Kelly's Heroes

Annotation for KRRR! 2022 by Katarína Kunkelová

At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War was raging, and in 1969, the involvement of the American armed forces reached its peak. In the same year, on the other side of the Earth, in present-day Croatia, Brian G. Hutton shoots the film Kelly's Heroes (1970) in co-production with Yugoslavia. This film, like many other Hollywood films from the late sixties, chooses the environment of war as its main theme. The director himself even tried the combination of the Second World War and the actor Clint Eastwood two years earlier in the very successful film Where Eagles Dare (1968).

It's been fifty years since Kelly's heroes introduced an unusual group of soldiers, played by Telly Savalas, Don Rickles and Donald Sutherland, trying to carry out an almost impossible task: to retrieve German gold stored in occupied territory. While The Dirty Dozen (1967) told the story of criminals who were transformed into soldiers when confronted with a similarly impossible mission, Kelly's heroes go through the exact opposite development during the film. Soldiers become criminals. With the help of completely different (stereo)types of characters, it is also possible to trace the representation of madness, illogicality, horrors and pitfalls of war together with comedic exaggeration, which is equally characteristic of later films such as M*A*S*H (1970) or Catch-22 (1970).

The creation of an ambivalent image of the time and the war in which the story is set can be characterized as exceptional. The film uses music that is associated with the "love" generation of the 1960s. This is further reinforced by the figure of Oddball, who is the perfect symbol of the "Flower power" cultural movement. Finally, the undisguised reference to spaghetti westerns by Sergio Leone, in which Clint Eastwood played the main roles (for example The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966), can be considered stylistically interesting. In addition, the film is not to be missed for the way it stages the action in the depth of the plans and the demolition work carried out by individual characters on various walls, barns or smaller houses.