All That Glitters, Vegas episode 1.3

A young boxer, just back from the Olympics, is found dead. Ralph investigates. In the larger story, the owner of the Savoy, Angelo and his first lieutenant, Johnny Rizzo, arrive in town and chaos ensues.

“One federal witness , two federal agents and the last Sheriff of Clark County” Jack Lamb in reciting the ways Savino has broken the law since coming to town.

Side note and quibble- Ralph Lamb was the sheriff of Clark County, not Las Vegas. Clark County begins at Sahara (San Francisco Street back in the day) but this show takes place, almost exclusively, downtown where Ralph didn’t have any jurisdiction. Metro (the combining of the City Police Dept with the County Sheriff's Dept) didn't happen until the 1970s.

Well, things could be looking up, Jonathan Banks joins the cast. Been a fan since his days on Wiseguy (first William Russ, now Jonathan Banks and loved him as Mike on Breaking Bad). As the owner of the Savoy, he brings some menace.

Mia (Sarah Jones) is the daughter of Johnny Rizzo (Michael Wiseman), the man who brings the big money in and seems to be Angelo's favorite.

A dead body (the boxer) on Fremont Street.  Why can I see portions of the Sahara sign and the original Stardust sign next to the Savoy?  WTF???  The Savoy is not on the Strip. As I mentioned last week, you can see the Golden Nugget from his office. The Savoy is on Fremont Street. The geography is all over the map and not in a good way.

Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing these recreations of the signs and casino fronts but how hard is it to at least distinguish between the Strip and downtown. It was only 50 years ago and there are plenty of photos, news articles, film footage (from the Las Vegas News Bureau archives as well as network news archives like CBS) and postcards that show what hotels were where.

Fremont Street

And no one who has seen them would believe that Fremont Street and the Strip were on the same County block.

Courtesy of LeavingLV.net- Fremont Street 1960s

Courtesy of LeavingLV.net- The Stardust from the era of the show

On the show, Johnny Rizzo is in the black book. If he’s in the black book, he not only can’t be on the gaming floor he can't stay in the hotel. It’s what got Sinatra’s license pulled when he owned a portion of the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe. He hosted Sam “Momo” Giancana and the Gaming Commission found out. Sinatra had to give up his points in the Sands as well.

Talking about skimming from the boss in his own hotel. That takes cojones. Too bad there's no weight in the words.

A gourmet restaurant, women’s clothing stores, in 1960s these are novel ideas? Every hotel on the Strip had them. These are not novel ideas for the era. No matter where the damn hotel is supposed to be located. The sawdust joints downtown had gourmet restaurants but space was valuable on Fremont Street so women’s shops, etc not necessary because the whole street had them (Ronzoni’s, Fanny’s, Chic Hecht’s, CH Baker Shoes) and women only had to walk a block to them vs on the Strip where you had to drive a half mile or more to get to the next property.

It’s stuff like this that takes me out of enjoying the show.  Well, that and the lack of character and story development.

Ralph vs Rizzo on the floor of the Savoy conjures up memories of Ralph vs Lefty Rosenthal. But Ralph had more gravitas. Or at least the stories do. These are still archetypes not real characters so no one’s words carry any weight.

The original wiseguys were smart enough to keep the violence to the outskirts of town, not the floors of the casinos and while they may not have liked Lamb, they likely didn’t entertain the idea of whacking him.

Rizzo advocates for the removal of Lamb, the more violent the better. He takes his case to Angelo and Savino must defend the idea of letting Lamb live because the bottom line is, killing him is bad for tourism. “If we take him out, best case scenario the feds don’t come after us, they don’t revoke our gaming  license but we still have two dead sheriffs in less than a month. What man is going to take his wife to a city without any law? Without tourism, there’s no money, there’s no suitcases coming home. Whatever we think of Ralph Lamb, we need him alive, for now. Otherwise we have another wasted opportunity, another Havana in the desert.”

