Ocean's Week: Fifty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing

OCEAN'S 11

1960

Directed by Lewis Milestone

Written by George Clayton Johnson, Jack Golden Russell, Harry Brown, and Charles Lederer

Spoilers: moderate

There was nothing inevitable, I'd have to think, about Steven Soderbergh remaking Ocean's 11 forty years down the line, thereby generating probably the single most splendid trilogy of the 21st century, not to even mention a rather good distaff brand extension that's possibly the best version of that in the 21st century, too.  The original film, it's true, managed the notable-enough feat of topping the box office for three weeks, one of the comparatively few films of 1960 to put any noticeable dent in Ben-Hur's earth-shaking run.  (Ben-Hur, which occupied the spot for 32 weeks in aggregate throughout 1960, went back to it immediately after Ocean's 11's brief breakthrough was over.)  Accordingly, it may or may not have been one of the ten highest-grossing films of that year, but would have to be pretty close to it if it weren't; and so we obviously have to concede it was a solid enough performer, even a hit, it made money, all that good stuff.  I would have to imagine, too, that it had some measure of influence in the decade that followed, which is, after all, the decade of the heist film, a genre only spottily represented before Ocean's 11, and, never say never, but to the best of my knowledge at least rarely pitched in the tenor of classy hijinx that Ocean's 11 must've confirmed.  (There's To Catch a Thief, anyhow.)  It also baited enough critics into controverting it, and declaring it immoral (oh, Bosley Crowther, you fucking square, I love you), that filmheads would probably have retained some memory of it, as a prefiguration of more serious provocations to come.  For all that, my impression is that it had all but faded away when Soderbergh retrieved it.  It's the kind of movie whose legacy is almost exclusively other movies, and when that includes its own remake, more-or-less universally considered not just a superior film, but a vastly superior one, that's not good news for Ocean's 11.  Myself, I'm having some difficulty in deciding whether it's actually "a good movie."  One of the movies inside it is good, that's for sure; but it only occupies about 70 minutes of a, let's say, decompressed 127 minute runtime, which for comparison's sake is still nine minutes longer than even its 21st century remake.

The other movie is the one that comes on first, and if it's not entirely deadly (the movie's quality is at least heavily backloaded), then it's certainly hobbling.  (This review's title is, as you likely guessed, a quote; I don't think it's intentionally meta.)  I would suspect that production history answers the "why" here, and the film has a fun anecdote to explain its initial germination: actor Peter Lawford bought the idea from B-movie director Gilbert Kay, who didn't even come up with it himself, but instead, according to the lore, had it pitched to him by a gas station attendant.  (I suppose the lesson is never tell people your ideas; or, actually, do, because you're probably never going to be invited to pitch them to Warner Bros., and the best you can hope for is that an insider will steal them.)  In any case, somewhere during its period of development, Lawford got waylaid by Frank Sinatra, and hence the Ocean's 11 we know, a showcase for a whole host of Sinatra's Rat Pack pals, including Lawford, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joey Bishop (and long-term Sinatra sex friend Angie Dickinson, if she counts), with a smattering of other faces filling out the titular eleven.  The appeal of the movie—I dare little to assume you already know what the premise of Ocean's 11's heist is—was magnetic, and I certainly think we can spot it that.  When apprised of the project, Sinatra remarked, "Forget the movie, let's pull the job!", but this is, unfortunately, funnier than literally anything he says in the movie, which is by manufacture mostly a comedy.

Anyway, the unavoidable supposition is that the various drafts of script that Ocean's 11 received over the course of a couple of years, courtesy screenwriters Harry Brown and Charles Lederer working from story treatments by George Clayton Johnson and Jack Golden Russell, were steered ever more towards making it a Rat Pack comedy, and the obvious (indeed, only) place to do that was to build out from the front of the heist film they were interested in writing, until eventually what Brown and Lederer had was a movie that, hand to God, does not actually start until 54 minutes and 30 seconds have elapsed, this being the moment that somebody finally lays out the plot of the movie in any detail beyond an insinuation that, eventually, there might be some manner of thrilling crime, which, according to a fun opening credits animation by Saul Bass concerning thousands of blinking lights and gambling iconography, will potentially involve casinos in Las Vegas.

