Guy Madison

(On Cable TV, July 2022) There are some interesting parallels to be made between 5 Against the House and Ocean’s Eleven five years later—both are about a few buddies teaming up to rob a casino, but it’s the differences that make them worth a comparison. Clearly, the group here isn’t the charismatic rat-packers playing WW2 veterans—they’re young students (albeit on the GI Bill, some of them Korea veterans), two of them newlyweds, who don’t go for greed as much as they approach casino robbing as an intellectual exercise that gets out of hand. Ocean’s Eleven has cool characters—but the plot of 5 Against the House depends on one member of the group being disturbed by severe PTSD and escalating an intellectual exercise into a real robbery, threatening the others into executing the plan. Taking place in Reno also lends the film a different feel from the overdone Vegas extravaganza—the sense of place heightened by numerous sequences being shot on location. An interesting cast also populates the film—Kim Novak has one of her first turns here, with Brian Keith playing the disturbed heavy and Guy Madison as the male lead. There is a bit of a lull in the middle and the ending’s intention to play nice is shackled to a bit of an anticlimax if you see 5 Against the House as a strict genre exercise, but maybe that’s another crucial difference between this early casino heist picture and its successor.