Kelly's Heroes is an offbeat 1970
war film about a group of
World War II soldiers who go
AWOL to rob a bank behind enemy lines. Directed by
Brian G. Hutton, who also directed the 1968 World War
II drama
Where Eagles
Dare, the film stars
Clint
Eastwood,
Donald Sutherland,
Telly Savalas,
Don Rickles, and
Carroll O'Connor, with lesser roles played
by
Harry Dean Stanton,
Gavin MacLeod, and
Stuart Margolin.
The screenplay was
written by British
film and television writer
Troy Kennedy
Martin.
Plot
The film opens in
World War II France
in early September 1944. Units of the
U.S.
Army's 35th Infantry
Division are nearing the town of Nancy
when one of
the division's platoons receives orders to pull out while under
attack from the Germans (much to the chagrin of the men, who are
eager to get into Nancy in order to find a decent place to get some
rest).
Kelly (
Clint Eastwood), a former
lieutenant demoted to private as a
scapegoat, captures
Colonel Dankhopf
(
David Hurst) of German Intelligence.
When Kelly notices his prisoner has a gold bar, he gets him drunk
to try to get information. Before he is accidentally killed by an
attacking German
Tiger tank, the drunken
Dankhopf blurts out that there is a cache of 14,000 gold bars
(worth $16,000,000 USD on the Paris market) stored in a bank vault
30 miles behind enemy lines in the town of Clermont.
Kelly recruits the rest of his platoon, including skeptical
Master Sergeant "Big Joe" (
Telly Savalas), to sneak off and steal it.
Eventually, others have to be recruited (or invite themselves) into
the scheme, such as an opportunistic supply
sergeant "Crapgame" (
Don
Rickles); a proto-
hippie Sherman tank commander, "Oddball" (
Donald Sutherland); and a number of
stereotypical
G.I. presented as
competent, but war-weary veterans.
The obvious antagonists are the Germans. However, it quickly
becomes clear that the motley band's own side is just as much an
obstacle. An Allied fighter plane mistakes them for Germans and
shoots up much of their equipment. When intercepted radio messages
of the unauthorized private enterprise raid are brought to the
attention of
gung-ho American
Major General Colt (O'Connor), he
misinterprets them as patriotic soldiers pushing forward; Colt
rushes to the front line to exploit the "breakthrough".
Kelly's men race to reach the French town before their own army.
There, they find it defended by three formidable Tiger tanks with
infantry support. The Americans are able to handle all but one
Tiger, which camps out in front of the bank itself. Powerless to
defeat the armored behemoth, Kelly, Oddball and Big Joe offer the
German tank commander's (
Karl-Otto
Alberty) and his crew a share of the loot. They divide up the
gold ($875,000 per share) and go their separate ways, just in time
to avoid meeting the still-clueless Colt who is welcomed by the
locals as a liberator.
Cast
Production
The movie
was filmed in the Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
, in regions which are now the independent countries
of Bosnia and
Herzegovina
, Croatia
, and
Serbia
. This was done mostly because earnings from
previous showings of movies in Yugoslavia could not be taken out of
the country, but could be used to fund the production.Also the
Yugoslav army had in its inventory U.S. Sherman tanks (part of the
military aid packages received when Colonel Tito split ways with
Stalin and the U.S. feared a Red Army intervention through
Hungary).
Several years after the film was released, Eastwood claimed that
the movie studio (MGM) made additional cuts to Hutton's final
version of the film, eliminating scenes that gave depth to the main
characters. The resulting edits, Eastwood said, made the characters
look like "a bunch of goof-offs from World War Two."
There is a nod to Eastwood's
spaghetti
westerns in the standoff with the Tiger tank — a virtual remake
of the ending of
The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly, right down to the musical
score.
It has been proposed that the story was inspired by the story of a
French Resistance ambush on a German truck convoy of gold bars in
Oradour-sur-Glane in World War Two or by the story of the German
Reichsbank gold which was moved out of Berlin in the month before
the end of World World Two, and subsequently vanished. It was an
inspiration for the film
Inside
Out released in 1975.
This film was produced and released during the
Vietnam War, and in the same political and
cultural climate as
M*A*S*H
— the war-weary soldiers who "don't even know what this war's all
about" (Big Joe's words to the German tank commander), the
Liberation of Europe being the
least of their problems as they set out to line their own
pockets.
The U.S. troops wear the insignia of the
US 35th Infantry Division.
The
division actually was in action around Nancy in France
in September
1944. The film also uses authentic M4 Sherman tanks (from
Yugoslav Army's reserves), while most other contemporary war films,
for example
Patton, employed
too-modern
M48 tanks. Such technical
details as machine guns and entrenching tools are also remarkably
accurate. The three
Tiger I Tanks used in
the film were actually ex-
Soviet Army
T-34 tanks, converted in great detail by
specialists of the Yugoslav army for the 1969 movie
The Battle of Neretva.
The movie
inspired the 1975 movie Inside
Out, about ex-American
World War II veterans
who team up with ex-Nazi war criminals to con a former Nazi party leader into revealing the location of a
secret shipment of gold.
Although he does not appear in the credits, future director
John Landis worked as a production
assistant. He also appeared in the movie, dressed as a nun. During
the shooting of the picture in Yugoslavia, he wrote the first draft
of what would eventually become
An American Werewolf in
London.
The film was voted at number 34 in
Channel
4's
100 Greatest war films of all time.
Musical score and soundtrack
The main musical theme of the movie (at both beginning and end) is
"Burning Bridges," sung by
The Mike Curb Congregation with
music by
Lalo Schifrin. There is also
a casual rendition of the music in the background near the middle
of the movie. The Mike Curb Congregation's recording of "Burning
Bridges" reached number 34 on the
Billboard Hot 100 singles chart on March
6, 1971.
The soundtrack to the film also contains the song, "
All For the Love of Sunshine,"
which became the first No. 1
country hit for
Hank Williams, Jr.. The inclusion of the
song is one of the film's many anachronisms since it was not
released until 1970, 25 years after the end of the war.
The soundtrack was released on LP, as well a subsequent CD
featuring the LP tracks, by
Chapter
III Records. This album was mostly re-recordings. A CD
containing the full score as well as the alternate LP tracks was
released by
Film Score
Monthly.
The track, entitled "Tiger Tank", of Schifrin's score appears in
Quentin Tarantino's
Inglourious Basterds.
See also
References
- channel 4 - 100 greatest war films of all
time
External links
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
