Viva Las Vegas: The City Where the Movies Never Check Out

There are cities that appear in movies, and then there’s Las Vegas. Vegas doesn’t really do background. Put a camera anywhere near the Strip and suddenly the city is demanding a close-up. The neon, the casinos, the fountains, the desert, the slightly ridiculous hotels pretending to be Rome, Paris and Venice. Hollywood production designers must arrive in Las Vegas, look around and think: brilliant, somebody has already done our job for us.

Perhaps no film understood this better than Ocean’s Eleven. Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 remake turned the Bellagio into one of cinema’s coolest workplaces as George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and the rest of Danny Ocean’s crew attempted to relieve Terry Benedict of rather a lot of money. The film used numerous locations around the hotel, but its defining Vegas moment comes at the end, when the gang quietly gathers in front of the Bellagio fountains before disappearing one by one into the night. More than two decades later, you can stand in almost exactly the same spot. Sadly, Brad Pitt probably won’t be there eating something.

For a considerably darker version of Vegas, there is Casino. Martin Scorsese’s 1995 epic strips away some of the glamour and takes us into the violent world lurking behind old-school Sin City. Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci inhabit a Vegas of mobsters, money and spectacularly questionable clothing, with Fremont Street among the real locations captured in the film. Fremont has actually enjoyed an extraordinary screen career of its own, appearing in everything from Diamonds Are Forever to Con Air, Vegas Vacation and The Hangover Part III.

And then there’s Swingers.

Before Vince Vaughn became Vince Vaughn, he and Jon Favreau jumped into a car and headed to Vegas in one of the great 1990s movie road trips. “Vegas, baby, Vegas!” became the line everybody remembered, capturing exactly what the city represents in the movies: the promise that everything is about to get better, stranger or considerably worse. The boys arrive full of swagger, attempt to look like seasoned high rollers and very quickly demonstrate that they are anything but. It’s a relatively small section of Swingers, but it helped cement Vegas as the ultimate destination for characters wanting to escape their normal lives for a night.

That same idea was pushed to glorious extremes in The Hangover. Few films have advertised Las Vegas so effectively while simultaneously making a weekend there look like an absolutely terrible idea. Caesars Palace becomes headquarters for Phil, Stu and Alan as they attempt to reconstruct the previous night, locate their missing friend and work out why there is a tiger in the bathroom. Caesars itself has enjoyed an impressive movie career, also appearing in Rain Man, Rocky III and Ocean’s Eleven.

Vegas, though, can become whatever a filmmaker needs it to be. Leaving Las Vegas turned all that colour and excess into the backdrop for something devastatingly sad. Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas transformed the city into a drug-fuelled hallucination where reality barely survives the journey. Showgirls embraced every ounce of Vegas excess and somehow became even more outrageous than the city around it. James Bond visited in Diamonds Are Forever, while Con Air memorably decided the Strip was the perfect place to crash a plane.

Even Tom Cruise took a trip there in Rain Man, with Raymond and Charlie Babbitt arriving at Caesars Palace and discovering that an extraordinary memory can be extremely useful at a blackjack table.

And Hollywood keeps coming back. Brad Pitt returned to the Strip decades after Ocean’s Eleven for F1, once again surrounded by the unmistakable lights and landmarks of modern Las Vegas. The casinos may change, hotels disappear and new towers rise, but the appeal to filmmakers remains exactly the same.

Because Las Vegas can be sophisticated, sleazy, romantic, dangerous, hilarious, heartbreaking or completely unhinged. Sometimes it manages all of them before breakfast.