Battle Of The Network Stars

Rating: 6/10 (7 October 2007)

"Kelly's Heroes" works, to some degree, as a war movie not for the "Greatest Generation" of World War II but the Woodstock/Vietnam mentality of its day, released as it was the same year as "Patton" and "MASH".
It's 1944, and as an American infantry unit is about to be pulled out of the line of combat in France, a soldier named Kelly (Clint Eastwood) discovers Wehrmacht troops have stashed a fortune in gold bars in a town still days ahead of the Allied advance. He proposes his comrades join him in a commando-style raid designed to take the gold away from the Nazis and pocket it themselves, before the rest of the American Army can.
Eastwood and director Brian G. Hutton, who collaborated two years before in the near-classic, more straight-laced World War II adventure yarn "Where Eagles Dare", lend "Kelly's Heroes" much of its polish, but it's Eastwood's C-list co-stars who give the film its character. You could call this "Battle Of The Network Stars" for all the future American TV series mainstays on hand for this enterprise.
Telly Savalas ("Kojak") is Big Joe, a sergeant and nominal leader of Kelly's group. Don Rickles ("CPO Sharkey" and a ton of Dean Martin roasts) is Crapgame, a conniving quartermaster. Stuart Margolin of "The Rockford Files" is one of the soldiers, and Carroll O'Connor, Archie Bunker himself, is the meathead U.S. general who thinks Kelly's boys just got a burst of patriotic spirit.
The TV mojo is harder to ignore when one realizes there was a series on CBS at the same time as this movie's release with a very similar name: "Hogan's Heroes".
I especially enjoyed Savalas' performance as the one guy in Kelly's outfit, including probably Kelly himself, with thoughts for the men's larger welfare. A better film would have made more of this tension, instead of deferring to the bigger star. Savalas so often played the heavy, yet he does compassion well here, in small, Sgt. Rock-like doses.
"You're pressing these guys' luck and they only got so much of it left," he tells Kelly. "It's a long, long way to Berlin, and they're going to need every inch of that luck before this cockamamie war is over."
Many of the other actors, namely O'Connor, Margolin and future "Love Boat" skipper Gavin MacLeod, play their parts very broadly, contributing to the confusion of whether "Kelly's Heroes" is comedy or war drama. On the one hand, people do get killed. On the other, there's a lot of jokey dialogue. "That nut has got to be nuts", Big Joe says of Kelly. Or when Crapgame finds a mine and is asked what kind: "The kind that blows up!"
Donald Sutherland (also a sitcom star, indirectly, via Alan Alda) is especially off-the-charts as Oddball, a hippie tank commander, preening and mugging for the camera with odd abandon. Yet he entertains with his kooky relish, and in that way becomes something of an avatar for the charm of "Kelly's Heroes" itself, a subversive vehicle for delivering the visceral thrills of cinema combat while questioning the reasons for war in the first place.
I'm not sure that "Kelly's Heroes" is supposed to be subversive; Eastwood and Hutton apparently say it was until the producers reworked it. Perhaps the producers had the right idea. "Patton" was the subversive antiwar film of its day; "Kelly's Heroes" is a just an amiable caper film that never pushes its luck too far.