Kelly's Heroes

To round out our Memorial Day festivities, let's take a look at Kelly's Heroes (1970). Clint Eastwood and Where Eagles Dare director Brian G. Hutton make World War II into a full-blown comedy caper. The result is an entertaining mess.

Late in World War II, American Private Kelly (Clint Eastwood) hears about a cache of Nazi gold hidden somewhere in occupied France. He enlists the reluctant help of his platoon leader, Sgt. Joe (Telly Savalas), and spaced-out tank man Oddball (Donald Sutherland), recruiting a private army to retrieve the gold. The whole operation builds to ridiculous proportions, with General Colt (Carroll O'Connor) ordering an all-out assault on Nazi positions.

By 1970, commando films were all the rage. Audiences ate film after film up, perhaps in response to Vietnam: simple adventures set during the "Good War" against Nazism were an antidote to the grim, morally ambiguous stalemate in Southeast Asia. No matter how ridiculous or implausible the films got, and whatever the attempts to add anti-war musings into the mix (The Dirty Dozen), audiences loved seeing superhuman heroes slaughter truckloads of Nazis without consequence.

Kelly's Heroes arrives at the genre's logical conclusion, treating WWII as a joke. Oddball's tank crew slaughters a company of Nazis to a Hank Williams Jr. tune; Oddball himself is a very-1970 hippie bitching about "negative waves" and stopping to sample wine in the midst of a firefight; the General listens to radio traffic like a deranged football fan. Even Clint gets in on the act: the film climaxes with a faux-Western standoff with a Tiger Tank. The jokes come hard and fast: not all of them work, and few of them are in good taste, but it's all undeniably fun.

At 145 minutes, Kelly's Heroes drags in patches, particularly in the early going. But once things get on the road, it mostly flies, mixing action and humor with the daffy plot. Screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin builds things to ludicrous proportions, until Kelly's heist sets off an entire offensive. The action is well-staged if cartoonish: Hutton must break some sort of record for sheer number of explosions in a film. The last scene is sloppily executed, going for obvious snark, but it's perfectly in-line with everything else.

Clint Eastwood is his usual laconic self, laying back and taking everything in stride. Dirty Dozen stars Donald Sutherland and Telly Savalas do most of the heavy-lifting: Savalas carries the straight scenes, while Sutherland's spaced-out hippie gets the big laughs. Carroll O'Connor (soon of All in the Family) gets some of the film's best scenes. Don Rickles, Gavin McLeod, Len Lesser and Harry Dean Stanton can be seen among the supporting cast.

Kelly's Heroes is not among the all-time great war films. But it definitely isn't trying to be. It's frivolous fun without the faux-serious airs of many contemporaries, and it can't really be faulted for that.