I recently saw the 1970 movie Kelly's Heroes (or rather, I saw it except for the first ten or so minutes -- cable movies are somewhat of a throwback to the old movie-theatre custom of coming in at any point in the movie and watching it to the end). This was a flick that I'd seen snatches of for years on video-store screens or TVs in restaurants; and it had intrigued me -- partly because of the all-star cast (Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Donald Sutherland, Harry Dean Stanton, Carroll O'Connor, and a bunch of those guys who appeared in every WWII movie made in the sixties); partly because of the uber-late-sixties theme song, "Burning Bridges", written by future lieutenant governor of California Mike Curb (he also wrote the theme to the "Hot Wheels" animated TV series -- the stuff you learn on the Internet!); and partly because I'm a sucker for well-made WWII movies.
Anyway, this comedy-drama-adventure movie is essentially an Ocean's Eleven-type heist movie set in 1944 France. Eastwood, a disgraced US Army officer, learns of a bank 30 miles behind enemy lines that has $16 million in gold bars. He organizes a group of misfits to go there and knock over the bank. In the process, they end up jump-starting the bogged-down allied efforts in occupied France, rendering the clueless general in charge (O'Connor) ecstatic. It's beautifully shot (I love that late-sixties-early-seventies cinematography), has great action scenes, and is often hilarious. Particularly funny is Sutherland's anachronistic hippy tank commander, Oddball.
The movie makes an interesting contrast to the early sixties all-star WWII epic The Great Escape, one of my favorite movies. The theme of Escape is that when motivated by freedom, a man can do anything. The theme of Kelly's Heroes is that when a man is motivated by abject greed, he can do anything. A nice transition from the sixties to the seventies.
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