SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast4 Jul 2022

05: Heaven or Las Vegas

The early months of 1941 in Las Vegas were unique in history, a setting that most have forgotten. While still a small town of 8,500 people, this specific period saw the city on the verge of a tinderbox of circumstances - legalised gambling, an army base nearby, sex work, visiting movie stars, permissive divorce laws, organised crime, the end of prohibition and the end of the Depression - that were about to quickly escalate it to the place more familiar to us today.

In amongst all this came LAS VEGAS NIGHTS (1941), released two weeks before the first resort opened on the Strip. This was a tourism ad masquerading as a film, and it tried to sell Vegas both ways at once: a thriving city of nightlife and neon casinos, but also, a folksy little town where everybody knows your name and nobody locks their doors. Bizarre, fascinating and dreary all at once, this film also happened to be Frank Sinatra's first.

Special thanks to KCLV and the Commission for the Las Vegas Centennial for the documentary VEGAS IN THE 40s (2022), released just this year, which was a hugely helpful resource in putting this together. The film is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7edD3d0ATw

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