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"Heldorado" (1946)
[This is the second in a series of reports on Las Vegas in the movies. The first, about "Diamonds Are Forever",
can be found in the Las Vegas Miscellany section and in the section of Netflix Reviews below.]
"Heldorado" is a routine Roy Rogers programmer partially shot in Las Vegas the same year Bugsy Siegal's visionary
Flamingo resort opened on The Strip. The Flamingo wasn't yet finished when the Rogers company came to town -- in May -- and
wouldn't open until December of that year, and it's not featured in the film, which centers on the Western-themed Last Frontier
resort, exteriors of which are featured prominently. The interiors of the resort were I believe shot on sound stages elsewhere.
The film opens at and returns briefly to Boulder Dam (now renamed Hoover Dam) -- one of the prime attractions of Las Vegas
at the time, before The Strip itself became a spectacle destination.
There are also scenes shot on location during the Helldorado Parade on Fremont Street downtown (the producers removed an 'l'
from Helldorado for the film's title in the interests of decorum . . .)
. . . at the rodeo held as part of the festivities . . .
. . . in which Roy and Trigger and the Sons Of the Pioneers made appearances . . .
. . . and at a horseback treasure hunt which started across from the El Rancho (the first casino resort built on what would
become The Strip.) You can see part of the El Rancho's windmill tower behind Dale Evans in the picture below.
The hunt looks as though it may have been staged for the film. (That's The Strip -- near the El Rancho and the intersection
of what would become Sahara Avenue -- behind Gabby Hayes in the picture below.)
We get some good wide views of the Las Vegas Valley at the start of this sequence, but it climaxes in a landscape shot elsewhere,
almost certainly California. The picture below is from the beginning of the sequence, shot in the Las Vegas Valley, probably
not too far from The Strip . . .
Fremont Street still had the feel of a small (if somewhat gaudy and tarted-up) Western town at the time and the rest of the
valley, with its wide open desert spaces and its Western-themed resorts, still had the overwhelming flavor of the Old West.
It's fashionable to downplay Siegal's achievement in building the Flamingo, because it wasn't his idea originally and because
it wasn't the first resort-casino on The Strip -- but without the exotic excess of the Flamingo, Las Vegas might have drifted
along indefinitely as a Western town, or at least a Western-themed town.
The Flamingo was a window on the future of Las Vegas as a location for any dream palace that could be imagined -- and
as an international city cut loose from its actual past and actual location.
In this film you can catch a last glimpse of Las Vegas as a rational place -- a place that sort of makes sense in conventional
terms. After the Flamingo it only made sense in the realm of fantasy and desire.
In the film Roy plays a government ranger who goes undercover to expose a money-laundering scheme at the Last Frontier.
That aspect of the film IS a window on the future, since money laundering became a primary function of the mob-controlled
casinos of the Fifties -- and one suspects that the same sort of thing goes on in the corporate-controlled casinos of our
day, with or without the collaboration of the corporate managers.
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