Las Vegas Shakedown

"Las Vegas Shakedown" is a wildly uneven film...with writing that is occasionally brilliant...and also occasionally terrible. It also is a strange sort of film...with lots of stories that look like they come from "The Love Boat" combined with gritty film noir!!

The story is set in a Las Vegas resort owned by Joe Barnes (Dennis O'Keefe). He is a tough sort and his bottom line seems to be making money...which is odd since later in the film he's a benevolent benefactor! But no matter for now. The normally unflappable Barnes is worried as he's received word that someone is coming to get him...but who? In the midst of all this suspense, oddly enough, he meets and falls in love with a woman (Coleen Gray), fixes a couple marriages AND manages to take on and beat the baddies coming for him!!

On the plus side, Thomas Gomez generally plays a wonderfully vicious criminal. I loved how he was so heartless...especially towards the end. But the film ALSO makes him utterly ridiculous, such as when the very rotund guy (he looks like he weighs close to 300 pounds) climbs out a window with more grace than Douglas Fairbanks! It's obviously a stuntman and the director was, frankly, an idiot for allowing this scene to be made in the first place!! What also never should have been in the film was making Barnes so very hard and money-hungry....yet also benevolent and quick to give away the casino's winnings...which simply made no sense. What also didn't make sense was the nice old banker and his wife...they were cute...but the ending portion with him and his wife (Charles Winninger and Elizabeth Patterson) was nonsensical. Overall, a tough film that also tries to be heart-warming and sweet...and only ends up being frustrating as a result. I really wanted to like this film.

Going by its title, its year of release, and its cast - Dennis O'Keefe, Colleen Gray, Thomas Gomez, Mary Beth Hughes - you might think Las Vegas Shakedown was a late film noir, but you'd be wrong. It's a sort of Grand Motel set in the early days of the Nevada gambling oasis when it really was The Pastures - a glorified cowtown.

O'Keefe runs the Rancho Something-Or-Other casino, and we know he's on the up-and-up because he testified before the Kefauver Committee on organized crime and sent mobster Gomez to Alcatraz. Gomez, now deranged, is barreling back into town, a couple of aging torpedoes in tow, to kill O'Keefe. Also into O'Keefe's establishment drift Hughes, who gambles away the three grand her husband was planning to open a lunch wagon in Salt Lake City with (she pleads with O'Keefe to give it back to her, but no dice); a straight-laced elderly couple from Nebraska, bank president Charles Winninger and his wife Elizabeth Patterson (Mrs. Trumbull on I Love Lucy); James Millican and Dorothy Patrick, a couple on the cusp of divorce; and a schoolmarmish author (Gray) who wants to research an exposé of Vegas - her last book was called `The Psychology of Science' - but ends up falling for O'Keefe instead. She should have stuck to her writing.

Their various stories are told as stand-alone, unconnected vignettes, and the movie is directed in a flat, uninteresting style by Sidney Salkow. Maybe the most arresting thing about Las Vegas Shakedown is its musical score by Edward J. Kay, mainly because its Big Theme seems strangely familiar - it's the same one he wrote for Decoy, 10 years earlier.

Dennis O'Keefe is the manager and co-owner of a Las Vegas casino. It's another ordnary day. A woman has gambled away most of her and her husband's savings, and she wants him to return the losses. A small-town banker and his wife are vacationing, and he decides that he can afford to lose $3,000, but wins instead. Gangster Thomas Gomez, newly released from Alcatraz, wants revenge and the casino. And schoolteacher Coleen Grey is researching a book on how you can't win against the house, so she and O'Keefe fall in love.

O'Keefe offers a world-weary performance that is telling, but the principal interest is old-time actors in small roles: Robert Armstrong as one of Gomez' henchmen, Charles Winninger and Elizabeth Patterson as the banker and his wife, Mary Beth Hughes as a losing gambler.... it's the downside of the ending of the studio system: all these talented actors in small roles that brighten this definite B movie for a few seconds.

Really nothing special about this - at all.

Dennis O'Keefe stars in "Las Vegas Shakedown" from 1955, also starring Coleen Gray, and featuring Tomas Gomez, Charles Winninger, Mary Beth Hughes, and Elizabeth Patterson.

O'Keefe plays Joe Barnes, the owner of a Vegas casino. He's tough but fair, and he seems to deal with situations very efficiently. Coleen Gray plays Julie Ray, a schoolteacher who comes to Vegas to write a book.

After their first kiss, Julie, an uptight woman, decides to leave the hotel. On the way out, she overhears that someone plans to kill Joe. She returns to the hotel; ultimately, she and Joe fall in love.

This is the main subplot that has Tomas Gomez out to force Joe to sign the casino over to him, and if Joe dies in the process, too bad.

Another plot involves a woman (Mary Beth Hughes) who has gambled the money her husband was going to use to buy a business; an elderly couple, the Raffs (Winninger and Patterson) on vacation. Winninger is a bank president, so they don't want anyone to know they're in Vegas, lest the town think he's an embezzler.

When there is a discrepancy at the bank, a minor one that Mr. Raff isn't concerned about, Mrs. Raff talks her husband into getting rid of the $15,000 he won by systems betting.

Solid if not exciting performance by O'Keefe, Gray is lovely, and the minor characters are all very well portrayed.

As we all know, Las Vegas casino owners, especially in the 1950s, were straight-shooting public benefactors protected by incorruptible local law enforcement. In this film, casino owner Dennis O'Keefe is threatened by three out-of-town hoods with the brilliant scheme of forcing him at gunpoint to sign a contract turning his casino over to them. Sounds like an airtight plan but you'll be glad to know virtue triumphs in the end.

Colleen Gray, as a repressed high school math teacher from Oakland, or something like that (it's a bit unclear), has the brilliant idea of coming to Las Vegas to write a book with the shocking revelation that tourists at the casinos lose money. Naturally it's love at first sight when she and O'Keefe meet and she changes her mission to protecting him. Why? Despite the protestations of the cops he keeps insisting on facing the crooks single-handed in a couple of unconvincing faceoffs.

Meanwhile there are three subplots about tourist couples, two of which treat compulsive gambling with some seriousness before implausible happy endings. The third, about two hicks from Nebraska, is just flat-out silly.

O'Keefe, after a brutal beating from the thugs, is up and about hours later with nary a scratch. Thomas Gomez, as the chief thug, cutely nicknamed Gimp, has a bum leg, but in the climactic obligatory chase scene races up ladders and leaps off rooftops.

Despite the many flaws, fast-paced, some amusing scenes and dialogue, and quaint reminders of the era when Vegas was basically still a small town in the middle of the desert. OK as a fun time killer, but don't expect hard-boiled realistic film noir.