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.

Where Eagles Dare

If you liked The Guns of Navarone except for the plot, the dialogue, the characters and the semblance (however tenuous) of realism, then Where Eagles Dare (1968) is the film for you! Anticipating the Medal of Honor video game series, Alistair MacLean's follow-up to the much-garlanded 1961 film is a mindless World War II action flick, filled with bizarre, improbable twists and turns and scene after scene of faceless Nazis getting knocked over en masse like swastika-adorned bowling pins. It's fun up to a point, but it will disappoint anyone looking for more than just cartoonish gunplay and explosions.

In 1943, a US Army General (Robert Beatty) is shot down over Germany, along with Allied plans for the invasion of France. A crack team of mostly-British commandos, led by Major Smith (Richard Burton) and American Lieutenant Shaffer (Clint Eastwood), parachute into the Bavaria to raid the Schloss Adler, the forbidding headquarters of the Nazi Alpinkorps where the General is being held. Almost immediately, the commandos start turning up dead, and things are clearly not what they seem. A series of twists and turns reveals several characters to be traitors, others to be otherwise lying about their identities, and very little of it is sorted out by the time the bullets and bombs start to fly.

It's rare for a movie to so frankly describe itself, but when Ferdy Mayne's befuddled General shouts "THIS IS PREPOSTEROUS!" during Richard Burton's epic mindfuck session, he's encapsulated Where Eagles Dare in a nutshell. The movie's featherweight plot goes through so many twists and turns that it eventually collapses under its own weight - it even ends with a gratuitous twist. The set-up is silly but well-done, creating mood, tension and character, but after the brilliant scene where Burton confuses the hell out of everyone and then does it again, the movie falls back on endless scenes of Clint Eastwood gunning down interchangable Nazis en masse while things explode in the background. If you're like me, after awhile that becomes tiresome, particularly when the film's incongruities and plot holes start to pile up.

Director Brian G. Hutton handles the direction well; the movie has its share of fine sequences, from the twice-mentioned Burton scene to the epic ice-ax fight on top of a movie tram car, but the hallway machine-gun shootouts quickly become repetitive. The art direction by Peter Mullins, with the looming, cavernous Schloss Adler, and Arthur Ibbetson's imposing cinematography of the foreboding, white Alpine forrests, are excellent. Ron Goodwin's rousing score also contributes much to the film. If nothing else, the adventure is certainly stylish.

Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood are both excellent, playing off each other surprisingly well, and making their ridiculous characters almost believable. Mary Ure (Custer of the West) has a near-pointless role as Burton's glamorous gal pal; Ingrid Pitt (Doctor Zhivago) fares better in a smaller part. The most interesting characters are the trio of Nazi villains - Ferdy Mayne (The Captain's Paradise) as the General, Anton Diffring (Fahrenheit 451) as the flustered Colonel, Derren Nesbitt (The Blue Max) as the arrogant Gestapo man. It says little for Maclean's sense of dramatic economy that all three are killed before the action properly gets underway.

Where Eagles Dare is the perfect movie to have on TV in the background as you do homework or chores. Its plot is so complicated that it doesn't begin to make sense, and the whole thing is incredibly, knowingly frivolous - paying attention is beside the point. I suppose it's fun enough for a mindless Saturday afternoon movie, but at 158 minutes it comes close to wearing out its welcome.