Movies - Kelly's Heroes

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	Movies - Kelly's Heroes

Kelly's Heroes is an offbeat 1970 film starring Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, and Carroll O'Connor (and featuring a number of stereotypical GI "grunts") about a group of renegade U.S. Army soldiers who, while supposedly on R & R, sneak off and attempt to steal a cache of gold from behind the German lines during World War II. The screenplay was written by highly-respected British film and television writer Troy Kennedy Martin.

It was filmed in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Tagline: They set out to rob a bank... and damn near won a war instead!

Directed by Brian G. Hutton, who also directed the 1968 WW II drama Where Eagles Dare
, the film is virtually a who's who of Hollywood at that time - in addition to Eastwood and Sutherland, it starred Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Carroll O'Connor and (Harry) Dean Stanton with a small part by Gavin MacLeod (who would later play Captain Stubing on The Love Boat).

It stands out from many earlier and contemporary war films in both its cynical tone and mixed conflict as well as in its technical detail.

While its technical realism pales in comparison to Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, it drew and continues to draw attention for its props and historical details. At a time when some of the best selling war movies used anachronistic tanks, for example, in Heroes the Tiger tanks (which play a key role in the climax of the film) are well done mock-ups down to smoke dischargers in the right place and the appearance of anti-magnetic mine paste visible in close ups. The "Tigers" were in fact based on Russian T-34 tanks, since not one of the original Tigers which have survived WW2 are in driveable condition. Exactly the same thing was done 28 years later to reproduce a Tiger for the filming of Saving Private Ryan.

The film can be said to walk an interesting tightrope. There is a great deal of comedy and satire in the film ranging from a nod to Eastwood's spaghetti westerns in a "High Noon" standoff with a Tiger tank to Carroll O'Connor's satire of Patton. This film was produced and released during the Vietnam War and in the same climate as M*A*S*H: some see the theme of cynicism as disguised comment.

The Heroes are presented as competent, if weary veterans; their motivations are more cynical and self-serving than patriotic. That is a central plot line of the film: the Heroes are attempting the "perfect crime" while their superiors are both: indifferent to the protagonists, and mistaking their motivation for patriotic gung ho. Highlighting this theme is the range of antagonists the Heroes face. The Heroes' antagonists are often men in the same uniform--US. There are combat scenes with the German enemy to be sure, yet, ultimately, it is in common cause with a man in an SS uniform that the last conflict is resolved.

This unique film has something of a cult status in the US, and its reputation is helped along by a bevy of readily quotable lines. The more notable being from Sutherland's character, Oddball, a slightly anachronistic "hippie" tank commander in a reprimand to his mechanic "Always with the negative waves, Moriarity, ALWAYS with the negative waves!."

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.

Trivia

The sequence containing the 'homage' to Eastwood's spaghetti westerns over-dubs the sound of non-existent spurs onto the footsteps of Eastwood, Savalas, and Sutherland's characters' as they walk up the street towards the Tiger tank commander.

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