Gateway Cinephiles

3-Minute Intro: Ocean’s Eleven

Screened: August 10, 2008
Format: DVD - Warner Brothers (2008)
Selected By: Curt

While there are caper films that surpass Ocean’s Eleven, few films so perfectly embody the all-or-nothing spirit of Las Vegas, that oasis of wild-eyed opportunism and frank fatalism. Moreover, few films can claim with both justification and pride—and a bit of hindsight—to sit at the center of an American pop culture phenomenon. So it is with Lewis Milestone’s 1960 Eleven, which brought together for their first feature the most renowned version of the Rat Pack, a loose affiliation of entertainers who took Sin City by storm. And while Eleven featured a swath of famous faces from the era—Angie Dickinson, Cesar Romero, Henry Silva, even a cameo from Shirley MacLaine—the Rat Pack is at the glittering center of the film.

The 1960s Pack that inhabits Ocean’s Eleven—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford—was but the most recent iteration of a social gathering that once orbited around Humphrey Bogart and a younger Sinatra. There were other luminaries in this earlier version, and more women as well: Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, David Niven, and other Classical Hollywood veterans. The later 1960’s incarnation of the Pack might have been a Hollywood institution, but members played Las Vegas frequently, and their appearances there became so legendary and popular that the gathering became a part of the city’s entertainment identity. The group was also a force in first Democratic and then Republican politics, owing to Sinatra’s mafia allies and Lawford’s ties as John F. Kennedy’s brother-in-law.

Russian by birth, Ocean’s Eleven director Lewis Milestone served in the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps before heading out to Hollywood. A Howard Hughes protégé, Milestone eventually became known as a studio workhorse with a flair for war features. He would arguably attain his career triumph in 1930 with All Quiet of the Western Front, but Milestone continued to direct for another three decades. Ocean’s Eleven allegedly had its origin when writer Jack Golden Russell, then a gas station attendant, handed the script to Sinatra. Script aside, however, the pleasure of Eleven rests on the Rat Pack ad-libbing their way through a two hour on-location romp in the Sin City they worked and loved tirelessly.