Kelly's Heroes

A heist film set in the Second World War. Kelly gets information from a captured German officer: there are sixteen thousand bars of gold in a bank behind the lines. He does not report it. Instead he assembles a group from his own unit and goes behind the front, into enemy territory, to take it. The team includes Oddball, a tank commander with no interest in the war, loudspeakers mounted on his tank and a philosophy of his own. The character carries the hippie attitude of the 1960s rather than the war of the 1940s, and the anachronism is deliberate. The idea is to take the heroism out of war and show it as a job: nobody is fighting for an ideology, everyone wants a share. The encounter at the end is not a battle but a negotiation. Clint Eastwood plays Kelly, Telly Savalas the sergeant and Donald Sutherland plays Oddball. Brian G. Hutton directed. It was shot in Yugoslavia with real tanks. It was received unevenly on release and acquired cult standing over the years. An enjoyable production for anyone who likes war films and heist stories together. For a viewer expecting a serious war film, the register keeps sliding into comedy and it makes no claim to historical realism.