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Va-va-voom ostrich-plumed showgirls were once synonymous with Las Vegas entertainment. While Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl explores the end of an era for the glitzy, glamorous dancers, the first showgirls were introduced to the U.S. in The Ziegfield Follies, a series of revues on Broadway from 1907 to 1927, inspired by the famed dancers at the Folies Bergère in Paris.

Initially kicking off in 1869 in a Parisian cabaret hall, the Folies Bergère launched the career of Josephine Baker, who made a splash in 1926 dancing topless with strategically placed pearls and a skirt composed of artificial bananas. Fast forward to Christmas Eve, 1959, when Lou Walters — then-entertainment director for the lavish Tropicana Las Vegas and father of broadcast journalist Barbara Walters — imported the sensational Folies Bergère act directly from Paris. Touching down in a pre-Cirque du Soleil era when French revues were all the rage, it went on to become the longest-running show in Vegas history,...

The Spy in Black.Michael Powell knew where he was going. From the first day he set foot in a movie studio at nineteen and was put to work sweeping the floor, he had no doubts about his life’s purpose. “I just knew I was a director, and couldn’t understand why people didn’t stand in line to offer me a film,” Powell wrote of his presumptuous younger self. By 1938, he was a rising young filmmaker under contract to producer Alexander Korda, with the prospect of directing the great German star Conrad Veidt in a World War I thriller, The Spy in Black (1939), set against the mist-shrouded cliffs and basalt columns of the Orkney Islands. On reading the original script, however, he found it flat and lackluster, full of the “pleasant British dialogue scenes” he despised. Then, at a story conference arranged by Korda, he listened to a...