User Reviews

TravelTalks goes to Nevada to get a quickie marriage (just kidding). First, they drive to Lake Tahoe to watch an old man pretending to dig for gold. Next is the emptying mining town of Virginia City. There is the quickie divorce and the quickie marriage associated with Reno. I'm guessing that this was a time when Vegas was still a dusty crossroads and overshadowed by the neon of the bigger Reno. That's a bit interesting but like most of the domestic WWII episodes, the exotic is missing.

A nice, but undistinguished, look at Nevada--mostly at the glittering night life where new associations are made and new romances bloom and die in Reno.

The short begins with a winding road overlooking a spectacular view of Lake Tahoe. It winds its way across what the narrator calls "a mineral wealth of land" where the Gold Rushers discovered gold in the 1850s. We get a brief glimpse of a deserted looking Virginia City which was once a thriving metropolis but in the 1940s has become a ghost town of few occupants.

We see the popularity of Dude Ranches rise as women await a period of divorcement by spending their waiting period at these ranches, probably hoping to find a cowboy during the interim. Memories of Claire Booth Luce's wicked portrait of such ladies in THE WOMEN comes to mind. Naturally, we're made aware of Las Vegas being famous for being the city of marriage and divorce.

Nothing distinguished about this short, but the Technicolor views of lakes and pine trees are nice.

Lake Tahoe, the silver mines, dude ranches, Reno -- the divorce capital of the US -- and lots of red neon lights. There's not a word of Las Vegas and the dreams of wealth that draw millioons of people thence, but I would imagine that indicates that the boom of Vegas as one of the gambling centers of the world still lay in the future. It would not be until the 1950s that Vegas surpassed 'The Biggest Little City in the World" in peoples' minds as what Nevada was about. It was all backwards looking, according to this episode in Fitzpatrick's Traveltalks series: the shrinking lakes, the ghosting town of Virginia City, the dying marriages at the Washoe County courthouse..... although the commentary insists there are more marriages than divorces going on there. Well, maybe.

As is usual with these travelogues, the pictures are quite lovely, with many splashes of bright red in the clothing we get a chance to look at, although Fitzpatrick's never-ending, trivia is shouted at the audience, as if they were more interested in the dull recitation of facts. This was produced during the War, so trips outside North America were in short supply for the Technicolor cameras. One state over, mostly near the California border was a memorable journey, especially for the Americans stuck on the East Coast, and even for people in California, with gasoline rationed during the War. Travel wasn't easy, trains were crowded, and after the years of the Depression, hotel rooms were in short supply.

Fitzpatrick doesn't mention these facts, of course. Travelogues might make you want to see these sights for yourself, but for the moment, getting there was a problem. Still, one day, the chance would come to take the journey and people would come to Nevada, but to gamble. You could do that in Reno, of course. You could do anything in Reno, if you were willing to spend the money. At least, so I am told.

Romantic Nevada (1943)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Another entry in MGM's TravelTalk series has James FitzPatrick telling us about the state of Nevada. We start off learning about the minerals in their land, the gold rush in the mid-1850s and of course a look at Reno where one in five marriages end in divorce. The short goes onto tell people not to worry because the majority of the marriages do work out. As with others in the series, this one has been surpassed by better documentaries of today but there's still some mild charm here. There's certainly nothing ground breaking being told but it is interesting seeing how the cities looked back in the day.