A trippy war movie featuring Donald Sutherland as a proto-hippie GI: Kelly's Heroes

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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 Western (it bears a striking similarity to both A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and The Ugly) transplanted into a World War II setting.

The premise is simple.  The tactically-gifted but somewhat undisciplined Kelly gets demoted from lieutenant to private during the summer campaign to liberate France from the Germans after the D-Day invasion of Normandy.  A German colonel is captured by U.S. forces, and after a particularly nasty artillery barrage which prevents his interrogation by the G-2 types in HQ, Private Kelly takes him aside, gets him drunk and digs some information out of Herr Oberst that is not strategically important to the Allied cause but financially vital to Kelly's.

Happily under the influence of booze, the German colonel tells Kelly that in a bank vault in the town of Claremont there is a nice amount of gold tucked away...$16,000,000 worth of gold bars, to be exact.

Though in 21st Century terms this is quite a bit of money, think of how big a fortune $16,000,000 would have been to a squad or more of U.S. soldiers in 1944.  

Of course, there are several catches.  One, Kelly can't walk to Claremont all by himself and make off with the gold; he'll need accomplices.  Two, the platoon (it's always a platoon) will need transportation and a modicum of support, which will come partly in the shape of a trio of Sherman tanks commanded by a hippie-like sergeant nicknamed Oddball (Donald Sutherland).  Three, Claremont is not easily accessible - it lies 30 miles behind enemy lines.

Kelly, who is at this point more interested in making money than making war, assembles his team of misfits and golddiggers out of like-minded GIs.  Some of these Merry Men in Khaki (or, more accurately, Olive Drab) include the somewhat reluctant Master Sgt. Big Joe (Telly Savalas), the more enthusiastic and sarcastic Staff Sgt. Crap Game ("King of the Insults" Don Rickles), Private Willard (Harry Dean Stanton), and Private Babra (Gene Collins).

Taking advantage that they have a three-day leave, Kelly's "anti-heroes" set forth toward Claremont.  It's not a picnic excursion, of course, as they must engage the Germans in several firefights and even cross a deadly minefield on the way to the huge stash of gold bullion.

Adding to the satire is Major General Colt (Carroll O'Connor), who intercepts Kelly's radio conversations while the latter is coordinating his unauthorized jaunt into enemy territory and believes that it is a brave and unorthdox operation by the men under his command.

Though Troy Kennedy Smith's screenplay contained a far more acid bit of anti-war material, there were many scenes that were cut from the finished movie - which was shot in Yugoslavia - and somewhat blunted the movie's message.  It still works, particularly if one turns a blind eye to the notion of hippies in the U.S. Army during the 1940s, and especially if one is a fan of Eastwood's movies.

Interestingly, though Eastwood gets top billing and his character is the "brains" of the caper, the actor is quite content at letting the other cast members - particularly Sutherland and Rickles - have their fair share of the limelight.  This gives Kelly's Heroes more a M*A*S*H-like ensemble piece feel, and it also shows Eastwood's generosity as an actor.

On the whole, while this movie hasn't aged too well because of its eccentricities, it's still entertaining and sometimes even funny, if in a rather twisted 1970s fashion.

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