De l'or pour les braves

Clint Eastwood leads a fine cast of actors(including Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas, Carroll o' Connor, Stuart Margolin, and Don Rickles) in this underrated World War II action comedy as Private Kelly(Eastwood) learns of a secret cache of gold bullion worth $16 Million dollars. Only trouble is, it is many miles behind enemy lines, but that doesn't deter Kelly, who gathers other members of his platoon to recover it, leading to a misunderstanding with a general(played by O'Connor) who thinks the men are incredibly brave and determined soldiers who want to defeat the enemy, and reclaim an occupied village! Hilarious and action packed comedy with an appealing assortment of "oddball" characters, and nice directorial(Brian G. Hutton) touches like a showdown with a tiger tank that lifts some memorable music cues from a certain classic western of Clint's...

Highly satisfying film may not always be credible, but is a lot of fun. Nice use of the song "Burning Bridges" in this neglected classic.

Kelly's Heroes does not try to trivialize war. It portrays a comedy within the boundaries of war's absurdity. (Quite frankly, I did not like the film MASH because I felt it did try to trivialize war).

What makes Kelly's Heroes a success is that the director never forgot that the point of comedy is to make us laugh. There's no message here; just pure entertainment.

The film is believable because it stretches, but never steps over, the line of plausibility. The story is preposterous, but in the confusion of war we can believe something like this could happen. Those who have served in the military have all met characters like the ones in Kelly's platoon, even Oddball. Yes, Donald Sutherland was clearly cast out of time, from the 60s, but he somehow personified the rebel in all of us, and that spans generations. If anything, Oddball subliminally told us it was okay to view the film from our vantage point of 1970. His character worked. And so did all the others.

On top of that, the filmmaker spent the extra time and expense to insure reasonable technical accuracy. The uniforms were authentic and I was most impressed by the fact that the vehicles and equipment, for both sides, were accurate. (My biggest gripe about 'Patton' was that it used M-41 tanks for both sides, just painted differently).

The structure of the film is excellent. We believe everything is real. The early scene where the platoon is sitting on the side of the road while a seemingly endless convoy of Sherman tanks passes is a perfect example. There may have only been a few tanks but the way they were looped about continuously gave the impression of 'a cast of thousands'. The Yugoslavian backdrop was reflective of WWII Europe.

Watch this film a few times and you'll catch the slight nuances not normally found the first time through. It's classic how seemingly unimportant early events or dialog enhance the humor of later scenes. For example, when Oddball first shows Kelly his tanks he says they have loud speakers to calm their nerves and paint in their shells to scare the Germans. Early Sherman tanks had a low velocity shell that was ineffective against German armor. Later we roar when Kelly catches a Tiger from its vulnerable rear, but Oddball forgets to fire an anti-tank round and instead splatters it with pink paint! The railroad yard attack scene, (which is superbly choreographed, and tactically accurate) becomes absolutely riotous when Oddball's crew plays 'I've been working on the Railroad' after destroying the place and rumbling away.

Don Rickles should have won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Crapgame. He congeals all the other elements and characters in the film.

The parody scene of 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' is superb. Like Oddball, its being out of time somehow enhances its own effect.

I read somewhere that Clint Eastwood was a bit disappointed with this film because he was not allowed to give it one more edit before its release. I don't know how on earth he could have improved on it.

It creates a specific time (mid July 1944), a specific unit (35th Infantry) and a specific place (near St Lo and Nancy)

The accuracy is top-notch, the cast is top-notch. "Oddball" is not a '70s character as he is the Bohemian in all of us and tank crewmen were and are that strange. One tank commander in France in 1944 was known for carrying a colt 38 rather than the issued 45 and wearing cowboy boots. Some did effect Aviation leather jackets like Oddball, and yes there are plenty of pictures of soldiers with beards.

I was in the amry for 11 years and a tank crewman, and we all quoted the movie and we loved the character of Oddball, and when off the line he was all fun and games, when in action, he was all business, just the way real tankers were and still are.

Armor rules!

Kelly's Heros brilliantly mixes your average war movie with a bank robbery movie to come up with a plot that's entirely unique.

