Atlantic City Weekly

Atlantic City has been the main setting — or shown up at some point — in numerous movies over the years. Three Little Girls in Blue, starring June Haver and George Montgomery, was partially filmed in Atlantic City and featured the song “On the Boardwalk (in Atlantic City).” The 1944 movie Atlantic City is a musical about how it became a famous resort, and in Citizen Kane, the motion picture that has most often been called the greatest film ever made, there is a flashback set in Atlantic City.

With this special issue being devoted to the 35th anniversary of Atlantic City Weekly/Whoot!, I thought it would be fun to look back at some movies with Atlantic City themes that have been filmed here over the past 35 years.

I’m going to cheat a bit with my first film since it is such a terrific movie and Atlantic City is a main character. The King of Marvin Gardens predates Whoot! by a couple of years (it came out in 1972 and our first year of publication was 1974). I was going to college at Stockton when the school made its debut in 1971. That first semester, the classes took place on the Atlantic City Boardwalk at the Mayflower Hotel while the campus was being finished. Rumor had it a scene from a movie was being filmed on the Boardwalk a few streets down and I went to check it out. I saw Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn doing a scene with a rolling chair over and over again.

The pre-revival, crumbling Atlantic City was the perfect metaphor for this story of losers and schemers looking to pull off a get-rich quick scheme in a dying city. While I was annoyed director Bob Rafelson showed jitneys going downtown on Atlantic Avenue, it is a brilliant film and features one of Nicholson’s best performances.

The perfect film to feature as a double bill with The King of Marvin Gardens is Atlantic City (1980), Louie Malle’s brilliant examination of an Atlantic City that was in the very early stages of its revival. The film features the exquisite pairing of Susan Sarandon as a raw bar waitress hoping to improve her life by becoming a dealer and moving to Monte Carlo, and Burt Lancaster as an aging numbers runner who seizes an opportunity to be a high roller for once when he lucks into a cache of drugs. The film perfectly captures the early transformation of Atlantic City as it was striving to once again be known as “The World’s Playground.”

Many gambling themed movies have used Atlantic City as a background. George Clooney was here for a few days to film a scene in Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and his co-star Matt Damon was a poker pro who shows up at the Taj in Rounders (1998). Paul Newman and Tom Cruise played in an A.C. pool tournament in The Color of Money (1986).

Atlantic City has also been the setting for a particularly awful Brian De Palma movie starring Nicolas Cage, Snake Eyes (1998), in which Cage plays a corrupt A.C. cop who gets caught in the middle of an assassination plot. Gary Sinise (CSI: New York) is also in the cast. Luckily for both of them most people have never seen this stinker.

There is one scene where Atlantic City High School students are shown behaving badly. I was so glad they came up with a fake mascot name on their jackets rather than the Vikings.

Atlantic City was a more substantial background in the small, smart and touching indie feature Duane Hopwood (2004), starring David Schwimmer and Janeane Garofalo. He’s a casino employee and a drunk who really needs to get his life back together. The film was made by actor Matt Mulhern, who grew up in Philadelphia and Longport. AC Weekly loves this movie in particular since an issue of our publication is seen on a coffee table in one scene.

Of more recent vintage, Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston were in town a few months back to film scenes for the movie The Bounty Hunter. A dealer friend of mine from the Borgata told me Butler was a doll when he was losing his own money learning to play craps — the nicest celebrity she has ever met in a casino setting.

The Bounty Hunter is scheduled for release next March.

To read more about movies and other topics covered by movie critic Lori Hoffman under her blog alias Moviejunkie, visit http://blog.acweekly.com/