Ocean’s Eleven (1960)

Veterans of the 82nd Airborne reunite to pull an audacious heist: rob five Las Vegas casinos at the same time, on new year’s. It’ll take a lot of people to pull something like this off. Offhand, I’d say ... ee oh, eleven people.

You will find better heist movies. The planning details are pretty nonsensical, and the film spends understandably little time explaining them. You will also find better comedies. It was amusing in parts, but you won't vocalize a chuckle. What you do find is the entirety of Sinatra’s Rat Pack together in one film, including associate members Shirley MacLaine, Caesar Romero, and Angie Dickinson. Sinatra apparently had a falling out with Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis, Jr, but that was patched up for production. Frank and Peter would fall out again later.

They didn’t give Angie Dickinson much to do. She played Danny Ocean’s (Sinatra) off-put wife who loves him still. The resolution to their differences was left dangling, as were other plot points. Steve McQueen, who appeared with Sinatra and Lawford in Never So Few (1959), was offered a role, but he declined on the advice of friend Hedda Hopper who told him not to become one of Sinatra’s flunkies.

Ocean’s Eleven is a pure vanity project. If watching the Rat Pack pal around and giving knowing nods to inside jokes isn’t your thing, then there isn’t much here for you. If you want a great heist film, watch Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). For a better ensemble comedy, try It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). But it is a piece of history, with too many cameos to count, and interesting enough to hold my attention. AMRU 3.