That's an awful lot of runway, even for a movie that does, in fairness, have some need to introduce eleven (actually, sixteen) significant named characters, though in some cases it barely does this.  (There are only two figures that you'd call "characters" in the connotative sense of the word; oddly, neither is Sinatra; less oddly, one of them is Lawford.)  I will cut to the chase: in Beverly Hills, semi-retired crime boss Spyros Acebos (Akim Tamiroff) has come up with a grandiose plan—rob Las Vegas casinos.  He expects to be heralded as a genius for this, but the actual planning of this impossible heist—made all the more impossible by the hubristic need to rob five casinos on the Vegas Strip simultaneously—shall, as usual, be carried out by Acebos's disrespectful lieutenants, Danny Ocean (Sinatra) and Jimmy Foster (Lawford).  The latter is especially keen to get ahold of the cash so that he can stop running back to his wealthy mother (Ilka Chase) for pocket money, especially as she's recently remarried to one Duke Santos (Cesar Romero), who, in fact, will wind up being important (much) later.  The former is pining over his estranged wife (Dickinson) in proper Sinatran fashion, which is to say, with a companion capable of consoling him (Patrice Wymore); this will matter so God-damnably little now, later, or ever that I feel the white-hot need to emphasize how much it infuriates me that we're obliged to wait and wait for Danny to finally receive this story, a set-up of a character arc to nowhere.

They assemble an eleven-man team, including themselves*, and I'd feel very put-upon transcribing all their names, though the other actors portraying them comprise Martin, Davis, Bishop, Henry Silva, Norman Fell, Buddy Lester, Richard Benedict, and Clem Harvey; some of them have distinguishing personality traits, though the only one you can unfailingly tell apart from the rest is Davis.  (The "white people all look alike" joke is stale and stock even from non-white people in 2024, let alone me, so know I'm not trying to be amusing to point out that this film, which by necessity is going to be bouncing around locations that also look alike, provides numerous opportunities to take a couple of seconds to figure out precisely which of its well-stocked cast of tall middle-aged brunets in suits you're looking at now.  This is an appropriate juncture to mention the shoe-polish-on-face joke, so disconnected from any sort of genuine plot function that the over-obvious desire to bend the film to do blackface japery here in A.D. 1960 would render it sour, regardless of how generous Davis is being about it.)  Well, the above cast only gets us to ten, with the majority of them performing more-or-less cog-like roles in Ocean's well-oiled machine, with only Davis's Josh Howard having any kind of unique function so far undescribed, since as the apparently hardest-working garbage man in Las Vegas, he'll be essential for getting the money out once they get it, which is, of course, harder than just getting it in the first place.  But for that, we have our last guy, Tony Bergdorf (Richard Conte), the other of those "two characters in the whole film" I mentioned.  Tony is an electrical engineer who got out of prison, basically, this morning, and is naturally reluctant to join a new criminal plot, but he changes his mind when he learns he has a fatal medical condition and this is the only way he'll ever be able to leave anything for his family.  He's instrumental to the crux of the plan: if they're going to take on five casinos at once, they're going to have to black out all Las Vegas to do it, and sabotage their generator back-ups so the automatic locks don't shut the money cages right back down.  And so, on New Year's Eve, the heist begins.

I practically started that synopsis at an hour in; everything in it that's in the first hour of the movie, meanwhile, could have been communicated in a quarter of one, and even giving the larky first phase leave to be a Rat Pack hang-out comedy, we probably don't need more than three-quarters, and I'd happily have accepted less, given that the way Ocean's 11 goes about its business of larking and hanging-out is mostly just a whole lot of repetitive prank phone calls to Acebos, along with various members of the Rat Pack making sexist jokes that don't even have the basic decency to take on joke-like shapes.  There is never any sense of momentum, and any that it accidentally accrues when we get introduced to a new conspirator gets wiped out with the very next "let's sit around while Lawford, Sinatra, and/or Martin have what certainly feels like an unscripted conversation for five minutes" scene.  It keeps promising and promising an exciting movie; then it gives us another scene where Lawford whines about his mother.  It's not much of a comedy qua comedy: it establishes a breezy tone, which isn't nothing, but the actual humor is tiresome; I didn't laugh aloud at anything until the second, heist phase, and that was at the idea of Red Skelton cameoing as an angry gambling addict version of himself, which has the knock-on effect of suggesting more Vegas entertainer cameos to come (Donald O'Connor is repeatedly pimped by background signage) but never actually materialize.  (Shirley MacLaine shows up, not as herself, but a drunken interloper into a key part of the heist mechanics; it's not actively unfunny as much of the previous material is, but I'm afraid I didn't laugh at this, either.)  The most it achieves, otherwise, is to emphasize (and re-emphasize) that every last one of these men is a veteran of apparently a specific unit of the 82nd Airborne Division, Josh included, and it gestures at and satirizes the old post-war ennui.  The problem is that in respect to its idea that "a precision heist is like a military operation," it's just (probably accidentally) knocking off Basil Dearden's The League of Gentlemen from earlier the same year, which does this one thing (and many other things) substantially better than Ocean's 11 does it.  That film admittedly has fewer hijinx (it acknowledges that "a heist like a military operation" is equivalent to "a heist like domestic terrorism"), but it probably has more class.

