Las Vegas Story - 1952

“Las Vegas Story” (1952) is like the seductively slow Mona Lisa smile of its star, Jane Russell: both sly and simple, secretive and open. It’s a noir that loses a lot of its noir shadows in the bleached, unblinking sunshine of the desert. Like the city for which it’s named, this movie does its own thing in its own way.

This week we adventure in Las Vegas -- with Jane Russell and Victor Mature today, and on Thursday we’ll have Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse in “Meet Me in Las Vegas” (1956). I hope it proves to be a lucky start to a lucky year.  By the way, we once featured publicity for this movie at this previous post.

“Las Vegas Story” is a crime drama. Jane Russell is the wife of Vincent Price, a suave, well-heeled businessman from the east out here on a pleasure trip to try his luck. The couple are followed by a very handsome pest played by Brad Dexter, who though obviously attracted to Miss Russell, is even more attracted to the gaudy diamond necklace she wears.

The necklace will figure prominently in a murder.

There are a few subplots to the story that keep us entertained while we’re waiting for the crime to happen. So entertained that, in fact, the crime story seems almost like an afterthought. First, there is the back story about Jane Russell, who during the War was a singer in one of the casinos here. She’s here not to gamble, but to come to grips with her past.

“I have a feeling I interrupted a conversation between you and the desert,” Vincent Price tells her in what I think might be my favorite line from the movie. Perhaps it’s just his charming, sensitive delivery. He has broken away from the gaming tables briefly to notice she has wandered off by herself, alone outside on the terrace. They appear to have a comfortable, affectionate relationship, but something is nagging each of them that has nothing to do with the other.

Vincent Price, too focused on gambling to pay much attention to her anyway, indulgently allows her to sort out a few old ghosts, and suggests she go off on her own to explore the Strip.

“Go ahead. Get it out of your system,” he tells her.

She heads for her old hangout, a casino called The Last Chance. There’s Hoagy Carmichael at the piano, playing “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” I love when Hoagy’s at the piano when we walk in the door.

This is an exquisite scene. Jane Russell stands some distance away from where Hoagy is seated at his piano. He doesn't know she's there.  At once we see she is remembering days gone by. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a flashback done with such sensitivity and such style. In a close-up on her face, we see her eyes wander around the room and then lock on a small table with an empty chair. From the chair, we go back to a close-up of her face, and her eyes gently move to something beyond the piano. We hear the echo of a woman’s voice singing. In another moment the camera shows us…

…she is watching herself. A younger, happier woman, with longer 1940s style hair. The room is full of GIs, and a large flag hangs on a back wall. Victor Mature is seated at the empty chair, dressed in an Army uniform, adoring her.

We go back to Jane’s expression as she remembers.  Her face registers the wonder of recognition, the co-mingling pleasure and pain of memory.  Usually in a flashback scene, we are dropped into the past, and when the scene is over, we get wrenched back to the present.  Here, the camera keeps shifting from the scene to her face watching it. We never completely enter the flashback; we always have one foot in the present, just as she is firmly rooted in the present but cannot let go of the past. She is stuck between two worlds emotionally, and in this scene, literally. This marvelous tactic makes the memory seem like real-time.

What Jane Russell does just with her eyes, and with the slightest flicker of sublte expression is so impressive. This scene is a skillful union between a starlet who rose to fame on her voluptuous figure but who clearly really could act, and a director, Robert Stevenson, who with admirable delicacy, pays more attention to her face than her chest.

The movie was produced by Howard Hughes, second to none for his famous appreciation and promotion of her décolleté.  While we have the obligatory costuming and camera angles that showcase Miss Russell’s physical attributes (including a gratuitous shower scene, and the demonstration that she wears nothing but heavy makeup to bed), there is still more even more here about her broken heart.

Victor Mature, and his perpetual grimace, is the tough police detective whose beat is the Strip. We gather Jane was supposed to wait for him until he came back from the War, but didn’t. They are equally delighted and distressed to see each other again, and Mature becomes particularly bitter. He also reflects on his former self:

“That guy was a chump. He believed that if he left his hat or his girl at a table they’d be there when he got back.”

A couple of subplots on Mr. Mature’s side include the teenaged would-be bride and groom he has to hold in detention until the parents show up to stop the quickie wedding. There is also the playful antagonism with his boss, the sheriff played as his comic foil by Jay C. Flippen.

The Last Chance, where Jane used to sing during the War also keeps a couple of side stories on the back burner for us: Hoagy and his pal, played by Will Wright. Mr. Wright, the hangdog proprietor/house detective of other movies here plays a floorwalker who used own The Last Chance, but lost it in a bad business move. The stern new owner, played by Robert J. Wilke, comes down hard on his staff. Hoagy hates him, and Wright chokes on his humiliation.

Which is something we have to consider when this same new owner ends up dead.

Vincent Price has the most dramatic reason to kill him. Mr. Price is an embezzler, wanted back east, and takes his wife’s necklace to buy himself credit at the gaming tables. When he loses big at The Last Chance, Mr. Wilke takes no pity on him.

But what of Brad Dexter, perpetually tailing Miss Russell in and out of cocktail lounges and swimming pools? He turns out to be an insurance investigator, and maybe Jane and Vincent have something cooking between them to scam The City of Second Chances?

Lots of suspects, and an unresolved love story in the middle of them.

The movie is capped by a nifty chase scene between an old woody station wagon and a helicopter.

The car is not unlike the old woody rumbling through the Nevada desert in “Split Second” (1953) seen in this post, and another reminder of that film is the abandoned military installation where the final confrontation between helicopter and car occurs. I don’t know if any atomic testing went on here, too, but it’s deadly eerie.

Victor Mature is in the helicopter, which buzzes the car and follows it right through an empty hangar.  The murderer has taken a hostage, and tries to escape in a cat and mouse game with the dogged Mr. Mature, in an abandoned wooden control tower. There is no dialogue in this exciting scene, just the sound of footsteps, gunfire, and the howling wind from the desert. A tumbleweed rudely bounces off the head of a slain figure in the dust.

The crime story may have not a lot of depth to it, but at times this is a visually stunning film. Along with the desert, and miles of footage of Jane Russell, we get the obligatory shots of the neon casino signs embroidering the night sky: The Golden Nugget, The Pioneer Club, a montage of all the old casinos and hotels. The Thunderbird, the Flamingo. The sign at the Union Pacific station where Jane Russell and Vincent Price arrive in town, not to be outdone, tells us Las Vegas is the “streamlined city of the west.”

The movie ends on an upbeat note with another of Hoagy’s songs. Not very noir, but Vegas makes its own rules.

Come back for more Vegas and more songs on Thursday in “Meet Me in Las Vegas” with Dan Dailey as a most unlucky gambler, until he grasps the delicate hand of dancer Cyd Charisse.