Kelly's Heroes

Kelly's Heroes
File:Kelly's Heroes movie.jpg
Directed by	Brian G. Hutton
Written by	Troy Kennedy-Martin
Starring	Clint Eastwood Telly Savalas Don Rickles Donald Sutherland Carroll O'Connor
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date	June 231970 (U.S.)
Running time	144 minutes
Countries	United States Yugoslavia
Languages	English German

Kelly's Heroes is an offbeat 1970 war film about a group of enterprising World War II soldiers who set out 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 starred 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

In World War II France, Kelly (Clint Eastwood), a former lieutenant demoted to sergent as a scapegoat, captures a German colonel in Intelligence. Kelly's superior, Master Sergeant "Big Joe" (Telly Savalas), only wants to know the locations of recreational facilities in the town of Nancy that his unit can enjoy when they get there, but when Kelly notices his prisoner has a gold bar, he gets him drunk to try to get information. Before he is killed by an attacking German tank, the drunken prisoner of war blurts out an interesting tidbit: there is a cache of 14,000 gold bars (valued at $16 million) stored in a bank vault 30 miles behind enemy lines in the town of Clermont.

Kelly recruits the rest of his platoon, including skeptical Big Joe, 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.s presented as competent, but war-weary veterans.

The obvious antagonists are the Germans. However, it quickly becomes clear that the motley band's own superior officers are just as much an obstacle, if not more so; the company's own commanding officer, Captain Maitland (Hal Buckley), cares more about turning the campaign into a personal shopping spree than for the actual welfare of his men. And 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 communications between patriotic soldiers pushing forward and 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 I tanks with infantry support. The Americans are able to handle all but one Tiger in front of the bank itself. Ironically, it is the cooperation of the German tank commander (Karl-Otto Alberty) that proves vital to achieving their goal. Powerless to defeat the armored behemoth, Kelly, Oddball and Big Joe gain the German's assistance by offering him and his crew a share of the loot. They divide up the gold and go their separate ways, just in time to avoid meeting the still-clueless Colt (who is mistaken by the townspeople for Charles de Gaulle).

Cast

• Clint Eastwood as Private Kelly
• Telly Savalas as Master Sergeant "Big Joe"
• Don Rickles as Staff Sergeant "Crapgame"
• Carroll O'Connor as Major General Colt
• Donald Sutherland as Sergeant "Oddball"
• Gavin MacLeod as Moriarty
• Hal Buckley as Captain Maitland
• Stuart Margolin as Private "Little Joe"
• Jeff Morris as Private Cowboy
• Richard Davalos as Private Gutowski
• Perry Lopez as Private Petuko
• Tom Troupe as Corporal Job
• Harry Dean Stanton as Private Willard
• Dick Balduzzi as Private Fisher
• Gene Collins as Private Babra
• Len Lesser as Sergeant Bellamy
• David Hurst as Colonel Dankhopf
• Fred Pearlman as Private Mitchell
• Michael Clark as Private Grace
• George Fargo as Private Penn
• Dee Pollock as Private Jonesy
• George Savalas as First Sergeant Mulligan
• John Heller as German Lieutenant
• Shepherd Sanders as Private Turk
• Karl Otto Alberty as German Tank Commander
• Ross Elliott as Sergeant Booker
• Richard Clark as 1st Tank Commander
• Sandy Kevin as 2nd Tank Commander
• David Gross as German Captain
• Phil Adams as Tank Commander
• Donald Waugh as Corporal Roamer
• Boyd "Red" Morgan as American Lieutenant
• Tom Signorelli as Sergeant Bonsor
• Harry Goines as Supply Sergeant

Production

The movie was filmed in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in regions which are now the independent countries of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. This was done mostly because earnings from showings of previous movies in Yugoslavia could not be taken out of the country, but could be used to fund the production.

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 Massacre 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.

This film was produced and released during the Vietnam War, and in the same climate as M*A*S*H.

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, 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 adapted ex-Soviet Army T-34 tanks, converted in great detail by specialists of the Yugoslav army for the movie The Battle of Neretva.

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.

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 in early 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 films few anachronisms since it was not released until 1970, 25 years after the end of the war.

The soundtrack has not been released in the UK.

External links

• Kelly's Heroes at IMDb
• Castle Beočin in Serbia (Major General Colt's headquarters)