Ocean's Eleven
![Watch film Ocean's Eleven — Ocean's Eleven [1960 / Official Trailer / english]](https://www.acmodasi.in/amdb/images/posters/0/2/oceans-eleven-1960-zm6Y7.webp)
Short description
Ocean's Eleven is a 1960 heist comedy set in Las Vegas, in which Danny Ocean gathers a team of ten men to rob five of the city's biggest casinos on a single night. The group is made up largely of former comrades from his wartime unit, now scattered into ordinary, unremarkable lives, and each has his own reasons for signing on to the scheme. The plan is worked out in detail, but carrying it out proves far less orderly than intended. The film blends crime and comedy with musical numbers, and runs 127 minutes.
Lewis Milestone directed, produced and co-wrote the film from a screenplay he wrote with Harry Brown and Charles Lederer. It sits between The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) in his directing career, which began in 1929 with Betrayal and includes All Quiet on the Western Front and The Front Page. Frank Sinatra leads as Danny Ocean, with Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Angie Dickinson and Richard Conte among the principal players; 104 cast members are credited in all.
Released in August 1960, the film took about 3 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds 6.5 out of 10 from roughly 24,700 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.4 out of 10 from over 400 votes. A separate critics' rating comes in lower, at 5.3 out of 10 from 32 reviews, so audiences have generally rated it more kindly than reviewers did.
What's left behind the scenes
- According to Billy Wilder, he decided to help write the screenplay for the film as a favor to Frank Sinatra, who in gratitude gifted him a drawing by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).
- Filming mostly took place in the early morning hours before dawn, as many of the actors had their own shows in Las Vegas during the day that they couldn't miss. The actors would wake up after noon, participate in one or two evening performances, then get their makeup done and arrive on set. Everything on set was prepared in advance to avoid wasting time.
- According to Frank Sinatra, the film's original ending was quite different: the protagonists managed to escape from Las Vegas on a chartered plane piloted by one of them, but then they all perished in a plane crash. This ending didn't appeal to anyone, so the finale was rewritten, and it turned out that the stolen money was cremated along with the body of one of Danny's friends. This idea was suggested by director Lewis Milestone (1895-1980, birth name – Leib Milstein), who had recently attended the cremation of a deceased friend.
- One of the most difficult problems the filmmakers had to solve was convincing officials from Clark County to rent them a garbage truck.
- The relationships between the characters shown in the film were largely the result of improvisation. The actors in the leading roles knew each other well, so the lines they came up with sounded as good as, or even better than, those written in the script.
- According to the lead actor Frank Sinatra (1915-1998), Sammy Davis Jr. (1925-1990) had to be housed in a "blacks-only" hotel for the duration of filming because black people were not allowed to stay in the major hotels in Las Vegas, even though Davis Jr. appeared at the Sands Hotel with Sinatra, Dean Martin (1917-1995) and the rest of the filming crew. He only settled into one of the larger hotels after Sinatra intervened on his behalf with the casino owners.
- All members of the "Rat Pack," led by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr., appeared in this film. The only one who did not participate was Humphrey Bogart, the founder of the "Rat Pack." He was already deceased at the time of filming.
- Shirley MacLaine played a cameo role here during a break from filming Billy Wilder's (1906-2002) tragicomedy 'The Apartment' (1960). She was offered a car by the studio to take her back, but she refused, preferring to spend time with her friends from the so-called 'Rat Pack' (a group of American show business figures from the 1950s and 1960s that formed around Humphrey Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall; in the early 1960s, group leaders Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. often performed in Las Vegas clubs and on television with improvised comedic and musical numbers) and see a show.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
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