# Kelly's Heroes

Kelly's Heroes is a 1970 war comedy drama film directed by Brian G. Hutton. Set during World War II, the film tells the story of a motley crew of American GIs who go AWOL to rob a French bank, located behind German lines, of its stored Nazi gold bars.
The film stars Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas, and co-stars Don Rickles, Carroll O'Connor, and Donald Sutherland providing the comic absurdity, with secondary, comedic roles by Harry Dean Stanton, Gavin MacLeod, Karl-Otto Alberty, and Stuart Margolin. The screenplay was written by British film and television writer Troy Kennedy Martin. The film was a US-Yugoslav co-production, filmed mainly in the Croatian village of Vižinada on the Istria peninsula.

## Plot

In 1944 France, during World War II, United States Army Private Kelly—a former lieutenant scapegoated for a failed infantry assault—captures Colonel Dankhopf of Wehrmacht Intelligence. Kelly realizes that Dankhopf is carrying several gold bars and after getting him drunk, learns that they are from a cache of 14,000 gold bars worth $16 million, stored in a bank 30 miles (50 km) behind German lines in the French town of Clermont. Dankhopf is then killed when Germans overrun the American line.
Kelly decides to steal the gold and attempts to recruit his cynical master sergeant, "Big Joe". Concerned for his men, Big Joe refuses to risk their lives for money, and warns Kelly against telling them of his plan. Kelly then recruits money-motivated Supply Sergeant "Crapgame" to provide the needed weapons and supplies. Eccentric hippy tank commander, "Oddball", overhears the heist plan and suggests that his three unattached M4 Sherman tanks join the caper. Finally, Kelly broaches his plan to Big Joe's platoon, who—disillusioned with the pointless battles, being bombed by their own side, and risking daily death for a low salary—eagerly join him. After much argument, Big Joe, equally frustrated by their circumstances, agrees to go along.
To avoid drawing attention, Kelly's infantrymen travel separately from Oddball's unit, who fight their way through the German lines and destroy an enemy-held railway depot. However, the bridge needed for their tanks to cross a river is destroyed by Allied fighter-bombers. Oddball contacts an engineering unit to build a replacement bridge, and the engineers, in turn, bring in even more men to supply support.
After an American fighter aircraft destroys their jeeps and half-tracks, assuming they are German soldiers, Kelly and his men proceed on foot. They inadvertently walk into a minefield, and one of the men is blown up. A German patrol arrives to investigate, forcing Kelly's team to engage them. To Joe's dismay, the last two men still trapped in the minefield are killed before Kelly's team can eliminate the German soldiers.
Oddball's group reunites with Kelly's two nights later, bringing with him the extra troops he recruited. Kelly and Oddballs's men battle their way to Clermont, but the extra troops remain trapped on the opposite side of the river after the bridge is destroyed, and they begin building a new one. Meanwhile, their radio messages are intercepted by allied command and Major General Colt, who misinterprets them as efforts by an aggressive Army unit independently pushing through the previously unmoving battle lines. Colt immediately rushes to this new front to exploit this "breakthrough".
Kelly's men infiltrate Clermont and, under the cover of the ringing church bells, eliminate the German infantry, while Oddball's unit tactically destroys two of the three superior enemy Tiger I tanks. After Oddball's final tank breaks down, the men find themselves stalemated, unable to damage the remaining Tiger or breach the heavily fortified bank.
At Crapgame's suggestion, Kelly, Big Joe, and Oddball approach the Tiger to offer its commander a deal, surmising that he is, like them, a soldier following orders, unaware of the gold in the bank. They offer him an equal share of the gold in exchange for using the Tiger to destroy the bank's armored doors. Afterward, the Germans and Oddball's crew depart with their shares, while Kelly's remaining men each receive $875,000 of gold.
Learning that the still oblivious Colt has arrived to celebrate their "victory", Big Joe deceives the joyously liberated Clermont townspeople that Colt is French General Charles de Gaulle, and they block his path in eager anticipation, while Kelly and his men escape with the gold.

## Cast

* Clint Eastwood as Kelly
* Telly Savalas as Big Joe
* Don Rickles as Crapgame
* Carroll O'Connor as General Colt
* Donald Sutherland as Oddball
* Gavin MacLeod as Moriarty
* Hal Buckley as Maitland
* Stuart Margolin as Little Joe
* Jeff Morris as Cowboy
* Richard Davalos as Gutkowski
* Perry Lopez as Petuko
* Tom Troupe as Job
* Harry Dean Stanton as Willard
* Dick Balduzzi as Fisher
* Gene Collins as Babra
* Len Lesser as Bellamy
* David Hurst as Colonel Dankhopf
* Fred Pearlman as Mitchell
* Michael Clark as Grace
* George Fargo as Penn
* Dee Pollock as Jonesy
* George Savalas as Mulligan
* John Heller as German Lieutenant
* Shepherd Sanders as Turk
* Karl Otto Alberty as German Tank Commander

