Bars, Nightclubs, and Casinos from Ocean’s 11 (1960)

How bad can a movie be yet look fantastic? Ocean’s 11 (1960) is a heist film famous for its slick Rat Pack, mid-century modern trappings, but altogether a heaping, floppy mess. It’s a movie you want to like but can’t. It has no real highs, no lows, no drama, little humor. Interminable parts of the movie happen at Spyros Acebo’s Ladera Drive house in Beverly Hills, where the boys just talk and talk forever. Even one hour into the movie, they have only talked about the heist. The only real spark of life is with Cesar Romero, as Peter Lawford’s father-in-law-to-be, an unspecified Las Vegas fixer-gangster who wises up to the boys’ heist and exposes it.

Yet the movie has a great look, as the boys progress from casino to casino: Flamingo, Sands, Desert Inn, Riviera, and Sahara. This slavish progression through the five hotels not once, but twice (first casing the joints, then later on, robbing them) is a huge drag on the movie’s storyline, but it’s a great crosscut of 1960s Las Vegas.