Angelo sides with Savino which only serves to make Rizzo mad and you can tell by the commercial break, the bad blood between Rizzo and Savino just got worse.

The scene of Chiklis delivering the above speech is the best acting we’ve seen so far by any of the characters. The main cast is trying hard but they need a story that is about these characters and not about archetypes.

The idea to kill Lamb felt more like a Rosenthal and Tony the Ant move than a Moe Dalitz move . But Lefty and Tony were almost 20 years later than the era the show is set in. You can’t just trade one era for the other.

Well, maybe you can. CBS is touting the show as its “#1 new drama”.

No show next week as the presidential debate takes place.

See you in two weeks!

Review of "Vegas"

Welcome to our weekly review (from someone who grew up there during that time and has chronicled the 20th century history of her hometown) of  Vegas (2012), the new drama on CBS starring Dennis Quaid and Michael Chiklis. Quaid plays Sheriff Ralph Lamb, the real life Sheriff who squared off against the bad guys in 1960s and 1970s Las Vegas. Chiklis plays Vincent Savino, a Chicago mobster who has come to Las Vegas because his casino, The Savoy, needs cleaning up.

Jason O'Mara plays Jack Lamb, Quaid's brother. Where Ralph is quiet, taciturn and hard headed, Jack is "much better with people". Carrie-Ann Moss plays fictional deputy district attorney, Katherine O'Connell. According to her character, her family had the ranch next to the Lamb family. She and Quaid have chemistry together and the story hints at a backstory between the two. Lamb is a widower when we meet him with a young son who looks to be in his early twenties.

Right now, all four main stars are playing archetypes instead of characters. Here's hoping that CBS allows them to develop the characters and become the strong drama that is evident but sadly, in the background right now.

The opening scene begins at the Lamb ranch as Ralph, Jack and Ralph's son were rounding up the cattle. A DC-4 came in low and scattered the cows. Ralph got angry, saddled up and headed to the airport to confront someone about the problem. At the airport, he found the official he was looking for and a fight ensued as Savino was disembarking from the plane and headed toward his ride.

The pilot focused on the murder of a young girl who worked in the credit department at the Savoy Hotel  but whose body was found out at the Nevada Test Site. The mayor, Ted Bennett, (Michael O'Neill), who knew Ralph in the war and fed up with the current sheriff (who more likely than not is corrupt and up in Reno on vacation with a young woman not his wife), sent a deputy to the Lamb ranch to get Ralph. Unbeknowst to the Mayor, Ralph was headed into Las Vegas in the back seat of a squad car, arrested for the fight at the airport. The blue/green screen work of Fremont Street, circa 1960, was quite good (though the far end of Fremont Street was missing the neon Union Pacific sign that anchored the old train depot).

As with other CBS procedurals (see NCIS, CSI: Las Vegas, Criminal Minds, etc), the story focused on the crime and by the end of the episode Ralph had kept his friend, Katherine O'Connell from arresting the dead girl's boyfriend, a rodeo rider, for the crime and had figured out who the real killer was.

A sub-plot involving bikers tearing up the town brought back memories of the original story of Lamb facing off against Hell's Angels in the late 1960s.

At the end of the hour, the original sheriff had been dispatched thanks to the district attorney and Savino's crew and his murdered body had been found, prompting Ralph to take the job on full time.

Quaid's character is  very much cut from the same mold as Jethro Leroy Gibbs on NCSI but, hopefully, going forward, he will become his own character and not a mirror image of the beloved Gibbs.

Michael Chiklis has the harder role, especially right now. Vincent Savino is a hood from Chicago with very little back story. He and Quaid are on the path to a showdown but without more character, back story and story telling, that showdown could ring hollow.

If cable dramas from Justified to Breaking Bad to Mad Men has taught viewers anything it's that it's possible to mine the depths of character and create a compelling story that brings viewers back every week to see what happens and propels the story forward.

CBS has two shows that they have allowed to do that- The Good Wife and Person of Interest. Here's hoping CBS gives Nick Pileggi (author of Casino) and showrunner Greg Walker (Without a Trace), the freedom to do what Robert and Michelle King and Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman have done for their shows.

