Rat Pack Confidential by Shawn Levy

Author:Shawn Levy [Shawn Levy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007383597
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1991-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

What they were really being paid for

Ocean’s Eleven had been such a lark and had made everyone associated with it such a nice piece of change that they all swore they’d have to do it again as soon as they could. That turned out to be the spring of ‘61, when the original Rat Pack quintet of Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, and Joey were reunited in the desert with supporting players and pals Buddy Lester, Henry Silva, and Sonny King, an old Times Square buddy of Dean’s who somehow was excluded from the first film; they even found work on the picture for three of Bing Crosby’s sons.

Dean and Frank coproduced the movie through their companies, Claude and Essex, and United Artists was chosen to distribute it as part of Frank’s deal there. (As a wedding present the previous December, Frank had given Sammy profit participation in the picture, putting him on par with himself and Dean.) John Sturges, with whom Frank and Peter had worked on Never So Few and who had a reputation as a handy man with a western (Gunfight at the OK Corral, Last Train from Boot Hill, The Magnificent Seven), was given the directorial reins. The script and story were credited to W.R. Burnett, but the film was a fairly loyal remake of Gunga Din, the 1939 George Stevens classic based on a liberal interpretation of a few lines of a Rudyard Kipling poem. Burnett had translated the action to the American West, soon after the Civil War. Frank, Dean, and Peter were the title characters, cavalry officers and best buddies fighting the Indians (just like in Kipling—get it?) and about to be separated by the decision of one of them to get married. Joining up with them was a puppy-dog loyal freed slave (Sammy) who wanted so badly to be a cavalryman that he fetched their water and blew the bugle for them—another role suffused with the stuff of human dignity.

The film was originally intended to be called Badlands, and it was shot under the name Soldiers Three, but MGM had made its own spin-off of Gunga Din with that very title in 1951; the studio kept threatening action against the new film throughout the shoot, and Frank finally agreed to change the name to Sergeants Three during editing. (Informed of the title change, Joey quipped, “I wish you’d told me. I’d have played it differently”)

The film was shot in Kanab, Utah, a small desert town in the Monument Valley some two hundred miles from Las Vegas. There was, of course, no nightlife. “There was a Dairy Queen that was open until eleven o’clock,” Joey remembered. “My advice to everybody was to get two scoops, because after that there wasn’t a goddamn thing to do.” And yet they found their own fun. Frank had ordered extensive renovations to the hotel that was housing the company during the location portion of the shoot and dipped into the film’s budget to pay for it; with their

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