1970 - KELLY'S HEROES, very confused genre film

A confused mess of a film if ever there was one.  Kelly's Heroes is maybe a war film or an antiwar film.  Maybe a comedy or maybe some sort of bank heist film.  In any case it all mashes together somewhat uncomfortably.  

The cast is certainly an eclectic bunch,  Clint Eastwood is the leader of a group of soldiers rushing behind the enemy lines during World War II to get their hands on a bank full of gold.  Telly Savalas is the loud mouthed sergeant.  Don Rickles is the supply sergeant feeding them weapons and fuel.  Rickles is playing on his Las Vegas insult comic persona.  The wild card in the bunch is Donald Sutherland playing a late 1960's hippie somehow dropped into a 1940's war movie.  Sutherland is so completely out of character it would be interesting to know who had the idea for him to go down this odd character path.

The director Brian G. Hutton can't seem to figure out the right jokey tone for the film so he resorts to some large scale battle scenes staged by the famous 2nd unit director Andrew Marton  who was always good at blowing up stuff.   

Overall this is a very cynical film somewhat funny at times.  It gets it's entertainment value from being a big production with excellent photography from the legendary Gabriel Figueroa a cinematographer usually associated with Luis Bunuel

146 minutes, written by Troy Kennedy Martin.