The reason I mention this movie on a government-focused blog is that it's very much engaged with examining Atlantic City itself at a particular moment of transition.
The story concerns itself with questions of how the characters either are trying to reinvent themselves or are living too much in the past, and these themes are echoed in footage of the actual urban renewal and change that was happening at the time.
Lancaster's character complains that even the ocean doesn't look like it did back in the old days. He objects to all the demolition and construction going on around him, saying that the new casinos are too "wholesome."
In many ways, the recent history of Atlantic City has echoed his complaints, in the sense that the oceanfront casinos have been too divorced from the continuing struggles of the town. More recently, state and local officials have come to share his point of view.
"Whenever I visit the head of one of the casinos, their walls are covered with black and white pictures of Atlantic City in its heyday,'' the head of New Jersey's Casino Reinvestment Development Authority told The New York Times earlier this year. ''It's like this place is haunted by the images of this city in its glory days.''
The Times reports, "Now his agency, which invests money raised by a casino tax into economic development projects in the city, is using the lure of low-interest financing to encourage casinos to embrace new design standards along the Boardwalk that evoke the look and scale of the city's original tourist hotels."
photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-119722