## Production
### Origins

The screenplay was written by British film and television writer Troy Kennedy Martin. He relied on a true story, featured as "The Greatest Robbery on Record" in Guinness World Records from 1956 to 2000. On 4 December 1968, Elliott Morgan, head of research for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, wrote to the Guinness Book of World Records requesting information on this entry: "The greatest robbery on record was of the German National Gold Reserves in Bavaria by a combine of U.S. military personnel and German civilians in 1945". On 10 December, the editor, Norris D. McWhirter, wrote back to Morgan, stating that he had very little information and that he essentially suspected that a cover-up had occurred, which required that the story should be subject to a "restricted classification". He closed by suggesting that until that security classification was changed, "due to death or eflux [sic] of time, "any film made will have to be an historical romance rather than history".
In 1975, British researcher Ian Sayer began a nine-year investigation into the Guinness entry. The results of his investigation, which confirmed a cover-up by the U.S. government together with the involvement of U.S. military and former Wehrmacht and SS officers in the theft, were published in the 1984 book Nazi Gold — The Sensational Story of the World's Greatest Robbery — and the Greatest Criminal Cover-Up. The investigation finally led to two of the missing gold bars (valued in 2019 at over $1 million) being handed over by German officials to the U.S. government in a secret ceremony at Bonn on 27 September 1996. The bullion was transported to the Bank of England, where it was held to the account of the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold (TCRMG). The first disclosure that the bank was holding the two bars (complete with Nazi markings) came from a press release issued by the bank on 8 May 1997, which confirmed that the two bars were those that had been identified as missing in the book Nazi Gold. Sayer had given information to the United States Department of State concerning the two bars (among other things) in July 1978. In 1983, they finally agreed to investigate using Sayer's evidence. The State Department investigation did not conclude until 1997. On 11 December 1997, Sayer was invited, by the secretary general of the TCRMG, to view the two bars in the gold bullion vaults of the Bank of England. In addition to being accorded this rare honour, he was also photographed holding the bars, which he had been instrumental in tracking down.

### Filming

The project was announced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in November 1968 under the title of The Warriors. Filming commenced in July 1969 and was completed in December. The film was made and released during a time of great financial difficulties for MGM, in the early days of the turbulent ownership by Kirk Kerkorian. Location shooting was done in Yugoslavia, in the Istrian village of Vižinada, in the city of Novi Sad, and the ruins of the Beočin palace (in present-day Croatia and Serbia, respectively), and finally in London. One of the reasons for the selection of Yugoslavia as the main location was that in 1969, it was one of the few nations whose army were still equipped with operating World War II mechanized equipment, both German and American, including in particular the M4 Sherman tank. This simplified the film's logistics tremendously. Actors like Clint Eastwood would spend time at Petrovaradin Fortress in Novi Sad during production. During filming, Sutherland had contracted spinal meningitis, exacerbated by a lack of antibiotics, which caused him to go into a life-threatening coma, but he managed to recover.
During pre-production, George Kennedy turned down the role of Big Joe, despite an offered fee of $300,000 (about $2.6 million in 2024), because he did not like the role. The original script included a female role, which was removed just before filming began. Ingrid Pitt had been cast in the role (she had worked on Where Eagles Dare with Eastwood and Hutton for MGM the previous year). She later said she was "virtually climbing on board the plane bound for Yugoslavia when word came through that my part had been cut". In the film's climax, a nod is given to the ending of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, another Eastwood film, including a similar musical score, and the addition of jangling spurs to the soundtrack.

### Vehicles and weapons

The Tiger I tanks were actually Soviet T-34 tanks that had been modified to look like the German tank. The U.S. Sherman tanks were the M4A3E4 variant. Kelly's platoon also drove an T19 howitzer motor carriage before it was destroyed on the hill, as well as several half-tracks. The Germans also drove a Kübelwagen.
Kelly's men were armed with a mix of .30 caliber machine guns, Browning automatic rifles, and Thompson submachine guns, with few carbines and no M-1 rifles. Gutkowski, the unit's sniper, was armed with a Soviet Mosin–Nagant M91/30 rifle. The German soldiers were armed almost exclusively with MP 40 submachine guns.
The U.S. plane that attacked Kelly's group was a Yugoslavian Soko 522 painted with U.S. Army air force roundels.