Equipped with an all-star cast, Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas play the straight guys to the comic antics of Donald Sutherland and Don Rickles. The movie makes no moral judgements about bad guys and good guys and simply shows the characters of both sides a path to redemption in the midst of war. In addition, the theme song, "Burning Bridges" is rendered with a youthful tone by the Mike Curb Congregation, which reminds us that in reality, people not much removed from childhood are the ones sent into battle.

We cheer when they get their just rewards.

Whilst it would make few people's "All time top ten" lists, I'm hard pressed to think of a film which is so relentlessly enjoyable as "Kelly's Heroes". Part war movie, part comedy, part bank-job caper, the different elements combine seamlessly to produce a distinctive and memorable film.

Clint Eastwood, in an unusually subdued but nonetheless commanding performance, plays the leader of a platoon of restless GIs in the chaos of post D-Day France. When he captures a German officer who just happens to be in possession of a solid gold bar, Clint extracts the necessary information and before you can say "Three Kings", he's hatched a plan to make it 30 miles beyond enemy lines to nab the $16 million stash. He can't do it alone, of course, but has no trouble in convincing his fellow troops that if they're going to be killed in this war, the reward for them should be worth the risk. Enlisting the help of Quartermaster "Crapgame" (Don Rickles) Sergeant "Big Joe" (Telly Savalas) and Sherman tank driver "Oddball" (Donald Sutherland) among others, Kelly and his platoon of ironic "heroes" are soon on their way to an eventual showdown with the German Tiger tank unit guarding the bank...

All too often cross-genre pictures can be let down if the balance isn't right, but that's not the case here because each element is as good as it can be. The action and battle scenes are well executed, especially that in which Oddball and his Shermans attack a German depot. The comic relief is genuinely funny rather than cheesy, and includes a beautiful scene at the climax of the movie which gently parodies Clint's spaghetti-western days, complete with the strains of cod-Morricone music. The suspense is well maintained where necessary, such as the scene where the platoon is caught exposed in the middle of a minefield with a truckload of Germans bearing down on them. And of course there is the ensemble cast, which is uniformly excellent. Keep an eye out for a young Harry Dean Stanton, and Len Lesser, who is better known as Uncle Leo in "Seinfeld". Sutherland's proto-hippie ("Always with them negative waves, Moriarty!") and Carroll O'Connor's manic General Colt are just two performances which live long in the memory, alongside the ever-reliable Eastwood and Savalas.

There are a few points made about the madness and futility of war if that's what you're looking for. Allied bombers knock out bridges by day, German mobile engineers rebuild them by night... neither the Americans or the Germans seem to know what's going on or where their lines are supposed to be... behind the lines our heroes are attacked by their own aircraft... General Colt mistakes Kelly's gold-inspired push for a patriotic determination to end the war, and mobilizes his army to follow him, chastising the staff officers around him for failing to show the same spirit!

But ultimately, this movie is about entertainment rather than political comment. And as such it is one of the most successful examples of its type, as the almost total absence of negative comments from this page should indicate. The script by Troy Kennedy Martin ("The Italian Job") is tight, and direction by Brian G Hutton ("Where Eagles Dare") equally assured. Perhaps regarded as lightweight in comparison to other, more serious "men on a mission" movies such as Robert Aldrich's "The Dirty Dozen" or Hutton's aforementioned "Where Eagles Dare", the film has nonetheless been influential. For example, although David O Russell's "Three Kings" veers off on a tangent and makes more of a serious comment on the US role in the Gulf War, its matchbook plot (ie that which can be written on the back of a matchbook) is the same as "Kelly's Heroes". And in the speakers mounted on the side of Oddball's tanks, used to blast music at the enemy and freak them out, there is more than a hint of the Wagner-playing helicopters in Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", still some nine years hence at the time of this film's release.

In my humble opinion, therefore, "Kelly's Heroes" is a supremely enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. You will be doing yourself a favour if, next time you get the chance, you take a look. It's rare that I see a film and don't think at least once that I'd change something about it, but if there is something to change in "Kelly's Heroes", I don't know what it is. With that in mind, I give it a...

(10/10)