high adventure; Joan Juliet Buck is fascinated by the dash and verve of three new shows, from the reckless lures of Las Vegas to the derring-do of King Kong's father to the dangerous games at British boarding schools.(Las Vegas: An Unconventional History)(Movie Review)

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

Should you think that this is a peculiar, greedy, unthinking age, turn to PBS's American Experience series on November 14 and 15 to watch the two-part documentary about Las Vegas, where, in the words of one commentator, "The specter of nuclear annihilation became spectacle." Between 1951 and 1962, 120 nuclear bombs were tested above ground in the Mojave Desert, 65 miles from Las Vegas. The chamber of commerce put out a series of brochures highlighting the tests. Nevada state senator Dina Titus, a smiling blonde in red, explains in the film that "the mushroom cloud is a very powerful, very sexy, very scary concept, so it fits right in with tourism." Casinos hosted bomb parties that culminated with a predawn blast, and offered limousine service to guests hoping to get as close as possible to ground zero. The press watched the tests from a mound called News Nob, and soldiers sat nearer, cross-legged. Old, and presumably promotional, footage shows gamblers looking up to register the nuclear flash before they turn right back to the tables. There are beauty-pageant contestants sporting bikinis in the shape of atomic clouds. One resident evokes the pink particles of dust that settled everywhere after the tests: "That was all radioactive fallout. We all took the government's word that it was safe, and the government lied to us."

That's as far as menace goes. Las Vegas: An Unconventional History, written by Michelle Ferrari and directed by Stephen Ives, heeds the credo that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Although they keep a fine balance between camp appreciation of the excesses of the gambling city and telling its history, with the pop-culture sages Dave Hickey and David Thomson among their talking torsos, Ferrari and Ives have incorporated the fundamental hucksterism of Las Vegas into the story of the improbable oasis and its "really surreal triumph over the elements."

You watch the old mobsters, early casinos, atomic clouds, Siegfried and Roy, Elvis, JFK, showgirls, and new palaces with the same level of affect, a sort of arrested astonishment that you could call Gee Whiz, one step away from Cheez Whiz. ("Cheezy and darn proud of it!" is Kraft's tag line for that product.) In 1930, 42,000 men came to a place in Nevada called Black Canyon trying to get work building Boulder Dam. They had nowhere to spend their paychecks apart from visits to Block 16, the red-light district of Las Vegas that was unparalleled during prohibition. In 1945, shortly before he was shot, the gangster Bugsy Siegel bought the El Cortez Hotel. Successive mobsters controlled Vegas, spread hotels and casinos through the desert until the place became "the dead end of cool" and the location for the Rat Pack film Ocean's Eleven. Howard Hughes moved into a room on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn for four years and busied himself buying hotels "like collecting snow globes or stamps." You meet the cocktail waitress who enrolled in real estate school the day after her daughter said she wanted to be just like her. Las Vegas celebrated its hundredth birthday this year with a cake that weighed 130,000 pounds. It was prebaked in ...