Welcome to Saturday Night of the Movies.

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is the original Ocean's 11 directed by Lewis Milestone and released by Warner Brothers in 1960.

Ocean's 11 stars five members of the so-called Rat Pack, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop.

The cast also features Angie Dickinson, Cesar Romero, Richard Conte, and Akim Tamiroff with cameos by George Raft, Red Skelton and Shirley MacLaine.

There are also a lot of other famous names including Harry James, Danny Thomas, and Louis Prima but only their names appear displayed on marquee's outside various Las Vegas casinos.

Danny Ocean, a gambler, and Jimmy Foster, a Playboy are former members of the Commando Unit of the 82nd Airborne who served behind enemy lines during the second World War.

The two of them have a plan for a heist cooked up by Spyros Acebos, a nervous and easily riled older man, but Danny and Jimmy are the ones who will put the plan into action.

Because the plan requires military precision and specialized talent to work, they recruit nine other veterans of their old commando unit to help them pull it off.

Those men all went there separate ways after the war and after 15 years, they've lost touch and some have had more personal success than others.

But they all know and trust Danny Ocean, and one way or another they reunite.

With a group finally assembled, Danny reveals just how big the scheme really is.

With each man playing his assigned part, they will steal and abscond with millions of dollars by robbing five Las Vegas casinos, the Sahara, the Riviera, the Desert Inn, the Sands, and the Flamingo.

And they're going to rob all five of them at the same time on the biggest night of the year, New Year's Eve.

Las Vegas, Nevada was at the height of its post-war boom when Ocean's 11 was made.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its connections with organized crime, Las Vegas became a desert oasis for big spenders throughout the Southwest.

Legal gambling meant millions of people visiting every year and hundreds of millions of dollars won and lost at the gaming tables of its most famous casinos.

But those casinos had more to offer than just a good way to lose a lot of money quickly.

The most famous entertainers in show business people like Bing Crosby, Carol Chaney, Liberace, and of course Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr., would perform in intimate venues that offered lots of food, liquor, and beautiful showgirls.

The first topless review Minsky's Follies debuted in 1957 followed the next year by Lido de Paris at the Stardust.

Elvis Presley had his first Las Vegas show at The New Frontier in 1956, and Wayne Newton first appeared at the Carnival Lounge at the Fremont in 1959.

By 1960, a particular attitude about the ways of the city was already fully formed.

An attitude later summarized in the tourist slogan "What Happens in Vegas stays in Vegas".

But the real entertainment kings of Las Vegas in 1960 were the members of the Rat Pack, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop.

Others sometime associates in the sixties, the Rat Pack mascots included Angie Dickinson, Marilyn Monroe, Buddy Greco, Juliet Prowse and Shirley MacLaine.

Don Rickles was around too mostly because Sinatra thought he was funny.

The Rat Pack defined a very specific idea of cool in the late fifties and early sixties.

A kind of cool that was also promoted by Hugh Hefner in Playboy Magazine beginning in 1953.

It involved wearing the right clothes, listening to the right music, driving the right sports car and enjoying a form of male centered sexual freedom that treated women as more or less interchangeable potential sex partners always threatening to deprive a man of his freedom.

That kind of cool is on full display in Ocean's 11.

And like the Las Vegas, where it takes place is part of a post-war America that for better or worse is long gone.

Since Ocean's 11 was made in 1960, it was inevitable that the heist at the center of the film would fail and no one would end up with any of the stolen money.

The Hollywood Production Code, which was followed by all major motion picture studios between 1934 and 1968 stipulated that no one in a film could profit from a crime.

All the heist films made in Hollywood during those 34 years ended at the very least with the heist somehow going wrong.

Although we might find the standards of the Hollywood Production Code rather old fashioned, several critics who reviewed Ocean's 11 objected to the films apparent lack of moral content.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times complained, "There is no built in implication that the boys have done something wrong.

There is just an ironic, unexpected and decidedly ghoulish twist whereby they are deprived of their pickings and what seems they're just desserts.

This is the flaw in the picture."

Leo Sullivan on the Washington Post said "Ocean's 11 was nothing more than a whopping sick joke in technic color.

It's a completely amoral tale told for laughs."

Frank Sinatra Jr. revealed in a DVD commentary for Ocean's 11 that at first the story ended with Danny Ocean and his friends flying the money out of Las Vegas on a charter plane, but their plan was foiled when the plane crashed and everyone on board was killed.

Needless to say, this setting was considered too downbeat and downright depressing for such a lighthearted film.

Director Lewis Milestone came up with the alternative idea of the gang hiding the stolen money in Tony Bergdof's coffin and the money going up in flames when Tony's body is cremated.

That decidedly ghoulish twist, macabre as it is, is still certainly better than all of the major characters dying in a plane crash.

The success of the film was due in no small part to the members of the Rat Pack, essentially playing themselves.

Much of the dialogue among them was improvised.

Both Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin sing a catchy song during the movie leading Variety to observe, "It was frequently one resident wise crack away from turning into a musical comedy."

In fact, several of the stars were performing in Las Vegas every night at the same time the movie was being made.

Shirley MacLaine was a cameo as the tipsy woman who accost Dean Martin at a vital point of the plot, was taking a break from her starring role in Billy Wilder's, The Apartment at the time.

She later said she only took the job on Ocean's 11, so she could hang out with her friends in the Rat pack and see them perform.

With the stars doing double duty on stage and on film, shooting the movie was often a logistical nightmare, with different actors showing up for work at different times.

Joy Bishop would be ready at 9:00 AM, Peter Lawford would only work in the morning.

Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. would arrive in the afternoon and Frank Sinatra would be last showing up at 5:00 PM.

To make sure no time was lost once the actors were available, the crew had to make sure every aspect of a shot was fully prepared in advance.

In the end, the entire group of men who made up Oceans 11 only appeared together in two scenes, one at Spyros Acebos' house and the other at a bowling alley.

They also appear together at the very end of the film, but by that time their numbers have been diminished to Ocean's 10.

Although Ocean's 11 is a Rat Pack movie, that doesn't mean that group was as tightly knit as later legend would have it.

At the time of the film was made Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford were at odds because Lawford dated Ava Gardner both before and after her rocky marriage to Sinatra.

Lawford also didn't get along well with Dean Martin.

Sammy Davis Jr. was not yet as close to Sinatra as he later would be.

And there was a clear hierarchy among the Rat Pack's members.

At the same time, it was Frank Sinatra who interceded with the owners of the Sands when Sammy Davis Jr. was not allowed to stay at the hotel during the filming.

Like other African Americans, Davis was barred from staying in any of the major hotels in Las Vegas.

Their alternative was Mrs. Harrison's boarding house in the West Side District.

Most of the African American entertainers who performed in Las Vegas would stay there, and as a result the boarding house is now a designated historical site.

As it happened, Sinatra's intervention both got Davis into the Sands and broke the Las Vegas casinos unofficial color barrier.

Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.