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Brazilian movie buffs often like to count the enormous number of films with a plot that involves running away to Rio de Janeiro. The list is a long one. From The Lavender Hill Mob to A Fish Called Wanda, from True Romance to Nuns On The Run, Rio is clearly cinema's preferred destination for fugitives, criminals and eloping lovers.

It all began with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Or rather, Fred and Ginger began with it: The first time cinema's most famous couple were paired together was in Flying Down To Rio, the 1933 musical that first portrayed the city as a cosmopolitan metropolis and as Hollywoodese for a certain escapist glamour.

The film also helped establish the Copacabana Palace as the jet set's favourite hotel in South America. No sleeping dogs, horse-drawn carts or sombreros here. Instead, the hotel evoked urban sophistication with a touch of the exotic, although Fred and Ginger only danced in a replica built in the RKO studios 9,600 kilometres away.

The atmosphere of movie glamour has never gone away. It still is the top hotel in town, and the only one where the presidential suite really is used by presidents. The gala ball, this year on Feb. 25 during Carnival — dress code: luxury fancy dress — is still the high-society event of the year.

Flying Down To Rio was actually intended as a vehicle for another Rio — sexy senorita Dolores del Rio, who was really from Mexico. Dolores needn't have felt hurt, however, by being upstaged by her two cavorting co-stars, for she was later to earn her own special role in the hotel's history.

Of the filmmakers to pass through its doors, the most heavyweight was del Rio's boyfriend Orson Welles, who in 1942 was in town making a documentary (he never finished it, although the original footage was released posthumously as It's All True). Del Rio called Welles up in his hotel room and dumped him, provoking an angry fit in which he threw furniture out the window into the pool. (As the hotel's movie anecdotes go, it is second only to Marlene Dietrich peeing in a champagne bucket filled with sand because her dress made a trip to the toilet too problematic.)

Another actress to make a splash in Rio was Brigitte Bardot, who came to town in 1964 at the height of her fame. Besieged by paparazzi from the moment her plane touched down (she refused to disembark until reporters dispersed), Bardot holed herself up in an apartment in Copacabana. The impasse was only breached when the actress agreed to a press conference and photo shoot at the Palace in exchange for being left in peace for the rest of her stay in Brazil.

The pool at the Copacabana is one of my favourite places in Rio to have a caipirinha. Inspired by the grand hotels of the French Riviera, the Copa was refurbished a few years back and looks gorgeous inside and out. Until recently, you would inevitably catch a glimpse of Jorginho Guinle, the playboy whose family used to own the hotel and whose girlfriends included Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner. Guinle, who barely reached five foot five inches (165 centimetres) in his Cuban heels, was one of the main reasons why Rio in the 1950s and 1960s was a must-visit destination for the Hollywood elite. He died in 2004 after checking himself out of hospital to spend his final night in a luxury suite.

When the Copacabana Palace opened in 1923, you could walk out the front door directly onto the sand. At that time the beach fronted an unpopulated, empty stretch of land. Now Copacabana is the most densely populated neighbourhood in the city, the hotel faces six lanes of traffic and is surrounded by ugly high-rises.

Copacabana's heydey was the 1950s — two blocks from the hotel, in the Beco das Garrafas, bossa nova emerged. Yet the population who moved there then stayed put and now the neighbourhood has the oldest average age in Brazil. The beach area is full of pensioners and fading grandeur and the Copa is the grandest old lady of them all.

But though the pretty young things have moved over to Ipanema and Leblon, the awesome four-kilometre sweep of Copacabana beach remains a magnificent sight, one of Rio's visually dramatic landmarks that make easy cinematic reference points. One shot of Christ the Redeemer, atop His 700-metre granite plinth, and you could be nowhere else. Similarly, who can look at the Sugar Loaf mountain without thinking of James Bond dangling out of a cable car in Moonraker?

Carnival at the Copa may aspire to be a modern-day Babylon, but it was the Morro da Babilonia, a hill that overlooks the hotel, that shaped preconceptions of the city's hedonism. Rio's social geography means that the rich stay on the flat while on the rocky outcrops spread favela shanties. The poor get the best views, like the ones from Babilonia, which were filmed in all their beauty in Black Orpheus, a recreation of the Greek myth in contemporary Rio that won the 1959 Cannes Palme D'Or. Black Orpheus — with its stunning scenery, mulatto actors, bossa nova soundtrack and voodoo-style portrayal of samba — gave European cinemagoers their first taste of the sensuality of Carnival.

While hailed as progressive for focusing on the black poor, it also romanticized their difficult lives. You wouldn't go up Morro da Babilonia nowadays. Along with their massive growth, the main change in favelas in the last 50 years has been the emergence of the armed drug factions that control them. This story was memorably told in City Of God, about the rise of cocaine trafficking in the Rio neighbourhood Cidade de Deus. You wouldn't visit Cidade de Deus either.

Despite the problems of violence and the financial pull of much wealthier Sao Paulo, Rio remains Brazil's premier showbiz city thanks mainly to TV Globo — the channel that produces, so they say, the world's most successful telenovelas. Just past Cidade de Deus is Projac, an enormous studio full of elaborate telenovela sets.

Rio's centre of gravity has moved westwards from Copacabana and visiting celebs these days are as likely to stay at the Caesar Park, on the Ipanema beachfront. The fanciest restaurants are just round the corner — like Gero, on Anibal de Mendonca or Capricciosa, on Vinicius de Moraes.

However, the true elite who now fly down to Rio do so on their way to remoter, more luxurious surroundings, such as private islands near Angra dos Reis, or up near Buzios. Rio is not where everyone wants to run to any more; it is just a passing point en route to a true escape.

Guardian News Service