A trippy war movie featuring Donald Sutherland as a proto-hippie GI: Kelly's Heroes
One of the great truths in life is that all art, as writer-director Nicholas Meyer ( Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ) is fond of saying, reflects the times in which is it created. A good example of this is 1970's Kelly's Heroes, a wry, dark, and sometimes downright daffy caper-comedy set in World War II. Starring Clint Eastwood as an oft-busted ex-lieutenant-but-now Private Kelly, Kelly's Heroes is not so much a giddy Blake Edwards-inspired World War II comedy a la What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? but more of a Vietnam War-era revision of all those war movies wherein the G.I.s are always portrayed as imperfect but well-meaning "angels in battle dress and helmets" who are fighting to liberate Western Europe from Nazi tyranny. Kelly's Heroes, directed by Brian G. Hutton, whol made only a handful of fair-to-middling features and a score or so TV episodes of various series before switching careers to plumbing, is essentially a Sergio Leone spaghetti West