Filming Las Vegas.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

MORE THAN A FEW cultural critics have suggested that Las Vegas may be the ultimate U.S. city, a citadel situated in the desolate center of the American frontier, constantly undergoing renovations to adapt itself to the vagaries of taste, always a repository not of our best hopes and aspirations, but of their glitziest, most distasteful simulations. When author Henry James foresaw the "rise of mediocrity" in America, he might have prophesied Las Vegas as its capital. The admonition attributed to showman P.T. Barnum that one never went broke overestimating the bad taste of the American public is canonized in Vegas' cartoonish sphinxes and pyramids.

Americans somehow have repressed the essential notion that Vegas is a city built on and exemplifying corruption and excess. Throughout the postwar years, when Las Vegas was created and flourished, Hollywood has taken its measure, assuming, until recently, that the city is the emblem of prosperity and abundance Vegas always has wanted to be.

Unsullied innocence

Lewis Milestone's "Ocean's Eleven" (1960) is the quintessential Vegas flick, particularly with Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack as its centerpiece at the dawn of the Kennedy era, feeling the wild oats of the then-new Playboy culture, trading knowing winks and insider jokes. The heist premise is incidental to the film's sense of the free-wheeling male brio, with loads of cash to toss around, that characterized the postwar boom. Vegas is shiny, classy for those who don't know class, but almost antiseptic. There is no blood money at its base, no crashed dreams around. The hoodlums on the sidelines, played by Akim Tamiroff and Cesar Romero, are cartoon versions of the real thing. At this point, Hollywood was able to incorporate Las Vegas into a yet-unsullied notion of American innocence.

Barry Levinson's "Bugsy" (1991) wasn't the first picture since "Ocean's Eleven" to question Vegas' relation to the American Dream, but it still seems a transitional film in the representation of the city. While the movie shows the madness and savagery of hoodlum Bugsy Siegel, the real founder of Las Vegas, it also offers a star vehicle for Warren Beatty, who wants us to see him as a forever-young glamour boy who can hobnob freely with virtually any social class--just like Siegel. Beatty offers Bugsy as a nut-case, but an inspired and charming one. After his murder by Meyer Lansky, the film offers a coda about Bugsy in the form of a panoramic view of modern Vegas. The...