Kelly's Heroes

Brian G. Hutton
1970

My buddy tried to get me and a couple other friends to watch this back in high school. The premise and casting certainly seemed attractive, but overall we just couldn't get into it, and gave up. I definitely enjoyed getting reacquainted with the picture, but a lot of it's inaccesability is still apparent. Taking a realistically cynical view of WW2, "Kelly's Heroes" is full of tired soldiers desperate for booze and horny for broads. Clint Eastwood stumbles on a tip that there's a veritable shit-ton of Nazi gold stashed in a bank just behind enemy lines, and with a small outfit headed by bulldog Sergeant Telly Savalas, a stereotypical Jewish shyster (Don Rickles!), and a gypsy-loving nut job with three Sherman tanks (Donald Sutherland), the group decides to liberate the gold for themselves. The morally iffy setup and narrative is fascinating when one takes into account how many tried and true war-film tropes are applied. It's as if years of Hollywood tradition couldn't be completely erased by the previous decade's radicalism and revisionism, and it works to the film's advantage. The depiction of U.S. GI's as something other than 100% altruistic must have certainly resonated with the Vietnam-era counterculture, and Donald Sutherland's tank commander, while never shown explicitly, is clearly a skewed caricature of 60's drug use.