Kelly’s Heroes is a war film that has all the great elements of an old fashion, rousing epic that keeps your attention all the way through. Set in the late summer of 1944 as the allies swept across occupied France, Kelly (played by the ever cool Clint Eastwood) and his squad of screwball infantry men find out that the Germans are holding over sixteen million dollars worth of gold bars in a bank thirty miles behind enemy lines.
Tired of the politics of infantry life and the gross inefficiency of their Captain, Kelly and the rest of the squad run by tough sergeant ‘Big Joe’ (Telly Savalas), cook up a scheme to go behind the lines with three M-4 Sherman tanks to rob the bank. As the movie poster states: “They set out to rob a bank and damn near won a war instead.”
With Kelly’s Heroes, Eastwood began his second collaboration with director Brian G. Hutton, who had directed him a year earlier in the highly successful Where Eagles Dare (1969) — a movie which solidified Eastwood’s status as a major box office star. What makes Kelly’s Heroes such an interesting film is the fact that it was made in 1970 as the U.S. was beginning to downsize its presence in Vietnam.
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