There's also the possibility that Ocean's 11 just wasn't getting its principals' best: Lawford and Davis are probably the most engaged of the core ensemble (if stretching beyond the core, then it's actually Romero!), though if I understand events correctly, Davis relieves Sinatra and Martin of their excuse for being tired and cranky, since they were all working around their actual engagements in Vegas during the shooting there.  (And in point of fact, most of it's not even Vegas location shooting, so one just has to assume Sinatra either thought he needed to be hard for this role, or his enthusiasm dried up, because fairly or not I had more expectations of charm from a "Danny Ocean.")  As for its principal behind the camera, this was Lewis Milestone's one major success of an exhausted late career, and not that much for what he's doing himself; at a minimum, the first phase of the film must've bored him as much as it bored me, as there's very little effort to grapple with the widescreen Panavision frame (aside from the superiority of the lenses, this 1960 film looks like a widescreen comedy from the dawn of 'Scope seven years prior), with compositions and blocking permitted to simply congeal for the entire duration of a scene, and a lot of those scenes are just Sinatra, Lawford, and Martin standing in rooms.  (I could express disappointment with Milestone, one of the technical and artistic pioneers of the Early Sound Era; but finding out that "not even televisual, really" is where the world-class black-and-white cinematographer William Daniels wound up after his heyday makes me much sadder, because I have a greater attachment to his work.)

But I did indicate, some paragraphs ago, that Ocean's 11 at last gets good, and this is so; like I said, it happens at the 54:30 mark, whereupon Milestone and Daniels begin to get their shit together, if nothing else just to fit these eleven dudes in a geometrically-pleasing shape inside a single shot, though the casino floors and Vegas locales effectively enforce more multi-dimensional staging in the depths of their shots, and a bit more dynamic camera movement, whether the aged filmmakers felt like it or not.  But that's underselling it, maybe: once the many moving parts of Danny's heist finally receive their impetus, it's a pretty engaging watch, from the prefatory moves to the (false) triumph of the heist's climax.  (I'm not entirely keen on the twenty minutes the movie still has after the heist, but I appreciate its perception that it should be more complicated than Danny counted on, even if it contrives like hell to get there; and however they got to the denouement of Danny's great enterprise, involving some downright startlingly ghoulish comedy, it was probably worth it, with the increasingly-threadbare Production Code turning out to be this crime film's unlikely ally, with just enough force left in it to get us to as hilariously bleak an ending as a heist movie could possibly have.)

But the real joy is, as always, in the act itself, and there's something fundamentally cool about the entire endeavor—the central appeal, I think, and Ocean's 11 explicitly agrees with me, is that robbing casinos is basically just robbing worse crooks of their own ill-gotten loot, anyway.  We eventually find some really fun Vegas atmosphere during the blackout, which is where editor Philip Anderson comes to the fore as the film's most valuable contributor, which has probably been true for twenty minutes already as we steadily build up to New Year's Eve, but he and Milestone pull out some lovely sequence design that navigates us across the Vegas Strip by way of color-coded party balloons (and, naturally, a countdown!) before repetitively, but this time rhythmically, taking us through "Auld Lang Syne" and the moment the lights go out, with that wonderful, crystalline heist flick feeling of the plan coming perfectly together; presently, Anderson takes us through the darkness and towards victory alongside our super-criminal heroes and their fancy infrared technology, frequently through what I assume is actual animation.  (And even then, my favorite moment of the whole thing, and hence the whole movie, involves a couple of featured extras and the film's best joke, about an accidental New Year's kiss, which lets the Daniels I've known and loved since the 1920s come out to play once more, with some wonderfully lush chiaroscuro.)

There's some primitivism to all this, and even as I praise Anderson I have to recognize that there's some clunk as to how this is put together (his strongest, most modernist-feeling editing is, in fact, in the denouement, not the heist at all, where there's some terrific jump cuts that capture the draining anxiousness for our guys).  But it is, after all, early days for the genre, and the rush of watching professionals masterfully do exactly what they said they were going to earns Ocean's 11 some small place in film history, as one of the forerunners of a whole movement of stylish, fun heist movies.  Then the drag 'chute of its endless first hour, not to mention the flippant disregard for even bothering to tell an actual story, pulls it right back towards where it still lives today, one more mystifyingly tedious 60s comedy rightfully cast into semi-obscurity.

Score: 6/10

*The poster copywriter seems confused on this point.

Reviews in this series:

Ocean's 11 (1960)

Ocean's Eleven (2001)

Ocean's Twelve (2004)

Ocean's Thirteen (2007)

Ocean's Eight (2018)