![]() “For example, Oddball is wrong on several levels. Mark Felton, military historian, author and creator of the Youtube channel Mark Felton Productions. ![]() “It is a Sixties film with Sixties attitudes, dialogue and even looks,” says Dr. Yet, and to Eastwood’s regret, Kelly’s Heroes ultimately found its audience not as social commentary but as rifles at dawn escapism. With its portrayal of the US military as a two-ring circus, the movie is, moreover, clearly coloured by American experiences in Vietnam in the late Sixties. Never more taciturn, Eastwood, for his part, appears to have settled for parodying his Man with No Name character from Sergio Leone. The wise-cracking tough guy quotient is ticked by co-stars Telly Savalas, comedian Don Rickles and Harry Dean Stanton (billed as Dean Staunton). Sutherland’s tank-commander, Oddball is a hippy adrift in the wrong time period. Under pressure from MGM, Hutton had made sure to include plenty of cartoon Nazis and blazing gun fights. Kelly’s Heroes is a mess but an endearing one. They laugh, they cry, they have a close encounter with a trio of indestructible Tiger Tanks. Taking advantage of the US military’s shambolic command structure, he leads a mechanised reconnaissance platoon of the 35th Infantry Division into Nazis lines in search of the loot. The gold becomes an obsession for Eastwood’s Private Kelly, a former Lieutenant scapegoated after a failed attack and demoted to rank and file. Where the original heist was rumoured to have occurred in Bavaria, now the location was north-eastern France, near Nancy. Verisimilitude, however, was not a priority for director Brian G Hutton. Kelly’s Heroes was loosely based on the true story of a hunt for Nazi gold undertaken as Allied Forces swept towards Germany at the end of the War. And yet somehow from this upheaval and unhappiness emerged a beloved World War II romp, which marks its 50th anniversary this week. “Bad weather, mishaps with pyrotechnics and the… enormous number of extras made for complicated logistics, and to particular irritation, the shoot went on and on and on,” wrote David Sterritt in the Cinema of Clint Eastwood: Chronicles of America. Croatia was remote and oppressively warm, except when it was swept by downpours And the filming seemed never to end. He was returning to marital turmoil having spent much of 1969 sitting in a Yugoslav People’s Army Sherman Tank in the withering heat of Croatia’s Istrian Peninsula.īut then, making Kelly’s Heroes was not a particularly happy experience for any of the cast and crew. It can’t have been the easiest period for Sutherland. They had two young children, Rachel and Kiefer, but would divorce in 1970, not long after he shipped back from Yugoslavia. Sutherland and Douglas had married in 1966. “And when he got to the personal cheque he started laughing so hard he fell to the ground. With a personal cheque,” he recalled Eastwood saying. Your wife’s been arrested,” Donald Sutherland would later remember. “ Clint Eastwood came walking out of the sun like it was a spaghetti western and said, 'I have some bad news for you. He agreed to pass on details of Douglas’s detention. A message was eventually relayed to a colleague. As she was led away, her lawyers wondered how on earth they would contact her husband, who was off working in Yugoslavia. “And I thought, “Please, would you just move the shaking hand because this isn’t going to get us anywhere”.”ĭouglas, a Canadian citizen, was about to be arrested and charged with conspiracy to possess unregistered explosives in relation to her support for the Black Panthers. “He was holding his gun right near my head,” Douglas would remember. One afternoon in the summer of 1969, the actress and civil rights activist Shirley Douglas descended the stairs of her rented mansion in Beverly Hills and was surprised to find a policeman dismantling her front door.
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