Viva Las Fantasy Road Trip Films

In yet another quest for fun films to chase away the world-wary blues, I recently watched one nostalgic movie and one from early in this century that both featured cars—a road race and a road trip—and also included the fabulous Ann-Margret. What were the odds, given the first flick was an Elvis epic from 1964, Viva Las Vegas?

Blue Hawaii from 1961 has always been a fav Elvis film, especially when I lived there in the 1980s and just had to visit all the spots on Oahu and Kauai shown in the movie. So it’s surprising it took me almost six years of living in the Vegas Valley to actually see the one set in Vegas.

Viva Las Vegas is about racer Lucky Jackson (Elvis) who needs to score enough money for a new racecar engine to compete in, and win, the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Along the way, he also wants to win the heart of swimming and dance instructor Rusty Martin, played by a 22-year-old (redheaded for this movie) Ann-Margret.

In truth, Viva Las Vegas, like Blue Hawaii, was likely merely a moving-picture vehicle for Elvis’s hit song of the same name. Which, ironically, he never performed live after singing it in the movie in which Ann-Margret also sang—and danced.

Viva Las Vegas also came off as a tourism infomercial for not only entertainment at a string of 1960s Strip casinos, including the showgirls of the Folies Bergère at the Tropicana and pool scenes at the Flamingo, but also for Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, and Mount Charleston. Yet, surprisingly, Valley of Fire State Park is never mentioned despite extensive road-race scenes there.

Therein also lies a cringe-inducing issue with this movie, and ostensibly something that would never happen in this century—either on the silver screen or in reality in the Silver State. An unfettered auto race on scenic roads of Valley of Fire. Cars crashing willy-nilly offroad, definitely desecrating natural resources and potentially harming cultural resources that exist within this majestic park that is, incidentally, the headquarters for an alien race called Red Orbiters in my Other Worldly novels.

After an extensive internet search, I could not determine whether this Grand Prix actually took place in Vegas in the 1960s, but a destructive mess of a car race was definitely filmed there for Viva Las Vegas. In the 1980s, Caesar’s Palace hosted a Grand Prix that involved the Vegas Strip, and now the city unfortunately hosts the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix.

A few fun tidbits about this movie is that it rendered the existing phrase Viva Las Vegas—as in long live Las Vegas—widely popular. Also, this Texas Longhorn was quite surprised at an early scene in a club called Sons of Texas wherein The Eyes of Texas is sung in its entirely. Yes, I stood and sang along, making our famed Hook ‘em Horns hand gesture.

It’s also funny how this, like many Elvis movies, gave the false impression that one could do many exciting things over the course of many miles in mere hours, including seeing at least six Vegas shows in one night and flying a helicopter around the city with several stops, one involving boating and waterskiing on Lake Mead, which somehow didn’t mess up Ann-Margret’s 1960s heavily hair-sprayed bouffant coif.

The next movie watched also covered a lot of ground in a short time, but involved a fantasy road trip, so one didn’t have to absurdly suspend belief, but it did stretch the imagination across a marvelous stretch of highway.

Interstate 60 is a 2002 “independent road film” in which Neal Oliver, a 22-year-old (same age as Ann-Margret when she starred in Viva Las Vegas) aspiring artist played by James Marsden is plagued with his lawyer father wanting him to follow the same professional path, so he questions his future.

Hence, he takes the bizarre road trip that involves heading west on an interstate that doesn’t exist to reach Danver, a fictitious city, and pursue a mystery woman he thought was merely a blonde model on a series of beckoning billboards.

Along the way Neal learns valuable lessons from a variety of well-casted characters, including Ann-Margret as Mrs. James who runs the Museum of Art Fraud that contains real masterpieces posing as fakes.

Other female characters were played by unfamiliar faces, but highly recognizable actors included Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, and Kurt Russell, not to mention Gary Oldman starring as O.W. Grant. That character definitely interested me because of the “O.W.,” which turned out to stand for “One Wish.” Though he was quite otherworldly. And the best snark in this film comes not from a character but a question-answering novelty toy invented in 1946, the Magic 8 Ball.

As one person penned about Interstate 60 on Rotten Tomatoes, “It inspires me to want to write my own movies.” Indeed, this quirky and clever film so delighted my imagination that it was ultimately reminiscent of a 1961 favorite childhood novel, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Wherein a bored little boy is gifted with a magical tollbooth through which he drives his toy car from his bedroom into the Lands Beyond, a surreal allegorical city.

Curious about how the title came to be, I looked up why there is no actual Interstate 60. Turns out it’s because the US interstate numbering system aimed to avoid confusion with pre-existing numbered highways, and 50 and 60 were already used for US routes.

Don’t I know it. Route 50, which stretches from Ocean City, MD, across the country to Sacramento, CA, has always been a dream road trip of mine. So much so it’s mentioned in my most recent OW novel, Aliens Watch, as a dream trip for Rowan Layne. Route 50 is also featured in the opening scene taking place on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which just happens to be part of Route 50.

One other Interstate 60 connection to my OW series is how Neal Oliver isn’t really keen on becoming a lawyer, a destiny dilemma facing Rowan in the very first novel, Alienable Rights. His road adventure reinforces his doubt when he visits a “law-abiding” town called Morlaw in which every resident is a lawyer so they spend all their time suing each other—and anyone who stumbles into their litigious locale. Rowan’s road trip takes her to the Monterey Bay Peninsula, which ends up being perfectly timed with a historic alien spaceship landing. Talk about destiny.

But now I’m wondering about whether, instead of someday taking a dream road trip covering Route 50 from end to end, I should pen a fantasy novel about it. Maybe I should ask a Magic 8 Ball because I’m not about to gamble in Vegas on it.