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Kelly’s Heroes is one of the best movies ever filmed. Film critics will extol the many manifest virtues of such classic works as Sophie’s Choice and The Sound of Music. Forget that. Great movies shouldn’t make you sleepy, weepy, or thoughtful. Truly epic films should make you laugh uproariously or stand up in the theater and shout, “’Merica!” Kelly’s Heroes punches all the right buttons.

If you haven’t seen Kelly’s Heroes yet you need to drop what you are doing and fix that, like right now. I don’t care if you are flying an airplane, delivering a baby or being tried for embezzlement. You’ll thank me later.

Now, wasn’t that awesome? The film debuted in 1970 when antiwar sentiment in America was at its most intense. A goofy counter-culture ethos perfuses the production. The movie is at once funny, poignant, exciting and cool. What made the film work was its ensemble cast.

Details

Kelly is played by the inimitable Clint Eastwood. A former Infantry Lieutenant, Kelly lost his rank and is destined to serve out the rest of the war as an enlisted grunt. His foil is Telly Savales’ character, Big Joe. Big Joe is the company’s First Sergeant who just wants to get his guys back home safely.

The cast also includes Don Rickles as Crap Game, the conniving supply sergeant hustler; Harry Dean Stanton and Jeff Morris as the lovable rednecks; Carol O’Conner as the self-absorbed megalomaniacal American General; Gavin McLeod as the acerbic tank crewman, and many more. And then there was Donald Sutherland’s Oddball.

Donald Sutherland has played a wide variety of characters across a wildly successful acting career that spans decades. His unhinged tank commander, Oddball, eclipses them all. Oddball is equal parts cynic, lunatic and stoner. I kind of want to be Oddball when I grow up.

Story Arc

Spoiler alert — you’ve been warned. The narrative has Kelly’s armored infantry unit, the 35th ID — National Guard division drawn from Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas — getting hammered as it slogs its way across France after D-Day. Kelly and Big Joe serendipitously capture a German Colonel in Army Intelligence.

Big Joe knows they are approaching the French town of Nancy and demands that Kelly interrogate the Kraut Colonel about the best hotels, restaurants and brothels. As he does so, Kelley discovers that the German officer is carrying several gold bars. He gets the German drunk and finds that there are fourteen thousand more stored in a bank behind German lines in a French town called Clermont.

Stealing a massive pile of Nazi gold seems like the perfect crime. Big Joe is a hard sell, but Kelly’s guys eventually strike out along with Oddball’s three Sherman tanks to rob the German-held bank. There results chaos aplenty, much of it genuinely hilarious.

Packing a captured Luger in his M1916 leather holster, Oddball steals the show. We discover that his commander was previously decapitated by a German 88, but Oddball has neglected to report him dead. Instead, he just keeps his tanks out of the way while going to great lengths to make them all look battle-worn so the brass will leave them alone. The movie drips with amazing Oddball moments. However, the antics behind the camera were arguably more entertaining than what we saw in the film.

Background

Clint Eastwood agreed to do the movie because his friend Don Siegel was directing. When Siegel could not wrap Two Mules for Sister Sara in time and had to be replaced at the last minute by Brian Hutton, the ink was already dry on Eastwood’s contract. Hutton also helmed Where Eagles Dare.

Kelly’s Heroes was filmed in Yugoslavia in 1969. In the midst of filming, Eastwood read a news item reporting that Sutherland’s wife, Shirley Douglas, had been arrested for attempting to purchase hand grenades for the Black Panthers. Douglas actually tried to pay for the illicit ordnance using a personal check. When Eastwood reported this to Sutherland it was the first he had heard of it.

When he got to the part about the personal check, Eastwood supposedly laughed so hard he could no longer stand. He then wrapped his arm around his friend’s shoulders and assured him of his complete support.

Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas were parents to Kiefer Sutherland and his twin sister Rachel. However, they divorced the following year. Apparently using family funds to buy ordnance for terrorists was a deal breaker.

John Landis was a production assistant on the movie and developed a friendship with Sutherland. Landis admitted that he aspired to become a director himself. Sutherland promised that, should he actually someday make movies of his own, he would happily appear in them. Sutherland kept his promise and had parts in The Kentucky Fried Movie in 1977 and Animal House a year later. He also had a cameo on a billboard in The Blues Brothers in 1980. It was also while working on Kelly’s Heroes that Landis first had the idea to make An American Werewolf in London.

The incompetent artilleryman Mulligan was played to perfection by Telly Savales’ real-life brother, George. Mike Curb wrote the lyrics to the iconic theme song Burning Bridges. Curb went on to serve as Lieutenant Governor of California from 1978 through 1982. A contemporary 45-rpm record was released of Burning Bridges as sung by Clint Eastwood. Eastwood also recorded the forgettable B-side tune, Where I Loved Her, which was written by Kris Kristofferson.

The tanks in Kelly’s Heroes would warrant a column unto themselves. Oddball’s Shermans were Yugoslavian Army surplus M4A3E4’s featuring 76mm guns installed in original 75mm turrets. The three magnificent PzKpfw VI Tigers were bodged together out of Soviet T-34’s. The conversions were superb, but true tank nerds will notice that the bogeys are wrong and the turrets are a bit too far forward.

Ruminations

Inspired by a true story, Kelly’s Heroes was an epic black comedy. It only returned $5.2 million against a $4 million budget but has since gained a massive cult following. For anyone interested in guns, tanks, military history or great guy movies, Kelly’s Heroes is indeed a timeless classic.

As an aside, Kelly’s Heroes is also a wealth of some remarkably quotable dialogue. Here are some of my favorite lines, “To a New Yorker like you, a hero is some kind of weird sandwich, not some nut who takes on three Tigers,” “Get the underwear off of your head, enough is enough,” and “Why don’t you knock it off with them negative waves!”

Donald Sutherland died last week at 88 after a protracted illness. During his long and successful career, he has played an astronaut, an alien-infected monster, a Roman aristocrat, a Korean War-era Army surgeon and a WWII German spy. However, Oddball eclipsed them all.