Ocean’s 11
Nevada became a state just to help a man win.
No, not win a game of craps or a jackpot on a slot machine; win an election. Nevada joined the union as the 36th state on October 31, 1864, just days before President Abraham Lincoln was to stand for reelection. The Civil War still raging, Lincoln’s prospects for reelection seemed dim. His opponent was former General George McClellan, whom he had fired. McClellan made Lincoln’s prosecution of the war a major campaign issue. Lincoln and his Republicans in Congress had to rig the game to get Nevada into the union to ensure its three electoral votes for Lincoln. Nevada did not have the required 60,000 citizens for statehood, but Congress pushed through statehood anyway.
Nevada also had a precious resource that funded the Union cause – silver. For decades, silver mining was the state’s main industry. The state didn’t originally include Clark County and Las Vegas. It was annexed in 1867 because why else? There was money to be made. Gold had been discovered nearby.
By the turn of the century, the silver mines and Nevada’s population had dried up. It remained the least populated state in the country for nearly a century until Alaska entered the union with a lower population in 1960, the year the Nevada movie on my list came out.
Since its creation, Nevada has become associated with debauchery, games of chance, and high risk-taking. From its days as a lawless Wild West outpost until now, playing host to Las Vegas, a worldwide gambling and entertainment mecca called “Sin City,” Nevada was the state people go to win, legitimately or illegitimately. No movie brought that reputation to the state more than the Rat Pack’s infamous heist film Ocean’s 11.
The movie begins in Beverly Hills, California on Christmas Eve. “Mushy” O’Connors (Joey Bishop) does a narration as we see him walk into a barber shop. There, Mushy meets Spyros Acebos (Akim Tamiroff), a professional racketeer looking to knock off a bunch of Las Vegas casinos on New Year’s Eve. O’Connor tells Acebos that he can put together a team to do it, he and his ten former Army paratrooper buddies who all served in the 82nd Airborne in World War II. Much of the first half of the movie is just us getting introduced and learning about each of the eleven. The “boss,” so the speak, is the movie’s namesake, Danny Ocean (Frank Sinatra) who gets a call from O’Connors while with his best friend Jimmy Foster (Peter Lawford) and two very lovely women with magic hands. I wonder what JFK’s sister thought about this? The two discuss putting together the team.
From here the first third of the movie is just putting together the team, which grows boring after a while. It does build up anticipation for the actual heist.
Next, we meet Sam Harmon (Dean Martin) who arrives from Hawaii, and then we go to San Francisco, where Roger Corneal (Henry Silva) is looking for teammate and electrician Tony Bergdorf (Richard Conte), but finds out that he is serving a prison sentence in San Quentin. Danny pulls some strings to get him out early though. There’s an adorable scene where he visits his son at military school that melts your heart.
Danny and Jimmy seek out Vince Masslet (Buddy Lester) in Arizona, who works at a burlesque house where his wife is one of the dancers. After he starts a fight with a man who taunts his wife, he gets fired and joins the operation.
Throughout this entire portion of the movie, every time there’s a hiccup in the team’s formation, we get another pathetic melodrama from Acebos who seems on the verge of an emotional breakdown every scene he’s in.
Josh Howard (Sammy Davis Jr.) is among the last of the eleven we meet, serenading his coworkers at a junkyard. It feels like the entire scene was added to give Davis an excuse to sing an entire song in the movie, which, if so, that’s fine. Davis’ real-life partial blindness is also written into the script as Josh is blind in one eye.
From Davis to Martin, we cut to Sam crooning to the maids at a hotel room in California. Enter Beatrice Ocean (Angie Dickinson), Frank’s estranged wife. They’re uncomfortably flirty, but in this quick exchange, we learn that Sam tricked Beatrice into coming to see Frank, a trick Beatrice was onto, and that their marriage fell apart because of Frank’s gambling problems. “We didn’t have a home, Sam, we had a floating crap game,” she explains. She leaves and runs into Frank in the elevator, who tries unsuccessfully to win her back. Danny later gets confronted by his mistress Adele (Patrice Wymore), whom he blows off rather cruelly. She threatens him on her way out. He’ll be sorry he did.
Meanwhile, Jimmy calls his super-rich and naive mother Mrs. Restes (Ilka Chase), who fawns over her son, for more money. Mrs. Restes is now living with a new boyfriend Duke Santos (Cesar Romeo), who suspects Jimmy is up to something sinister. They become important later. Jimmy goes to see his mother, where Santos lets him know he has his eye on him.
