One of my favorites

Rating: Null/10 (1 August 2002)

Spoilers!
Very good film. Still one of my favorites. But it is a cobbled together Hollywood vice-president sort of effort, or seems like it. The cast, some well placed sets and production, and music save it.
Nazi Operation Tannenbaum. An American unit, fresh off the invasion on D-Day, now moving deeper into France, grabs an intelligence colonel, somehow captured by Eastwood (Kelly) and friend, right in the middle of a Nazi staging area in a rain storm. They make a break for it, run back to their lines, and Kelly discovers a gold bar in the colonel's attache case. He gets a few details - where the gold is - that it's defended by some Panzer tanks. Off Kelly goes. He convinces the unit to join him in the heist. And ultimately - they gets the gold, and presumely go AWOL to Switzerland. Their commanding officer likely reports them all dead, cause he's a goofball and how else could he explain it, and so on.
That's right. It's a comedy. It literally is a comedy. There are some convincing scenes - realistic big budget scenes - the opening scene, the sort of 60's western gun-em-down with Sutherland and crew taking a railway station to the strains of country music blaring on the Sherman's loudspeakers, and 'Crapgame's little office among the overabundance of crates and more crates at a depot, the army moving up, or moving back, with the planes flying over, as the unit lays to on the side of the road, and many other scenes, as well - like the commando unit/fortune hunters merrily cruising through the byways of assorted French towns on the way to the bank. Perhaps it was slated to be a big budget war film, and got sidetracked along the way - like the plot of the film, itself.
It seemed like a little of this - a little of that. Plot points are thrown out, forgotten, contradicted. And who cares? It's sort of directed for laughs - like the example of the operatic spaghetti western (which had made Eastwood a major star) guitar music (virtually from Hang 'em High) as the main star trio approaches the tank in the square next to the bank. Maybe it's because the offbeat, but catchy music, keeps things honest. Maybe it's because the country tunes sound even better in 2002 than they did in the late 60s. Maybe it's because the actors play it sufficiently serious when required. Maybe it's just following 'Oddball's very competent tank crews and wondering how they'd do under another set of circumstances.

One of the plot points that seems unanswered, beyond whether Maitland really DID report them all killed in action, is how they advanced unimpeded after the battle at the minefield. They killed I don't know how many Nazis of what looked like a small camp/fuel dump. That would have been noticed, and pretty quickly; as would the column of engineers/band musicians that Oddball brings with him - rain or shine. And it seems unlikely they could simply have cruised unnoticed up to their destination, as they did. There would have been checkpoints. Oddball calls from a bar/cafe behind enemy lines, without so much as 'may I see your papers?". They try to put a lot off on the confusion at the line, or front line Nazi incompetence, 'amorphous lines', whatever.
O'Connor plays it up, for sure. Then maybe Archie Bunker was a bit hammy, too. Now his character probably seems more 'enjoyable', because he's so nutty. I don't know how it would have played in the 60s. McCleod, soon to be Love Boat captain, I think, is pretty annoying, playing pretty much the same shifty character he did from McHale's Navy. Rickles is good. His cynical loathing always seems like it's part of him. Sutherland's oddly 'hippie' inflected loner is not quite as well set into the film as in another of his films that year, namely MASH. I don't know if the image of a hippie running a three tank armored unit, gunning down Nazis, yes, but still soldiers just doing their job at a train station, didn't do more to rile the hippies and anti-war activists of the late 60s than it would have confirmed any of their opinions.
Great music (typ. of Eastwood films, by the way), except for Stanton's harmonica playing. Odd mix of carefully overplotted heist film, western film 'realism' from the 60s and infantry WWII film (which Savalas plays up to cliche), tongue in cheek comedy and 'black comedy' (and what have I left out?) and a sense that the enemy isn't so different from ourselves, just doing their job, trying not to get shaken down or left behind, or gunned down like target ducks by Kelly's 'heroes'. When the 'other guy' is the Nazis, though, it's a tough sell. Nazis make good villians for good reason.