Kelly’s Heroes: Brian G. Hutton

I like to imagine that Donald Sutherland's strung-out Sergeant Oddball from Brian G. Hutton's Kelly's Heroes was the in-universe father to Donald Sutherland's devil-may-care Capt. Hawkeye Pierce from Robert Altman's M*A*S*H* (1970). That doesn't really have anything to do with my thoughts on Kelly's Heroes...I just wanted to preserve that observation for posterity. So what do I think of the film? Well, I think that Kelly's Heroes, a war comedy about a group of soldiers from the 35th Infantry Division who go AWOL to steal 14,000 gold bars from a German-controlled bank while behind enemy lines in France, is entertaining enough to make the audience forget that technically all of the characters are war criminals. After all, isn't what they were doing technically looting? Well, anyway, Kelly's Heroes is enjoyable enough. It has a wonderful sense of spectacle. Scenes like Sergeant Oddball and his three Sherman tanks invading and destroying a German camp from inside a train tunnel to the sounds of laid-back music make me yearn for the days when action scenes weren't slaves to shaky-cams and CGI. There is a visceral excitement to watching a building explode into a fireball and a tank running straight through a farm-house that can't be duplicated with computers. Additionally, the film seems to predict the historically anachronistic soundtracks of Quentin Tarantino films by several decades. I never would have thought that World War Two and hippie music could have meshed together so well. But a few bars of "Burning Bridges" was enough to make me a convert.

7/10