MOVIE REVIEW : Few Big Payoffs in ‘Little Vegas’

“Little Vegas” (Monica4-Plex) is a nice little movie that falls apart--as nice little movies are sometimes wont to do. A first-time effort by writer-director-actor Perry Lang, it starts off with some positive virtues. It has bright, offbeat dialogue, a fine cast and a terrific backdrop--a sun-struck little Nevada trailer camp on the edge of the desert, inhabited by a motley collection of transplanted Jews, Italian-Americans and beaming, blank-faced Westerners.

It’s the bigger Las Vegas impacted and compressed. The people who live there are like parodies of the usual Vegasites. They’re not gangsters; they’re gangster’s relatives. They’re not big players; they’re small-potato bunco artists with grandiose dreams. Even the local entrepreneur, Harvey (Bruce McGill)--who dreams of tearing down the trailer camp and erecting “Little Vegas”--is so financially strapped that a would-be heist man can’t find any cash in his safe.

The movie’s hero, reluctant gigolo Carmine (Anthony John Denison), locked in a vicious probate battle with the son of his recently deceased lover, and falling in love with the daughter, is a harried father bereft of the usual machismo. When we first see Carmine, he’s staggering toward us, in heels and a dress, over the desert sands.

Yet these penny-ante schemers don’t necessarily talk small potatoes. They swagger and swear like the genuine article. The movie does have one real real gangster: Carmine’s brother, Frank (Michael Nouri), who shows up distressed because an old childhood enemy has just been named New Jersey sanitation commissioner--and since Frank looks like a GQ ad model, we might suspect that the major difference between big- and small-timers is that the big-timers have snappier tailors and don’t sweat as much.

Director Lang shows talent; his humor has an easy, unforced pitch. He’s an actor himself in this film, and he’s made the movie into an actor’s showcase. Denison, McGill, Nouri, Catherine O’Hara, Jerry Stiller, Anne Francis and Jay Thomas--as Frank’s sidekick--are all quite good.

But Lang is better at setups than payoffs. In its last third, this movie goes zany and loses all its rhythm, piling on the climaxes and the pratfalls, the violence and the major life decisions until they start spraying out every which-way, like a scraggly bouquet. A pity--because, at first, “Little Vegas” (R for sex, language, partial nudity and mild violence) is onto something. It has a fix on splintered families, wasted, rattletrap lives, wanna-be gangsters and people fleeing from their past.

This trailer camp lies at the dead-end of the Great American Open Road but Lang doesn’t open up the right windows. Perhaps he wants to kid himself that there’s a better road, opening up just ahead.

‘LITTLE VEGAS’

An I.R.S. World Release. Producer Peter MacGregor Scott. Director/script Perry Lang. Camera King Baggot. Production design Michael Hartog. Editor John Tintori. Costume design Cynthia Flint. Music Mason Daring. Executive producer Harold Welb. With Anthony John Denison, Catherine O’Hara, Anne Francis, Michael Nouri, Perry Lang, P. J. Ochlan, John Sayles, Bruce McGill.

Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (language, partial nudity, sex, mild violence).