### Deleted scenes

MGM cut about 20 minutes from the film before its theatrical release. Eastwood later stated in interviews that he was very disappointed about the cuts by MGM because he felt that many of the deleted scenes not only gave depth to the characters, but also made the movie much better. Some of the deleted scenes were shown on promotional stills and described in interviews with cast and crew for Cinema Retro's special-edition article about Kelly's Heroes:
* Oddball and his crew pack up to go across the lines to meet with Kelly and others while local village girls are running around half naked.
* The platoon encounters a group of German soldiers and naked girls swimming in a pool.
* While they wait for Oddball in the barn at night, Kelly and Big Joe talk about their disillusionment with the war and why Kelly was made a scapegoat for the attack that resulted in his demotion. Another part was deleted from this scene, in which the platoon decides they do not want to continue with the mission, and Gutkowski threatens Kelly at gunpoint, but Big Joe and Crapgame side with Kelly.
* General Colt is shown in bed with some women when he gets a call that Kelly and others have broken through the enemy lines.
* During the attack on the town, production designer John Barry had a cameo as a British airman hiding from the Germans.
* One promotional still shows Kelly finding a wounded German soldier among the ruined houses during the final attack on the town.
* Kelly, Oddball, and Big Joe discuss tactics while standing on an abandoned Tiger tank before the scene in which they negotiate with the German tank commander.
* When Kelly and the platoon drive off at the end, several soldiers yell at them that they are headed in the wrong direction.

## Musical score and soundtrack

The film score was composed, arranged, and conducted by Lalo Schifrin, while the soundtrack album was released by MGM Records in 1970. The President of MGM Records, Mike Curb, wrote two songs for the film, with his group, the Mike Curb Congregation, performing on a number of the songs.
The soundtrack was released on LP, as well a subsequent CD featuring the LP tracks, by Chapter III Records; both were mostly re-recordings. An expanded edition of the soundtrack was released by Film Score Monthly in 2005. The main musical theme of the film (at both beginning and end) is "Burning Bridges", sung by the Mike Curb Congregation with music by Schifrin. Also, a casual rendition of the music is heard in the background near the middle of the film. The Mike Curb Congregation's recording of "Burning Bridges" reached number 34 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart on March 6, 1971, but it did much better in South Africa, where it was the number-one song on the charts for five weeks ending in November 1970, and in New Zealand, where it spent two weeks at number one in March 1971. It also had a two-week stay at number one in Australia, and in Canada the song reached #23 in March 1971.
Mike Curb wrote the song "All for the Love of Sunshine" for the film, with the Mike Curb Congregation providing background on the recording by Hank Williams, Jr. Its inclusion in the film is sometimes considered to be an anachronism. The song became the first number-one country hit for Williams.

## Reception

The film received mostly positive reviews. It was voted at number 34 in Channel 4's 100 Greatest War Films of All Time. The film earned $5.2 million in US theatrical rentals.
Film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an approval rating of 79% based on 24 reviews, with an average rating of 6.8/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Kelly's Heroes subverts its World War II setting with pointed satirical commentary on modern military efforts, offering an entertaining hybrid of heist caper and battlefield action".
Roger Greenspun of The New York Times described the action scenes as "good clean scary fun," until it goes "terribly wrong" when many soldiers are killed and "the balance alters to the horrors of war. To acknowledge its deaths, the film has no resources above the conventional antagonistic ironies and comradely pieties of most war movies. And since its subject is not war, but burglary masquerading as war, the easy acceptance of the masquerade—which is apparently quite beyond the film's control—becomes a denial of moral perception that depresses the mind and bewilders the imagination". Arthur D. Murphy of Variety called the film "a very preposterous, very commercial World War II comedy meller, the type which combines roadshow production values and length with B-plot artistry". Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that "the bombing becomes tedious. One quickly realizes anytime a large object is brought into focus it will soon be incinerated. With only one dramatic problem—getting the gold—it is hard to imagine how the producers and directors could let the film run nearly two-and-one-half hours". Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called the film "a picture which confuses shrillness with wit and slaughter with slapstick", adding, "Even the estimable Donald Sutherland can't redeem the picture. Despite his artful efforts, his role as a long-haired hippie tank commander is so ludicrously out of time and place that it becomes hard to stomach in a film in which, elsewhere, two GIs trapped in a mine field are gunned down like cans on a stump. You can't poison your cake and eat it too". Alan M. Kriegsman of The Washington Post described the film as "a case of machismo gone mad," and wondered "how a photographer like Gabriel Figueroa, who shot a number of Luis Bunuel's finest films, among other things, ever got roped into such a jejune, tasteless project". The Monthly Film Bulletin stated: "In terms of rip-roaring, bulldozing action, this attempt to cross The Dirty Dozen with Where Eagles Dare can be said to have achieved its object". However, the review went on: "With all energy apparently expended on sustaining over two hours of consistently devastating explosions, pyrotechnics and demolition, little attention has been paid either to period detail (resulting in mini-skirted townswomen and the description of conditions in terms of 'hung-up' and 'freaked out') or to the script, which is jolly, vituperative, and little else".

### Home media

Kelly's Heroes was released on DVD by Warner Home Video on August 1, 2000, in a Region 1 widescreen DVD (one of several solo DVDs marketed as the Clint Eastwood Collection). The film was re-released again on June 1, 2010, this time as a Blu-ray Region A widescreen two-disc set also with Eastwood's 1968 World War II feature film, Where Eagles Dare.