Rock Around the Clock
This is a completely negligible movie, apart from a couple of musical performances. There's Bill Haley and his Comets performing the title song, of course, as well as a couple of other tunes. Even better are the two performances by The Platters, and best of all their performance of "The Great Pretender," a song I remember from sometime in childhood or early adolescence. Since I was only seven years old when the movie came out, I suppose my memory must be of hearing it as an oldie on the radio. But maybe not.
The plot is thin, the acting ranges from bad to passable. It involves the discovery of rock and roll by an impresario, with help from its real-life booster, Alan Freed. It's the sort of thing that gives people a pretty weird idea of what the 1950s were like, with its teenagers speaking some Hollywood version of hipster slang that was probably never heard in real life. But as a product of its times it's sort of interesting.
Have you ever noticed how good the guitar solo in "Rock Around the Clock" is?
Ocean's Eleven
Frank Sinatra's music will live forever, or at least until people can no longer comprehend the musical vocabulary of 20th century popular song. And I think he was a good actor in some movies. But portraits of '50s sophistication like this one have for the most part already grown stale. I found it only mildly entertaining. Sinatra, as ex-commando Danny Ocean, recruits eleven of his former compatriots to rob five Las Vegas casinos. But the witty repartee falls flat, the Vegas glitz just seems sort of thin and sad, and–maybe I'm jaded by contemporary action-intrigue movies, but there's really not much in the way of suspense or excitement. Like Rock Around the Clock, it seemed interesting to me only as an artifact of what its creators thought sophistication looked like. And maybe it did look like that, though surely the actuality was a little more impressive. Or maybe not in Las Vegas.
The heist takes place on New Year's Eve, and so the preliminaries occur during the Christmas season. And one aspect of the sophistication that unfortunately probably was correctly portrayed was the hollowed-out secular "holiday" season, with stylized foil trees, snowflakes, etc. the only indication of its presence. That tendency has been with us for a long time.
There's not any very memorable music, either, in spite of having Nelson Riddle in charge. I enjoyed the 2001 remake with George Clooney more, which is a bit surprising for me.
Light On Dark Water 
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