Pilots are always tricky to judge how a series will play out because so much has to be established in a short amount of time and networks want to hook viewers. It's doubtful people are tuning in to watch CSI: The 1960s and are much more interested in watching "the battle for the soul of Sin City" as the ads tout the premise. If CBS gives them the freedom to make the latter, it will make Vegas a show worth watching and worth investing in.

Various thoughts about everything from the production design to the story to the characters:

The opening scene with the DC-4, Ralph and the airport: McCarran Airport was a small airport but not quite that small. If it was supposed to be Alamo Airways, it wasn’t close. George Crockett would not have allowed something like that.

The showroom at the Savoy had good production design. The showgirls were very Copa like. But I'm still not sure where The Savoy is located- Fremont Street or the Strip? Interior of the The Savoy was very nice, the exterior too far out to the street.  Unlike today, hotels on the Strip had long drive ways, a porte cochere and were built to catch the eye of drivers. If it was supposed to be on Fremont Street, it was out of place. The showroom with the Copa-like showgirls made me think it was supposed to be on the Strip. To their credit, someone did their homework because they got the interior right. Strip casinos back then weren't covered end to end with slots and gaming tables the way they are today.

Great job of Fremont Street. Only problem was it looked like the Fremont hotel was briefly on the same side of the street as the Nugget. If so, oops! Also, oops, the Golden Nugget had a weeping mortar facade, not the fake MCM facade seen on the show.

Great seeing William Russ, even if it was too briefly. (Made it a nice shout-out to Wiseguy, the Ken Wahl show that included  a law man and a gangster one season). Russ plays a well-connected real estate owner who owns a great deal of land (either on Fremont Street or the Strip, that part wasn't clear) and the local BBQ joint (nice neon) that wasn't really part of the Fremont Street landscape but Fremont Street back then had a number of popular eateries that catered to the locals as well as the gamblers, so it fits. Hopefully, Russ is a recurring character.

Dennis Quaid has a great face for the part (bad haircut and all)  and Chiklis is terrific as Vincent Savino, even if his character needs more meat on his bones.

Props to the Production Designer, Marek Dobrowolski, for creating various sets that while they may not be historically accurate, evoke that era before post-war Las Vegas exploded into the Entertainment Capital of the World.

Director James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line) brought the flair and drama in equal proportions.

Nice shout out to Warm Springs. We used to go to Warm Springs when I was a kid in the early 1960s.

Nice neighborhood Ralph’s son’s chippie lives in. Seemed very Vintage Vegas.

A casino that was modeled after the Mint!!!!!  (Looks like it’s called, The Dice Club) You could see the arch of the pylon sign through the window when Mayor Bennett was talking to Katherine and the district attorney. And for the record (I've seen viewers criticizing them for this point), there were a small handful of pioneering female lawyers practicing in Las Vegas in 1960.

The Boulder Club got a shout out (though it was in the wrong place)! The Silver Palace was in the wrong place but the two story buildings that you could see from the Mayor's windo were spot on.

The Nevada Test Site is a bit of a hike to dump a body but it makes for good story telling. Though there was still above ground testing going on so the possibility of getting on the Site to dump a body or a bunch of bikers going for a ride out there were severly diminished.  And for the record, Boulder City is nowhere near the NTS.

Quaid and Moss have good chemistry.

Quaid and Chiklis have a good adversarial relationship.

Ralph's son isn’t a teenager (thank you Lord!), is lippy and has good chemistry with O’Mara.

It wasn’t quite as rural as they would like you to believe.

Westward Ho neon was a nice touch, very retro would have been better to be the Yucca or the Rummel (both are still standing).

The DA is crooked or certainly appears to be.

Where are all the smokers?

It’s not quite our history but it makes a good story. (am I the only one who thought of Crime Story while watching this show?)

Here's hoping they do something good and dramatic with it.

Hoping, hoping, hoping.......

 

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