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.

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.