Kelly's Heroes (1970)
This isn't Geneva, Colonel.
THE SUMMARY: A demoted American Army officer learns of a secret stash of gold behind German lines, and recruits a ragtag band of fellow soldiers to go AWOL and recover the riches. It has some impressive action for its time, but it’s needlessly long and uninteresting beyond some explosions.
FROM MOVIE-PICKER JASON: A classic WWII movie starring Clint Eastwood that brings comedic relief - a fun movie that every father and child can enjoy watching together.
JAMIE AND JEANNE’S AI FACESWAP ART:
Way fake - Blonde would never fight on this side.
Second from the right is nightmare fuel.
Is it still a mullet if it’s braided?
THE BEST:
Pretty good action: For a 50-year-old movie, the action holds up pretty well. Gunfights and explosions, even if sometimes goofy, generally look realistic and are performed on a scale that is believable. The movie is at its best when guns are blazing and stuff is blowing up. While it does have plenty of that, the decent action is broken up with twice as much boring dialogue among boring characters somehow categorized as ‘comedy.’
It challenges delusions of military grandeur: I can appreciate the way the movie challenges what are often points of near worship with the military. Contrary to many romanticized portrayals, like any other group of people, there are way more buffoons in the ranks than people of exceptional talent or integrity. Just because a guy puts on a uniform or has a high rank doesn’t make him a superhero, and this movie recognizes that point. The incompetence of their superiors is the only reason these guys can join Kelly’s treasure quest at all.
Likewise, we often think of the American soldier as a patriotic man, a guy who risks everything for his country and that for which it stands. And they do, but that doesn’t mean that patriotism is always their primary motivator. They join for all sorts of reasons that are often personal - seeking benefits, seeking to provide for a family, or just seeking to change or escape a past life.
That’s really the point of this movie - even in World War II, lionized as the great war of American virtue against evil, the guys fighting it were often there for themselves, not for some grand love of country. Case in point in this plot: given the choice between the dollar (or gold) and their orders, these guys choose the money and even team up with the enemy without hesitation to get it. It’s notable the German soldiers operate the exact same way too. Kelly’s Heroes is a work of fiction, but apply the same opportunity in real life, and you likely get the same result.
It’s not total fiction though: While of course this story isn’t strictly true, elements were borrowed from reality. Toward the war’s end in February 1945, allied bombers destroyed the Reichsbank in Berlin, where the Nazis stored their gold reserves. The vault contained not only German gold, but gold looted from other countries during Germany’s European takeover too. After the vault’s exposure, the Germans scrambled to move and hide the gold in other locations, sometimes tracked and intercepted by allied forces.
Shooting people and blowing stuff up - the best thing the movie does.
THE WORST:
It’s not funny: I genuinely have no idea how this movie is classified as a comedy. I get that its tone is lighter than the typical war movie, at least in that it doesn’t dramatize the death and destruction, but at no point was I laughing. Not even smiling. Not even smirking. There’s nothing funny in the plot. There’s nothing funny in the dialogue. There’s nothing funny in the story, other than this is a setting usually treated with much more seriousness.
Any decent comedy has at least a few memorable quotes. Kellys’ Heroes doesn’t. It’s not a comedy. It’s just a light-hearted war movie that doesn’t take the carnage too seriously.
It’s slow: There is absolutely no reason for this movie to be over two hours long. The plot is actually very basic: guy learns about gold stash, recruits unlikely band of misfits to find the gold, their search involves a few complications, but they find it. The end. Instead it’s forty-five minutes before the gold hunt even begins. Stop talking and get to blowing stuff up and cashing in. This movie half as long is twice as good.
Lame story, don’t care: World War II is so heavily portrayed in movies, video games, books, and other entertainment because it’s such a story-rich event: it involved complex moral questions, horrific atrocities, and millions dead to resolve it. Searching for gold in that context is a unique story, sure, but that’s because nobody cares about World War II for that reason. It’s a leprechaun hunt in fatigues, and there’s nothing particularly interesting about that. Everything that makes World War II fascinating is irrelevant to this story.
They’re after me Nazi charms!
THE RATING: It’s rare that I find a Clint Eastwood movie hard to watch, but Kelly’s Heroes is the hardest I can remember. It’s slow, it’s boring, and it’s not a very interesting story.
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NEXT WEEK: End of Watch (2012) - this is the last selection for April from movie-picker Jason. We thank him for his nominations.
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