Nearly an hour into the movie, we still haven’t seen any action. There’s a bizarre and badly aged scene where the dudebros are playing pool and joking about becoming Senators and enslaving women or something. They’re waiting for Louis Jackson (Clem Harvey), the eleventh member; a strapping cowboy who shows up with a cop, scaring Acebos.
With the gang all together, Jimmy and Danny get to the point: The gang will rob five casinos along the Las Vegas Strip; the Sahara, the Riveria, the Desert Inn, the Sands, and the Flamingo. They will do it at midnight on New Year’s Eve, knocking out the power to the entire city and using the auxiliary generators to open up the vaults, allowing them to steal the money. Several members of the group will take jobs at the casinos to be on the “inside.” Each will use a skill they excel at to assist; Peter Rheimer (Norman Fell), a demolitions expert, will take down one of the transmission towers supplying electricity to Las Vegas; Tony Bergdorf will use his expertise in electric work to open the vault doors, Josh will hide the money in a junk truck.
The most “Nevada” scene comes when Sam throws cold water on the plan, suggesting that the house always wins in Las Vegas. Danny replies that the person who rigs the game always wins, and that’s what they plan to do. Eventually, Sam comes around. His warning though is one they should’ve taken seriously.
Next, we watch as the team sets up for the heist, and we’re treated to another random Dean Martin performance. Meanwhile, Danny runs into Adele at the Flamingo and after a bickering match, he gives her his hotel room key. This is one of my favorite moments of the film. Adele then decides to do the bitch thing of calling Beatrice to tell her that her husband is in Las Vegas and he’s up to something, but Beatrice promptly reads her for filth.
“When I hear Danny has an enemy as venomous as you, it just makes me love him more. Call me anytime, love to have you waste your money.”
AND NOW I AM DEAD. This movie needed more of Angie Dickinson firing off barbs that would snatch the wigs off Drag Race contestants a half-century later.
Now it is time for action. Just the team’s luck though, guess who is in Las Vegas? Jimmy’s mother Mrs. Restes and her suspicious new boyfriend. She’s enjoying a show with Adele who tells her that her son is in Vegas despite having told his mother he was up in Squaw Valley (which, fun fact, hosted the Winter Olympics the year the movie came out). We also get a rather hilarious cameo by a very drunk Shirley MacLaine flirting with Dean Martin and unknowingly threatening to ruin the whole heist.
It’s finally midnight and we’re off. While the entire city celebrates the new year with a rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” Josh and Peter take down a transmission tower and the city goes dark. The vaults at the five casinos pop open and the gang robs them. All seems to be going according to plan.
Like always when you’re gambling, just when you think you’ve hit a streak, your luck turns on you. As the crew makes their getaway, Bergdorf collapses and dies of a heart attack in the worst possible place; the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard. The team realizes when the cops look into him, the whole heist could come out and they’d be busted. Meanwhile, Josh, who doesn’t know about Bergdorf yet, successfully gets the money past the roadblocks set up to catch them and out of town in the back of a garbage truck. (I feel like garbage trucks fleeing town would be the first place I’d look, but alright.)
The owners of the robbed casinos meet and we realize they have a massive problem. The mob takes a big chunk of their profits and they want the money back. The mob is as much a part of 20th-century Nevada as rattlesnakes and nuclear bomb tests. This is where Mrs. Restes’ fiancee, Duke, comes in. A former mobster himself, he offers to find the robbers for a percentage. He gets no leads until poor Mrs. Restes, oblivious to the whole situation, splits to Duke that her son and Danny are in town. Learning that Bergdorf was also an Army buddy of Jimmy and Danny, he pieces it all together just as Bergdorf’s body arrives at the funeral home.
Realizing they’ve been found out and desperate to get out of Nevada with the money, they hide the money in Bergdorf’s coffin, but keep $10,000 to give to Bergdorf’s widow and son. They plan to retrieve the rest of the money when Bergdorf’s body gets to San Francisco.
It never gets there. His widow, Gracie, is talked into having the funeral in Las Vegas as a cost-saving measure by the funeral director. When the team shows up to Bergdorf’s funeral, they realize he isn’t going to be shipped to San Francisco, he will be cremated on-site, with the money with him. The dumb look on their faces as they realize they did all this for nothing is hilarious.
The film ends with the crew walking sadly down Las Vegas Boulevard, the money and their dreams incinerated, just like the many who came to Nevada before them and since looking for a big score. It’s a reminder that as Sam warned them earlier in the film, in Nevada, the House always wins.