Pretty Good

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Las Vegas 1952 would have been the place to be so a film starring the beautiful Jane Russell being the affection of not one, not two, but three men made it a place that all men would want to visit. Jane Russell who plays a former Las Vegas lounge singer named Linda Rollins and is currently married to an addictive gambler named Lloyd Rollins (played by Vincent Price) who prefers the crap tables to bedding his gorgeous wife Linda.Linda would prefer to avoid Las Vegas all together since her past memories have her in the arms of a recent army veteran named Dave Andrews (Victor Mature) who she abruptly left Las Vegas apparently never to see him again. Now Dave Matthews is a Lieutenant with the Las Vegas police department and when Linda's expensive but insured diamond necklace goes missing and the slimy Fabulous Las Vegas casino owner is found murdered, it is up to Lieutenant Dave Matthews to find the killer and he has a couple of suspects in mind which include his former lover Linda Rollins and her husband Lloyd.I chuckled when I saw Victor Mature with his overly exaggerated broad shoulders (nothing that hidden shoulder pads under his suit jacket couldn't assist with) meeting his former lover the now unhappily married Linda Rollins. There is an insurance investigator named Tom Hubler (Brad Dexter) also trailing the Rollins couple to ensure her very expensive diamond necklace stays safe but needless to say it vanishes under mysterious circumstances and the Fabulous casino owner is murdered on the floor of his own casino.The film was novel for its time having the early Las Vegas strip as the backdrop, the gorgeous lounge singer Jane Russell with her piano playing Hoagy Carmichael having one or two numbers to shine, an insurance investigator, a lieutenant of the Las Vegas police department and what film would not be complete without a despicable addicted gambler like Vincent Price?It is a decent crime/drama/romance film which holds up pretty well for being 66 years old.

Was pleasantly surprised at this film.Played last night in a tribute to Brad Dexter,an underappreciated actor,who was apparently once married to Ms Peggy Lee.He was good in anything he did.Here,he's an "insurance" muscle man,sent to keep an "eye" on both Vincent Price and a $100,000 dollar insured diamond necklace worn by Ms Russell.She meets up with former boyfriend and cop Victor Mature while hubby Price decides to gamble to recover money to pay up his financial debts.Ms Russell also meets up with former co-workers at a lounge in which she used to sing.In spite of it being a Howard Hughes Production,I liked the film.Some really quality actors,and Price a great semi-villain,Dexter a great pure villain,and sparks from Russell/Mature,a young lovers trying to marry before he's drafted all make for a good story.

Saw this movie om Jane Russell's 85th Birthday (Thanks TCM!) I was impressed by her great performance - I think the first I've seen in a dramatic role. Victor Mature was excellent, too, even if he was playing to type. Hoagy was good, also, but nothing can touch his performance in "Best Days of Our Lives." J.C. Flippen also good in what would become a stereotypical role providing comic relief but not a fop in the style of "Barnie Fife". Am curious about the scene shot in an abandoned Air Force base. Logic dictates this is Nellis AFB but I doubt it was abandoned in 1952. Does anybody know where this location shoot took place?

The title suggests something nearly epic in its scope; a history of the gambling capital of the world, an iconic mix of organised crime and flaking glamour, bright lights and corruption - the 'Casino' of its day. The subsequent film is much more modest - a tale of petty opportunism and every day failure that, frankly, could be set almost anywhere in the world. Whatever Happy's opening voice-over tries to convince us of, this isn't the Las Vegas Story, or the Clark County one. Never mind - 'The Philadelphia Story' and 'The Palm Beach Story' had similarly grandiose titles with almost as little to back them up, although even their stories of marital strife weren't quite as modest as this one.It's a trifle about a woman with a past, caught between a seemingly solid husband beginning to crack under financial difficulties and a bitter ex who refuses to forgive her for walking out on him. The catalyst for the plot is her diamond necklace, under observation by an insurance agent and desired by the new owner of the bar she used to work in - subtly named 'The Last Chance'. A later Russell film, 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes', would inform us that 'Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend' - here, they're her worst enemy, coming between her and all the men in her life. Jewellery was often used as a symbol of women's superficial allure and grasping nature in good old misogynistic Hollywood, but here it's the men who care about the ice. Russell suffers their loss with no great complaint.For the most part, 'The Las Vegas Story' is no great shakes. Victor Mature gives a real teak-and-leather performance as the male lead; he looks a little like Jerry Orbach, but he has all the charisma of a side of sweaty beef, and hangs like a dead weight in all the scenes he's in, particularly those with Jane Russell. We can understand why she left him - he's an unappealing prospect. There's no real Vegas atmosphere to the film - although the hotel bathroom set is wonderful in its tacky opulence. Most of the direction is perfunctory, and the script isn't sharp enough - it clearly aspires to hard-boiled banter but doesn't give the actors anything to work with, and a subplot about underage newlyweds is truly trite, an example of Old Hollywood storytelling at its worst. Despite the script, Vincent Price is pretty good, segueing from cheerful husband to cold, desperate gambler effortlessly, but he seems to get lost halfway through the film.Shining out amongst all this mediocrity is Jane Russell, probably the most wasted film actress of her time. She displayed natural charisma in front of the camera in her very first film, 'The Outlaw', and she visibly grew in confidence as an actress over her next few films, but she never really got to work in great films - with the arguable exception of 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'. Here, she's sublime, despite working with third-rate material. Whilst the script leaves Mature somewhat stranded, unable to connect up the various lurches in disposition his character is required to make (he suddenly warms up to Russell again for no explicable reason), Russell handles these unlikely transitions much better, making them seem all of a piece. It's an effortless performance, a demonstration of pure film-star class, but just as in 'His Kind of Woman' she's neglected at the climax, left standing by as the men slug it out.Fortunately, that climax is the salvation of the film. The preceding hour and ten minutes lack either suspense or the kind of brooding menace the Noirish plot seems to require. Once the fleeing villain drives his car into an abandoned Airforce base, however, the direction picks up considerably. The helicopter/car chase is really well done, with impressive stunt flying as the helicopter flies through an open hangar, Bond-style (it's so good they repeat the trick a minute later). Even better is the final foot chase around the deserted buildings, with brilliantly atmospheric use of the howling wind. Tellingly, this is all achieved wordlessly, and seems to come from some infinitely superior thriller (the purely visual storytelling is reminiscent of Hitchcock). Here, the film actually touches greatness, if only for a few minutes.The other pleasures are incidental. Like many films of the period, it includes a couple of musical numbers, totally unnecessary but here rather well done (the first, as a piano tune triggers a memory in Russell of her time as a singer, actually has more emotional impact than any of the dialogue scenes). The murder mystery isn't that mysterious, but the solution is pleasingly unconventional (it's the opportunistic robbery that is always disproved early on in other whodunits), and the film wrong-foots the audience by not discounting Russell as a suspect.Even among the relatively few films that Russell made, this is minor; nevertheless, it does confirm that she was a capable actress, not the inflatable doll some critics would like us to remember her as - and is worth seeing for that reason.