, in which Cage’s suicidal alcoholic screenwriter and Elisabeth Shue’s ill-treated sex worker forge a soul connection amid surrounding despair.
The little-remembered 1949 noir The Lady Gambles (Internet Archive) serves up a slice of married life dimmed by the city’s distractions: Barbara Stanwyck is compelling as a well-to-do housewife drawn swiftly into ruinous gambling addiction on a trip to Vegas. For better or worse, casinos remain the lifeblood of the city, as demonstrated in Martin Scorsese’s dizzily expansive crime opus Casino, which lays bare the often grisly business workings behind the scenes. But it’s Bugsy, Barry Levinson’s handsomely dressed biopic of 1940s mobster and driving Vegas strip founder Bugsy Siegel, that gives the city a somewhat glamorised origin story.
All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified
Also new on streaming
Paddington in Peru
(Netflix)
The third big-screen outing for Britain’s best-loved bear is the weakest: cheerful, amusing in spots (particularly wherever Olivia Colman’s shady nun character is involved), but missing the ironic, innovative touch that absent director Paul King brought to the first two. Kids were still delighted, however, and its arrival on Netflix this week is a half-term coup.
The Balconettes
(BFI Player)
French actor Noémie Merlant makes her directorial debut with this chaotic but enjoyable melange of ghost story, farce and feminist revenge tale, following three female roommates who wind up in bloody trouble over a scorching midsummer weekend in Marseille – the humid atmosphere is half the pleasure here.
September 5
Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum delivers a tight, in-the-moment dramatisation of how one American newsroom responded to the Munich massacre as it unfolded during the 1972 Olympics: strenuously apolitical as it narrows its focus strictly to immediate, clock-ticking stakes, it’s certainly absorbing but adds little perspective to previous accounts of the event.
