KELLY'S HEROES (1970)

KELLY'S HEROES is a 1970 World War II comedy-drama heist film, directed by Brian G. Hutton, about a motley crew of American GIs who go AWOL in order to rob a French bank, located behind German lines, of its stored Nazi gold bars.

The film stars Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas, and co-stars Don Rickles, Carroll O'Connor, and Donald Sutherland providing the comic absurdity, with secondary, comedic roles by Harry Dean Stanton, Gavin MacLeod, Karl-Otto Alberty, and Stuart Margolin. The screenplay was written by British film and television writer Troy Kennedy Martin. The film was a US-Yugoslav co-production, filmed mainly in the Croatian village of Vižinada on the Istria peninsula.

Plot
During a thunderstorm in early September 1944, units of the 35th Infantry Division are nearing the French town of Nancy. One of the division's mechanized reconnaissance platoons is ordered to hold their position when the Germans counterattack. The outnumbered platoon is also hit by friendly fire from their own mortars.

Private Kelly, a former lieutenant scapegoated for a failed infantry assault, captures Colonel Dankhopf of Wehrmacht Intelligence. Interrogating his prisoner, Kelly notices the officer's briefcase has several gold bars disguised under lead plating. Curious, he gets the colonel drunk and learns that there is a cache of 14,000 gold bars, worth $16 million (about $280 million in 2023), stored in a bank vault 30 miles (50 km) behind German lines in the French town of Clermont. When their position is overrun and the Americans pull back, a Tiger I tank kills Dankhopf.

Kelly decides to steal the gold. He recruits Supply Sergeant "Crapgame" in order to obtain the supplies and the weapons needed. A spaced-out tank commander known as "Oddball" overhears the heist plan and suggests that his three unattached M4 Sherman tanks join the caper. With their commanding officer, Captain Maitland, preoccupied with visiting his uncle "The General" (and stealing a yacht), the members of Kelly's platoon are all eager to join Kelly in the heist. After much argument, Kelly finally persuades cynical Master Sergeant "Big Joe" to go along.

Kelly decides that his infantrymen and Oddball's tanks and crew will proceed separately and meet near Clermont. The Shermans fight their way through the German lines, destroying a railway depot in the process, but the bridge that they must cross is blown up by Allied fighter-bombers. Oddball contacts an engineering unit to build a bridge for the crossing, and the engineers in turn bring in even more men to supply support.

After losing their jeeps and half-tracks to friendly fire from an American fighter aircraft that mistakes them for German soldiers, Kelly and his men proceed on foot. They walk into a minefield, and Private Grace is blown up when he steps on a mine. Forced to engage a German patrol that arrives to investigate the explosion, the last two men still trapped in the minefield, PFC Mitchell and Corporal Job, are killed before Kelly's team can eliminate the German soldiers.

Oddball links up with Kelly two nights later, bringing with him the extra troops that he has acquired, and they battle their way across the river to Clermont. By this time, intercepted radio messages attract the notice of Major General Colt, who misinterprets them as efforts by an aggressive Army unit pushing forward on their own initiative and immediately rushes to the new front to exploit this "breakthrough."

Clermont is defended by three Tiger I tanks of the 1st SS Panzer Division and its infantry support. The Americans are able to eliminate the German infantry and two of the Tigers, but the final tank parks itself right in front of the bank after Oddball's last Sherman breaks down, leaving them stalemated. At Crapgame’s suggestion, Kelly, Big Joe, and Oddball approach the Tiger and offer the commander and his crew "a deal-deal": equal shares of the gold if the Tiger will shoot the armored doors off the bank.

After the Tiger blows the bank doors open, the German and American soldiers divide the spoils, each gold share amounting to $875,000 (about $15 million in 2023). They go their separate ways, just barely ahead of the still-oblivious General Colt. Colt's way into Clermont has been blocked by the joyous crowd of relieved French residents, who have been deceived by Big Joe into thinking that Colt is French Gen. Charles de Gaulle.

Cast
Clint Eastwood as Kelly
Telly Savalas as "Big Joe"
Don Rickles as "Crapgame"
Carroll O'Connor as General Colt
Donald Sutherland as "Oddball"
Gavin MacLeod as Moriarty
Hal Buckley as Maitland
Stuart Margolin as Little Joe
Jeff Morris as "Cowboy"
Richard Davalos as Gutkowski
Perry Lopez as Pachuco (misspelled in the credits as "Petuko")
Tom Troupe as Job
Harry Dean Stanton as Willard (credited as Dean Stanton)
Dick Balduzzi as Fisher
Gene Collins as Babra
Len Lesser as Bellamy
David Hurst as Colonel Dankhopf (credited on screen as "Colonel Dummkopf").
Fred Pearlman as Mitchell
Michael Clark as Grace
George Fargo as Penn
Dee Pollock as "Jonesy" Jones
George Savalas as Mulligan
John Heller as German Lieutenant
Shepherd Sanders as "Turk"
Karl Otto Alberty as German Tank Commander

Reception
The film received mostly positive reviews. It was voted at number 34 in Channel 4's 100 Greatest War Films of All Time. The film earned $5.2 million in US theatrical rentals.

Film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an approval rating of 79% based on 24 reviews, with an average rating of 6.8/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Kelly's Heroes subverts its World War II setting with pointed satirical commentary on modern military efforts, offering an entertaining hybrid of heist caper and battlefield action".

Roger Greenspun of The New York Times described the action scenes as "good clean scary fun," until it goes "terribly wrong" when many soldiers are killed and "the balance alters to the horrors of war. To acknowledge its deaths the film has no resources above the conventional antagonistic ironies and comradely pieties of most war movies. And since its subject is not war, but burglary masquerading as war, the easy acceptance of the masquerade—which is apparently quite beyond the film's control—becomes a denial of moral perception that depresses the mind and bewilders the imagination". Arthur D. Murphy of Variety called the film "a very preposterous, very commercial World War II comedy meller, the type which combines roadshow production values and length with B-plot artistry". Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that "the bombing becomes tedious. One quickly realizes anytime a large object is brought into focus it will soon be incinerated. With only one dramatic problem—getting the gold—it is hard to imagine how the producers and directors could let the film run nearly two-and-one-half hours". Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called the film "a picture which confuses shrillness with wit and slaughter with slapstick", adding, "Even the estimable Donald Sutherland can't redeem the picture. Despite his artful efforts, his role as a long-haired hippie tank commander is so ludicrously out of time and place that it becomes hard to stomach in a film in which, elsewhere, two GIs trapped in a mine field are gunned down like cans on a stump. You can't poison your cake and eat it too".
Alan M. Kriegsman of The Washington Post described the film as "a case of machismo gone mad," and wondered "how a photographer like Gabriel Figueroa, who shot a number of Luis Bunuel's finest films, among other things, ever got roped into such a jejune, tasteless project". The Monthly Film Bulletin stated that "In terms of rip-roaring, bulldozing action, this attempt to cross The Dirty Dozen with Where Eagles Dare can be said to have achieved its object". However, the review went on, "With all energy apparently expended on sustaining over two hours of consistently devastating explosions, pyrotechnics and demolition, little attention has been paid either to period detail (resulting in mini-skirted townswomen and the description of conditions in terms of 'hung-up' and 'freaked out') or to the script, which is jolly, vituperative, and little else".