麻豆社

Ocean's 11 (1960)

The popularity of Las Vegas exploded in the 1950s and 60s, largely because of its association with the Rat Pack, led by Frank Sinatra. There were some Vegas films before Ocean’s 11 – like the dreary Las Vegas Story and flat musical Meet Me in Las Vegas – but Lewis Milestone’s 1960 heist movie was where it all took off.

Starring Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Dean Martin and the rest of the pack, Ocean’s 11 isn’t great, but it’s where Vegas found its screen swagger. “It’s really not a good movie,” says Shawn Levy, author of Rat Pack Confidential. “Considering the vibe of those guys and the menace they embodied – palling around with gangsters, presidential candidates, Marilyn Monroe – it’s actually pretty tepid.” But it did put Vegas on the movie map.

Viva Las Vegas

Elvis is up there with Sinatra when it comes to Vegas icons. Like Sinatra, he made a movie about the city, and like Sinatra’s, it’s not the best. “It also a terrible movie,” says Shawn Levy of 1964’s Viva Las Vegas. “There’s a ridiculous plot where Elvis is trying to find a girl he’s met, played by Ann Margaret. He knows she’s a dancer, so he goes to every hotel on the strip to catch the floor show.”

It might not be Elvis’ finest, but it has its charms. “Elvis’ performance of Viva Las Vegas, and the two of them dancing together – they were lovers at the time – the sexual energy between them just crackles,” says Levy.

Leaving Las Vegas

Film critic Christina Newland calls Mike Figgis’ 1995 Leaving Las Vegas “one of the most miserable films I’ve ever seen”. It’s here we see maybe the darkest example of the grim side of Las Vegas.

Nicolas Cage plays a man who, having lost everything, decides to move to Vegas and drink himself to death. Elisabeth Shue is a prostitute who joins him on his horrible journey. Figgis says he had a complex relationship with Cage, who originally wanted to spend the entire shoot drunk, for realism, but was persuaded not to by his director. After Cage won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance, Figgis says: “I never saw Nic again. I couldn’t see him for dust.”

Showgirls

Also out in 1995, Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, about a woman trying to make it in the cutthroat world of Vegas’ exotic dancers, was slated on release. It’s had something of a re-evaluation.

“I like that it’s so unabashed by the grotesque,” says Christina Newland. “There’s so much nudity in the film, so much hideousness, that you feel like you need to shield your eyes and look away. I think Verhoeven’s intentional in that. I don’t think there’s any mistaking, when you look at Verhoeven’s larger project as a filmmaker, that he’s trying to shine a light on how exploitative American showbusiness is, and possibly how Vegas as a city is.”

Casino

“Goodfellas is seen as the A-side and Casino is the B-side,” says Newland when evaluating Martin Scorsese’s 90s gangster movies. Casino – also 1995, a big year for Vegas movies – brings together much of the same team from Goodfellas, including Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, in a tale of the rise and fall of a casino owner.

Scorsese's Casino is interested in the line between attraction and repulsion, which is key to understanding Vegas.

Film critic Christina Newland

Newland says it’s better when considered on its own merits. “It’s very interested in the line between attraction and repulsion, which I think is key to understanding Vegas as a city.”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

There aren’t many films that really embrace the totally lunatic side of Las Vegas, where time barely exists and sleep is discouraged. And there’s no Vegas movie more gonzo than Terry Gilliam’s hallucinogenic 1998 film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

It is based on Hunter S Thompson’s book – which Mark Kermode describes as “a scathing depiction of Las Vegas” – in which Thompson describes a trip that starts with journalistic intentions and becomes a drug-fuelled nightmare.

“It does a pretty good job of giving you this funhouse mirror [of Las Vegas],” says Newland. “Hunter S Thompson [called] Las Vegas the worst place on earth to do psychedelics, because everything is already so distorted and surreal.”

Ocean's 11 (2001)

Most remakes are unnecessary, but Stephen Soderbergh’s 2001 take on the original Las Vegas hit vastly outdoes its predecessor. “One of the many ways in which Soderbergh improves on the 1960 original is that all the characters are individuated,” says Ellen E Jones. “They have different personalities.”

It’s a film that unashamedly leans into the glitzy side of Vegas that the Rat Pack embodied, but and revels in having a ridiculously starry cast, including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Matt Damon. It’s all the dazzle of the city with almost none of the darkness.

Anora

The most recent film to take on Vegas, Sean Baker’s 2024 drama touches on both the light and the dark of the city. It follows an exotic dancer in New York, who meets the son of a Russian billionaire, who hires her to be his companion for the week. When they go on a trip to Las Vegas, he proposes, and then life spins further out of control.

It’s a peek at the modern Vegas, which, as Christina Newland puts it, “has become a playground exclusively for foreign billionaires… completely removed from anything to do with regular American life.” And because it continues to be simultaneously a fantasy world and a place of misery, it will no doubt fascinate filmmakers for years to come.

For more big, and small screen, explorations of the darkness and dazzle of Vegas, listen to the episode in full on 麻豆社 Sounds.