1960 crime/drama film, dir. Lewis Milestone, Frank Sinatra, Dean
Martin; IMDb /
allmovie. Old war buddies
from the 82nd Airborne get together again, to rob five Las Vegas
casinos in one night.
To a modern viewer like me who doesn't spend a lot of time
watching films of the fifties and sixties, there's an odd lacuna as
each character is introduced, which is clearly meant to be filled by
the viewer saying "oh, wow, it's (Frank|Dean|Sammy|etc.)" and hoping
they do some musical numbers (some of them do, but briefly). I get the
impression they're mostly playing stage personas that would already be
familiar to the audience, as characterisation is often thin; but even
so there are various wives and ex-wives and such like hanging about,
and there's some attempt to explain why these basically good people
would turn to crime (a combination of missing the excitement of the
war and a civilian world that has no place for them). Mostly, though,
this is about eleven men who, having been through hell together, now
trust each other absolutely, and no outsider can come close.
And of course this is the 1950s version of Las Vegas as its friends
wished to present it, wholesome family entertainment and not a mention
of the Mafia. Which means that there's no hissable villain; when the
casino bosses get together after the robbery, they talk about
insurance and minimising their losses, not about concrete overshoes.
The focus is definitely on the cast joshing around (indeed, most of
the lines in the group scenes were improvised), not on the heist
itself; there's a Cunning Plan, but it's been put together by someone
who's not doing it himself (Akim Tamiroff as a stock comic-relief
cowardly guy), and there's never any sense that anything's going wrong
or needing improvisation.
As with many films from before the 1980s when focus-groups became
supreme, these film-makers aren't afraid to have a downbeat ending; in
the original script, according to Sinatra's son, they all got away on
a plane and died in a crash. This isn't quite as grim as that, but
it's certainly not suggesting that crime pays.
Cesar Romero has a splendid scenery-chewing role as the retired real
gangster who can take on these amateurs with one hand behind his back,
but in the end this is a Rat Pack film first and a heist film very
much second. It's amusing, if a little slow by modern standards, but
very rarely tense or dramatic.
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