Lights, Camera, Trouble! The Saratoga-Las Vegas Connection in Film
By Michael Green, Ph.D.
The Saratoga area is known as a lovely spot for a tourist to visit.
Las Vegas is known as a spot for a tourist to visit. Lovely depends upon the eye of the beholder.
When I speak on June 15, I’ll be talking about some connections between the two places. Here’s one that I may spend less time on, now that I’m talking about it here: The movies.
For some reason, movies related to horses seem to be a popular choice for filming or being set in Saratoga. The Horse Whisperer and Seabiscuit are just a couple. If you want to go back to the early years of Hollywood, the first film set there was called—get ready—Saratoga (1937). Starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, the plot features a bookmaker who inherits a stud farm. Then came another horse-related film, the 1943 Abbott & Costello comedy It Ain’t Hay, which was based on a Damon Runyon story. And if you know anything about Runyon, it involved some gamblers.
Naturally, films set in or about Las Vegas often have a gambling motif, or at least a connection. One of the classics is Casino, co-written by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese, directed by Scorsese, and starring Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci as mobsters, with Sharon Stone as DeNiro’s wife and Pesci’s mistress. It brilliantly captures the aura of Las Vegas in the late 1970s and early 1980s, just as Seabiscuit evoked its time and place.
The greatest Las Vegas-related film is undoubtedly The Godfather. Both the 1972 original and the 1974 sequel have ties with Las Vegas, since the first features a Bugsy Siegel knock-off, Moe Green (no relation, though I don’t mind if you think so), with the second including Meyer Lansky doppelganger Hyman Roth (we’ll be talking a good bit about Lansky during my talk).
All of these films, though, create a problem for a community that relies heavily on tourism, as both Las Vegas and Saratoga do: Where does reality end and fiction begin? Note that I talked about the aura and evoking a time and place. Are these films accurate?
The short answer is that they can’t be. It would be difficult, if not impossible, for the dialogue to be totally true. The films are a couple of hours long, give or take, and tend to cover long periods of time; they have to leave out a fair amount. The actors can’t always hit perfection dead-on. In Casino, Robert DeNiro looks nothing like the character, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, on whom his Ace Rothstein is based. And since I have a personal connection of sorts to Rosenthal, it’s hard for me to watch the film and not start muttering about the difference. In The Godfather, Part II, legendary acting teacher Lee Strasberg played the Lanskyesque Roth, and wound up getting a call from Lansky, who complained about how Roth made Lansky look weaker and meaner than he really was.
But it speaks to how well known both Las Vegas and Saratoga are, and how associated they are with certain activities: that so many films have focused on these areas. And some of the connections include Hollywood. One connection was Robert Redford, who was a horse whisperer in Saratoga and a horse rider in Las Vegas in The Electric Horseman (1979). Another of the films set partly in Saratoga is Billy Bathgate, based on the story of gangster Dutch Schultz, and starring Dustin Hoffman … who later starred in Rain Man, set partly in Las Vegas, and the only film to be shot partly in Las Vegas that won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Since both Las Vegas and Saratoga have been considered a kind of Disneyland for adults, maybe it’s appropriate to say that it’s a small world after all.
Dr. Michael Green, Trustee of the Mob Museum and Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is the author of several books and articles, and has served in leadership roles in a wide variety of professional organizations. On September 21, 2022, he will be presenting on Saratoga-Las Vegas connections as part of the Saratoga County History Center’s “Experts Next Door” virtual speaker series.
