Plot
A gang of World War II 82nd Airborne veterans is recruited by Danny Ocean (Sinatra) and Jimmy Foster (Lawford) to rob five different Las Vegas casinos (Sahara, Riviera, Desert Inn, Sands, and The Flamingo) on a single night.
The gang plans the elaborate New Year's Eve heist with the precision of a military operation. Josh Howard (Davis) takes a job driving a garbage truck while others work to scope out the various casinos. Sam Harmon (Martin) entertains in one of the hotel's lounges. Demolition charges are planted on an electrical transmission tower and the backup electrical systems are covertly rewired in each casino.
At exactly midnight, while everyone in every Vegas casino is singing "Auld Lang Syne" the tower is blown up and Vegas goes dark. The backup electrical systems open the cashier cages instead of powering the emergency lights. The inside men sneak into the cashier cages and collect the money. They dump the bags of loot into hotel's garbage bins, go back inside and mingle with the crowds. As soon as the lights come back on, the thieves stroll out of the casinos. A garbage truck driven by Josh picks up the bags and passes through the police blockade. It appears to have gone off without a hitch.
Their ace electrician, Tony Bergdorf (Conte), has a heart attack in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip and drops dead. This raises the suspicions of police, who wonder if there is any connection.
Reformed gangster Duke Santos (Romero) offers to recover the casino bosses' money for a price. He learns of Ocean being in town and his connection to Foster, who is the son of Duke's fiancee. Santos pieces together the puzzle by the time Bergdorf's body arrives at the mortuary.
Santos confronts the thieves, demanding half of their take. In desperation, the money is hidden in Bergdorf's coffin, with $10,000 set aside for the widow (Willes). The group plans to take back the rest of the money, making no payoff to Santos, after the coffin is shipped to San Francisco.
This plan backfires when the funeral home talks Bergdorf's widow into having the funeral in Las Vegas, where the body is cremated – along with all the money.
Read more about this topic: Ocean's 11 (1960 film)
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
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—John Dryden (1631–1700)